Guilty Displeasures

On Toronto's men and masculinity (or lack thereof)

2011-12-10T19:05:00.004-05:00

Christie Blatchford is an irascible, reactionary columnist for the neoconservative National Post newspaper. (A friend of mine once aptly described her as the female Don Cherry.) And she's written another one of her typically awful pieces, this time about how Toronto men (and boys) are not properly manly. Rather, Toronto is a "city of sissies".

I could pick it apart, piece by piece, and complain at length, but I'll just grab a couple particularly hilarious parts:

"Do not mistake this as a plea for head-banging in sport, a defence of bullies, or a veiled anti-gay message."

However, that's exactly what she is doing. Blatchford criticizes bullies explicitly, sure, but the column itself becomes her endorsement of bullying - because she is herself being a bully. In the column's initiating incident, she is "mortified and appalled" at the sight of adolescent boys hugging, and proceeds to mock and deride the people whose policies she blames for causing this offense. She calls these men "delicate, slender, and arch", "delicate creature(s)", and "fey". Subtle, sure, but this is bullying.

And as for it not being a "veiled anti-gay message"? Well...

"It is possible to be a gentle and kind man without speaking in a soft, sibilant voice that makes all sentences sound to my ear as though they were composed entirely of Ss."

...no, it's not a "veiled" message. It's actually pretty obviously homophobic. Why rely on a stereotype of gay men, and use it pejoratively, in order to illustrate the point that something is wrong with straight men?

But what, might you ask, are men supposed to act like?

"I know men have feelings too. I just don’t need to know much more than that. On any list of The 25 Things Every Man And Boy Should Know How To Do, hugging is not one of them. Killing bugs is. Whacking bullies is. Kissing is. Farting on cue is. Making the sound of a train in a tunnel is. Shooting a puck is. Hugging is not."

So men are supposed to kill, whack, fart (on cue), sound like a train (what the fuck does that even mean?), do sports, and avoid emoting. Basically, Blatchford think that a properly masculine man should have all the complexity and depth of Homer Simpson.

Well, I'm glad that's settled.

When market researchers call...

2011-10-22T13:47:00.002-04:00

Them: Can I speak to someone over the age of 18 who pays for the utilities?
Me: Well, we rent. So we just pay everything as one lump sum.
Them: [pause] So, you pay maintenance fees?
Me: No. We pay for it in the rent.
Them: A maintenance fee.
Me: No.
Them: [pause] How familiar are you with Toronto Hydro? Very familiar; somewhat familiar; not very familiar; did not hear about it before his phone call.
Me: Somewhat, I guess.
Them: On a scale of one to ten, how satisfied are you with your internet service?
Me: Eight, I guess.
Them: [aggressively] Eight?
Me: Yeah, eight.
Them: On a scale of one to ten, how satisfied are you with your natural gas service?
Me: Well, I don't pay for my utilities, so I don't even know if I have natural gas.
Them: You don't have natural gas?
Me: I don't know if I have natural gas.
Them: [pause] So, a one?
Me: [laughing] I could give you a number, but I would just be making it up.
Them: [annoyed] Well, I gotta put something.
Me: How about we just cancel this call?
Them: Okay, bye.

I'm not sure whether the communication failure is with the me, the caller, or her script... but that was kinda hilarious.

Political stuff, of the Ontario provincial variety

2011-10-04T13:54:00.005-04:00

There's a provincial election in Ontario in a few days and a lot of mud flying, so I thought I'd capture some of it - and my responses - on here. (Really, some of it is right up there with the Carcetti-shaking-hands-with-a-slum-lord photoshop job from The Wire. That shameless, that manipulative, that bad.) If it's not for you, specifically, then at least it's for posterity:

The first bit is a shamelessly misleading set of charts from the Progressive Conservatives' platform. The designer came up with impressively deceptive visuals like a comparison of 5 stick-men (representing $64b in spending) and 25 stick-men (representing $113b). That's an apparent increase of 400% vs. an actual increase of 77%.

Given that charts/graphs privilege visual cues - they supplement and even replace a textual-numerical explanation, even if the text and numbers are there - that's just horrifically misleading.
The more recent headscratcher is a pamphlet that's been handed out by Tory candidates that slags equity-based education in Ontario's kindergarten classrooms. Now known as "the homophobic flyer", the Conservatives and their leader, Tim Hudak, are standing behind it, in spite of the fact that its arguments have been denounced as largely misleading. (This site dismisses 4 of the 6 claims as "misleading", another as a splice that misrepresents its source, and confirms that only one point is "accurate".) Some of the inaccuracies are stupid-but-understandably-stupid - for example, the harmless suggestion that boys and girls should swap gender roles, which probably amounts to boys holding babies and girls playing with hammers and wrenches, is misinterpreted as an instruction to enforce "cross-dressing."

But one is just hilariously (or disturbingly, depending on your mood) deceitful: a headline that says the Liberals are "keeping [Ontarians] in the dark" about the curriculum, which is attributed to CTV News. Only it turns out that CTV News was quoting someone in that headline. And who were they quoting? Conservative leader Tim Hudak.
I wish I had taken a picture of it, (foolishly, I thought it'd be easy to find online) but the Toronto Sun - a foaming-at-the-mouth-reactionary, lowest-common-denominator, and unabashedly right-wing rag - ran the most deceiving cover page that I think I've ever seen on an ostensibly mainstream newspaper. The background was solid blue (which is the color of the Progressive Conservatives) and it featured only the head of a smiling Tim Hudak and words of praise for him. You would swear that it was a paid ad. Only it wasn't.
Slightly off-topic... My daughter and I went to Ikea to pick up whimsical green shelves for her room. While we were sitting in the cafeteria eating ice cream, I overheard an entire phone conversation where a well-dressed 40ish white guy was pitching the formation of an "Ontario Tea Party, only we wouldn't call it that" comprised of "people in construction, farmers, landowners, people in Northeast Ontario, and people [who] are upset about the school curriculum." One small problem: the guy had a very smart man-purse, (Seriously, I was jealous of it.) and as my friend Alex noted on Facebook, "if anything is guaranteed to exacerbate the cultural rift with their Tea Party allies, it will be the Toronto Tea Partier's tendency to carry around a murse."

It had to happen: Sagan vs. Snooki

2011-09-30T14:30:00.004-04:00

So, this appeared in my Facebook newsfeed, yesterday. Apparently, I should be congratulated:

I recognized Snooki in an instant; I know who Carl Sagan is, in a vague sense, but I can't say that I had any idea what he looked like. So, good for me - I am, apparently, what's wrong with the world. Here are all of the other responses to the picture, again from Facebook:

I know I've seen that guy before, but have no idea who the woman is.
Carl Sagan! Do I get "billions and billions" of Science Points for that? And no, I don't know who the other one is.
I don't know Snooki enough to recognize her on sight, so until reading these comments I had no idea who either person was.
Val is happy to report that still she has no idea who either of these people are
i can spot sagan at 500 paces... who is snooki?

(An important note: this was posted on the Fb page of a graduate student, and likely responded to by other graduate students. I don't know whether this means that they would be inclined to be disingenuous about knowing who Snooki is - that is, I don't know if they would lie in order to save face - but I wouldn't be surprised if these people are actually intellectual clichés of the I-don't-even-own-a-TV variety.)

Now, I get the joke. Carl Sagan could be any intellectual who is/was on TV and the point would be the same - people care more about vacuous celebutantes and reality stars than they do about substantive stuff, like how the universe works. Point taken.

But... for the purposes of this illustration, it's Carl Sagan and not Steven Hawking or, especially for us Canadians, David Suzuki. And that annoys me for a few reasons:

Awareness of Snooki's existence does not necessarily make one a fan of her or of her show. Collapsing those two things into one-and-the-same makes no sense.
Carl Sagan has been dead for 15 years, and his TV show first aired more than 30 years ago; that someone might not know what he looks like is probably not surprising. (Granted, his show's been aired many times since then. But, to use but one example, Seinfeld, which ended in the late 90s, is aired constantly in syndication - and despite that, it's usually the case that none of my 18-21 year-old students have ever watched it. Which brings me to a related point...)
The comparison is ridiculously ageist. Because the Sagan reference is so dated, the person who put the image together must have known that virtually everyone under the age of 20 (if not 30) will have no clue who he is. So this isn't so much directed at the ignorant and intellectually-stunted - which is what the image implies - as it is at the young. (The choice of a smart dude and dumb woman also feels just a bit sexist.)
Frankly, I'm actually more stunned that there are people who don't know who Snooki is. Snooki is everywhere: You go on the internet, she's everywhere. You turn on the TV, she's there. You wait in line at the grocery store, her face is plastered on tabloids and bad magazines. If you don't know who is, you're either terribly unobservant (which doesn't speak well for all of those grad students that I quoted above) or you've been purposely ignorant of her existence for two years, which seems like an odd use of one's energy. (Now, if you admitted that you do know who she is but you dislike her intensely, well, then we could bring this into a discussion of guilty displeasures. And that I can totally get behind...)

The DC relaunch: some reactions

2011-09-27T13:09:00.007-04:00

1) DC Comics made waves - of the bad kind - in July when their co-publisher, Dan DiDio, got in an argument with a fan at Comicon. The fan had a legitimate beef: DC was canceling and relaunching all 52 comics in their superhero line, and in so doing was slashing their compliment of women from double-digits to just 2. And if this wasn't problematic enough, DiDio decided to chew the fan out, questioning whether it made a meaningful difference and demanding that the fan tell DiDio who they should have hired. It reflected pretty poorly on DC, especially given that women, in comics, have always been underrepresented as creators and problematically sexualized as characters.

2) I've picked up only two comics from the relaunch, including the very first one, the flagship Justice League title from Geoff Johns and Jim Lee, and Grant Morrison's Action Comics. (Though I've seen a lot of reviews and responses to other comics - but more on that later.) I don't know what the objective is with these new comics, but it seems to me that DC has actually rid itself of two of the things that gave its universe a unique character among the various superhero worlds - an optimistic outlook and bigger-than-big powers. Especially in relation to Marvel - where the world order is always tenuous, the situation is always dire, and the (anti-)heroes unliked and over-matched - DC has always seemed bright and bubbly. So, at least according to this guy's initial assessment, the newly brooding and irascible DC universe looks a whole lot like Marvel's. And this isn't a good thing.

3) In the past week, though, all of the attention has shifted back to the sorts of concerns that were, at least implicitly, being voiced back in July. Specifically, it's these comics, Red Hood and the Outsiders and Catwoman:

Now, admittedly, these are just small portions of bigger comics. But they're also pretty fair representations of the whole from which they've been taken. And they also seem to offer good evidence that the jokes that non-comic folks make - y'know, about superhero comics being filled with T&A and comic readers being horny fanboys - are well-founded. So rather than completely stealing someone else's thunder, I'll post some good quotes and refer you to the source - it`s worth reading it all:

"Most problematically, we are shown [Catwoman's] breasts and her body over and over for two pages, but NOT her face. [...] Can't you show us the playful or confident look in her eye as she puts on her sexy costume? Because without that it's impossible to connect with the character on any other level than a boner, and I'm afraid I don't have one of those."

"If you really want to support Starfire's 'liberated sexuality' like she's somehow a person with real agency, what people should really be campaigning for is more half-clothed dudes in suggestive poses to get drawn around her, since I'm sure that's what she'd like to see. But people don't really want that, do they? Because it's not about what Starfire wants. It's about what straight male readers want. [...] but let's be honest about what's happening and who we're serving (or not serving) and at whose expense."

Depressing for even more than the obvious reasons

2011-09-24T22:20:00.003-04:00

In a pre-season NHL hockey game in London (Ontario) on Thursday night, an unknown fan threw a banana on to the ice. Predictably, it was when one of the few black players in the NHL was also on the ice. And everyone is outraged, which certainly sounds good enough.

Here's the thing, though. There are all sorts of quotes from players of color and suits who say that London isn't a racist place and that this is a wholly isolated incident. (Because, the logic goes, if other black/brown players haven't felt/seen it, then it must not exist, right? In spite of the fact that racialized celebrities more easily "pass" as if they were white?) And then the article that I linked to provides a list of other explicitly racist, and ostensibly isolated, incidents in hockey games. And they note that in spite of everyone's outrage, no one has been able (willing?) to identify the fan who threw the banana.

So, I'm not the only person who sees a disconnect, here, right? It's isolated, but it happens with some regularity; it's not indicative of some racist sensibility among people in the city, and yet no one has helped identify the banana-thrower. Stuff like this seems like such an obvious launching-pad - a "teachable moment", as it were - for a discussion of systemic racism and how events like these are linked, and how indifference to racist acts is itself an act of racism. But, somehow, I imagine that every time this happens in the future, it'll be just as shocking, surprising, and isolated.

Live-Blogging: Terrible Sports Analysis

2011-09-20T21:51:00.005-04:00

Presumably because they're folksy, likable, and/or have good anecdotes, TV broadcasters choose to hire sports analysts who rarely understand how to analyze the sports that they used to play professionally. They can tell you, for instance, how to identify a curveball but they can't actually explain why it is or isn't advantageous to bunt or not. (Which wouldn't be so bad, except that they pretend that they know and their reasons are nonsensical, if they're even offered.) And this is hardly a contentious claim to make - every decent sports blog makes this complaint about their local announcers. (And, in fact, there was once a blog devoted entirely to critiquing/mocking bad sports announcers: Fire Joe Morgan)

So, here I am, sitting at home and 1) reflecting on the depressing fact that The Shopping Channel has found someone more qualified than me to write copy for them, while 2) my daughter refuses to go to sleep and calls my name, and I'm watching the Blue Jays play the Angels. And it occurs to me that I should blog about the errors, misunderstandings, and absurdities that the commentary team, Buck Martinez and Pat Tabler, are sharing with the audience on this particular night. (And honestly? The broadcaster, Sportsnet, has no excuse - I emailed them months ago to beg them to hire a stats guy who could offer them good stats and nudge them away from the bad ones that they love so much.)

1st inning

Buck: “[Howie Kendrick]’s had a consistent season.”
One of the annoying things that sports announcers do is confuse the words "good" and "consistent". Because Kendrick has had a very good season, (about 20% above average on offense, and well above on defense) but hasn't been at all consistent. During the 6 months of the season, his monthly batting average has ranged from a bad .231 (September) to an amazing .348 (May); he's hit 6 home runs in two months, and only 0 or 1 in three others; his wOBA shows that his bat has been excellent in three months, almost exactly average in two, and below-average in another. Point is, for a long period he was excellent, then he was very mediocre, and now he's playing badly - that's consistent? (I'm kicking a dead horse at this point, but I wanted to be thorough.)

Pat: “When you have Jose Bautista in front of you, you’re gonna have baserunners.”
This isn't really a dumb statement in isolation. What it does reveal, though, is that these guys are capable of saying really stupid stuff even though they're conscious of the fact that sluggers get RBI - in part, at least - because the players in front of them are good at getting on base. So when they say that sluggers who get out way too often are "producers" because they get RBI - as if the people on base had nothing to do with it - there's really no excuse.

2nd inning

Buck: “I think the most misleading statistic fielding percentage.”
Pat: “The only thing it tells you is how many plays he makes.”
This one could have been good. Buck actually makes a fine point, and one that statsheads have been making for decades: fielding percentage doesn't tell you how many balls the fielder failed to reach but should have, so a good percentage can mask a terrible fielder. And then Pat shows that he doesn't really understand that at all - because what he claims is the "only thing it tells you"? It's actually the exact opposite.

Pat: “Forget about the average, [Mark Trumbo] has been producing.”
Ah, yes - the "producing" that I mentioned earlier. If a good fielding percentage can mask a bad fielder, then good "production numbers" - home runs and runs batted in - can mask a mediocre hitter. The Blue Jays' J.P. Arencibia is a great example, but Trumbo works, too - lots of home runs but a terrible batting average and a low walk-rate. Because, in a league where the average player reaches base 32.5% of the time, Trumbo's 29.6% is worse than about 90% of his peers. Sure, Trumbo hits for so much power that he's a marginally above-average hitter, but "forget" that he reaches base at one of the league's worst rates? That's terrible analysis.

Buck: “[Brett] Cecil’s been much better than his win-loss record.”
This, again, is a reasonable statement that is routinely undermined by Buck's typical expression of love for the pitcher's win-loss record. Buck has, in fact, said in the past that wins are the most important stat for a pitcher. Which is absolutely ludicrous, and here's why: a typical starting pitcher usually only throws about 2/3s of his team's pitches (and, of course, none of the opposing team's), does almost none of the fielding, and either none or very little of the hitting. I don't quite know where to find the number crunching, but i recall that Win Shares credits all pitchers with only 34% of the game's result - and your starting pitcher, again, isn't eating all of those innings by himself. And yet assigning him a win or loss gives him all the credit.

Pat: “[Colby Rasmus] becomes a very dangerous breaking ball hitter.”
This one caught my attention because Pat often makes statements like these - "analysis" that can be, and is, quantified but only with great difficulty, and probably too much difficulty for Pat to bother with. So I looked it up on Fangraphs: Rasmus has been a below-average hitter against breaking balls over his career, while this season he's been awful against sliders but marginally above-average against curves. But "very dangerous"? Not by any measure.

Pat: “They don’t have a stat of plays that should have been made. Yet.”
Well, this is just plain wrong. TotalZone, DRS, and UZR all measure this, though none of them can do so perfectly. Pat doesn't need to agree with their methodology or results, of course, but he should probably know that they've existed for more than two decades. That's right - these things existed when Pat Tabler was still playing.

Pat: “The Angels are a good defensive team. They have athletes all over the diamond.”
The Angels may well be a good defensive team, but their athleticism is really neither here nor there. No one disputes the athleticism of, say, Torii Hunter, but plenty of analysts will point out that his age and declining skills mean that he's become a below-average fielder; likewise, the Jays have some pretty good, fast athletes in Rajai Davis, Brett Lawrie, and Eric Thames, but they're all demonstrably poor defenders. (That said, while Pat's reasoning is faulty, his conclusions are sound - the Angels grade as the 5th best fielding team in baseball, according to UZR, and are much closer to 2nd than they are to 6th.)

4th inning

Pat: “[The Angels] go 1st to 3rd better than anybody in baseball.”
This is tough to verify, so I can't imagine that Pat actually knows this. Like most analysts, he's probably guessed this based on what he's seen - and 'traditional wisdom' - and no other evidence. I couldn't find any stats, but evaluations of base-running on the whole are easy to find: the Angels are slightly above average on both the Speed Score and Baserunning metrics. That doesn't suggest to me, though, that they're likely to go 1st to 3rd better than anyone else.

5th inning

Pat: “At the Major League level, you fail 70% of the time and you’re a super-star.”
Pat's surely pretending that walks don't exist, here - or, maybe, thinking that they count as a "fail" - because this is patently wrong. Of the 25 best hitters in baseball, (according to their wOBA) none reach base less than 35% of the time. And, remember, failing 70% of time means that you're not only not a superstar, but you're one of the very worst at not getting out.

6th inning

Buck: “[Peter Bourjos]’s is just a triple shy of doing something that no Angel has ever done. [Have double-digit doubles, triples, and homers.]”
Pat: “Impressive.”
Well, not really. It's a quirky bit of trivia, I guess, but it certainly doesn't indicate that Bourjos is an "impressive" hitter. (He's slightly above average, and his overall offensive performance is almost identical to that of the aforementioned Trumbo.) What would be better for the player and the team, though surely less "impressive", would be if those 9 triples had actually been homers.

End of 7th inning

Gregg Zaun [between-innings and after-game analyst]: “You can’t put a price on guys like [Mike McCoy] in the organization.”
McCoy is a career .200 hitter with a below .300 on-base average, and he plays multiple positions competently. Basically, he's a replacement-level utility guy and there are dozens just like him. And you can put a price on him - somewhere just above league-minimum.

Blogging about bookshelves

2011-09-15T13:00:00.007-04:00

Recently (or, at least, recentishly), my friends Jen and Alex both blogged about home libraries* and encouraged other people to send/post pictures and talk about how they go about displaying books. I didn't take either one up on the offer, but not because of apathy - I simply hadn't gotten around to taking any pictures of my furniture/rooms since we last moved.

Clearly, though, I'm going somewhere with this. And if you guessed that I wouldn't write about home libraries and my lack of pictures unless I had finally taken some and was going to post them, well, you'd be right.

This is a shot of the legal bookcases in our dining room, which are just ridiculously sexy - hence, they're prominently displayed in the room at the center of the house. The one on the left houses most of our fiction and poetry, roughly half of that lowest shelf devoted to cook books. The one of the right is mostly fun stuff - poppy and mindless books on the top shelf, mass market hardcovers and 50 year old kid's lit on the middle shelf, and books that will eventually be Penelope's on the bottom. (Along with a box set of John Lennon demos and Queer as Folk DVDs, both of which had nowhere else to go.) But the point is, clearly, to showcase the bookcases themselves.

This is from our office. I have one of those big shelf units with the desk attachment, which is why the four squares in the bottom-left corner are basically a wash (my files, some computer junk, and the power-bar). The higher eight shelves are almost exclusively comic books, and the other four shelves mostly books about politics and theory. It's spectacularly hard to actually see any of them, though, I can tell - in part, that's because I used a moody, high-contrast visual effect on all of these; in part, it's because Blogger absolutely sucks when it comes to preserving the detail that does exist in the image.

The tower beside it is exclusively academic stuff, with whole shelves devoted to our particular fields (a masculinity shelf, a third-wave feminism shelf, and so on), except for the very top shelf, which is all Foucault and Butler. It's was previously an ugly, tan-colored Billy bookcase, but I spray-painted it black to match the other unit and bought the black door to increase its impressiveness by at least 200%.

This one's just fun. It's another Ikea bookcase, which matched nothing in our last two places but fits really well with the trim on the doorways in this house. Anyway, it's in the hallway and filled with goofy/cool stuff that earns us hipster capital.

* A fun note about Jen and Alex's ways of approaching the topic: superficially, at least, they bring some very different concerns and investments to the table: Jen uses the term "book storage" in her post's title, while Alex throws around the word "bibliophilia". And yet they're also both responding (with a lot of derision) to paranoia around The Disappearance of The Book, so they're really not all that different.

Self-indulgently blogging about my blog

2011-09-13T23:01:00.002-04:00

[All the numbers exclude any views from my own IP address]

Average number of daily pageviews* over the past month: 31 (high: 59, low: 12)
Average number of monthly pageviews over the past year: 1201 (high: 1641, low: 869)

Average number of daily views since August 2008: 41 (high: 366, low: 7)
Average number of monthly pageviews since August 2008: 1251 (high: 6463, low: 439)

Most viewed blog entry for September 2011: Leo Quintum is Lex Luthor (35 as of today)

---A friend of mine, who taught All-Star Superman at the University of Toronto, told me that this blog entry was recommended to him as THE argument in favor of Leo and Lex being considered the same character. (The guy who made the recommendation had no idea that we knew each other and my friend, it should be pointed out, was unpersuaded.) I've since learned that, amazingly, this actually is passed around on the internets as the last/best word on the subject. Yay me!

Most viewed blog entry since August 2008: The hysterical Joker (17277)

---More than 75% of the pageviews in my record month were views of this page. Somehow, right around the time that the film came out in July 2008 - and despite the fact that I wrote that particular blog in December 2007 - the image of the Joker that I had posted became the #2 Google Image search result for "Heath Ledger Joker", but the #1 full-body shot of him. So, evidently, people were looking for a picture of him and found my blog. Unfortunately, they found my reaction to the promo photos - I initially hated it - and mistook it for my reaction to the film, which means that the response thread is full of people telling me off for hating on the movie.

A very small sample of the some of the bizarre/hilarious searches that have led here:
- "turn your partner dosey doe bullshit"
- "why are all films about masculinity considered homoerotic?"
- "can i be your favorite color?"
- "superhero fetish porn"
- "neilshyminsky-demon"

I have no idea why someone would write that last one. But I kind of love it.

* I'm using pageviews because this is cobbled together from both my Google Analytics data and Blogger's own stats. The latter only counts pageviews, not unique visits. But considering that most people who visit my blog visit only 1.17 pages - that is, for the most part, they just read whatever's on the front page - the numbers are pretty comparable.

"Electronic literacy"

2011-09-12T15:38:00.004-04:00

From Alexis Madrigal in The Atlantic, in conversation with Dan Russell, a search anthropologist (what the hell is a search anthropologist and how do i become one?) with Google:

"90 percent of the US Internet population does not know [about ctrl+f]. This is on a sample size of thousands," Russell said. "I do these field studies and I can't tell you how many hours I've sat in somebody's house as they've read through a long document trying to find the result they're looking for. At the end I'll say to them, 'Let me show one little trick here,' and very often people will say, 'I can't believe I've been wasting my life!'"
I can't believe people have been wasting their lives like this either! It makes me think that we need a new type of class in schools across the land immediately. Electronic literacy. Just like we learn to skim tables of content or look through an index or just skim chapter titles to find what we're looking for, we need to teach people about this CTRL+F thing.

I have my own problem with ctrl+f, though it differs substantially from the phenomenon being described above. I rely on it so much that I find myself reading books - the paper kind - and thinking I should use the ctrl+f function... and needing a second to remember that it doesn't exist. (Similarly, there are times when I'm watching live sports - not even necessarily pro sports, either - where I find myself eagerly awaiting the instant replay.)

Follow-up on a blog about a news anchor

2011-09-10T19:57:00.005-04:00

About a year ago, I complained about the needlessly scary promotional images that Global TV was using to promote their new anchor, Dawna Friesen. But since I don't watch Global News, I haven't really seen whether they adjusted their strategy or her appearance. They did, and they have, so here's a comparison of the shot they were plastering everywhere before she debuted and a picture that seems indicative of how she's currently styled:

What I wrote then was the under-lighting was creepy, she's sneering instead of smiling, her tiny pupils look cold, and her hair is limp and dead - with my conclusion being that she looks like a vampire. And in this picture it seems that they addressed all of those things. (Except, maybe, for the pupils, though the smile appears so warm and genuine that the eyes aren't the least bit disturbing.)

Holy shit, though. What an improvement. (And what were they thinking??)

An uncharacteristically emo blog about cars

2011-09-04T15:45:00.004-04:00

Despite my complaints about hegemonic masculinity, I'm not an anti-masculinity guy. I love baseball and I've been referred to - only in my 20s, mind you - as a jock more than once. And, of course, there's my ambivalent relationship with hyper-masculine super- and action-heroes.

All that said, there are still some characteristically masculine things that I have a powerful aversion to, probably because they're particularly overdetermined. (In fact, I think that I like things like baseball and superheroes, in part, because they're somewhat problematically associated with masculinity - baseball is mocked as being boring, unathletic, and/or a numbers-game, and superheroes are still pretty geeky.) That is, I resist/resent the kinds of things that guys are just expected to know about or be interested in, even by people with feminist politics.

But this is just a longish way of getting to the point - I hate being expected to know anything about cars. I hate that knowing nothing about them is somehow a knock against my manhood and competency as a male partner and parent. And I just hate the idea of knowing anything about cars. I hate the kind of gruff manliness that's associated with cars, I bristle at conversations about cars, I actively disidentify with the kind of people who tend to be into cars, and I can actually feel an embodied response when the topic even comes up.

So when our car's battery just suddenly died at a gas station and we barely completed the short drive home after being boosted, I was fine with leaving the task of replacing the battery to people who know what they're doing. Because, like I said, I just don't want to know.

Is this unreasonable? I'm sure that it is. It makes a lot of practical sense to know this stuff, and it doesn't look particularly difficult, either. And it's probably dumb to let my somewhat-political-but-more-complicated-than-that relationship with cars get in the way of that.

So, all of the above issues aside, I'm gonna try to replace the damned thing anyway. But I'm gonna hate it every step of the way.

Baseball, hazing rituals, and Poe's law

2011-09-03T13:14:00.009-04:00

What with the beginning of September being the part of the baseball season when rosters expand and teams are flooded with younger players, a bunch of news outlets are running their annual 'rookie players are forced to do embarrassing things' stories. (A Toronto Star story published today talks about how the youngest pitcher in the Blue Jays' bullpen is tasked with carrying all of the relief pitchers' snacks across the field in a kids' backpack, but I couldn't actually find it on the site.)

Of course, aside from mentioning that the juxtaposition of professional male athlete and Dora the Explorer is funny because it's unmanly, there's little by way of critical reflection. Which is why it was nice to see a piece from Jezebel, where the author points out, of course, that there's certainly a sexist element to some of the choices. (Jason Isringhausen, for example, is explicit about wanting to find pink, flowery bags.) But Jezebel makes another point that's likely to be missed - that it also has to do with embracing childhood, especially in a number of examples (like Heath Bell's, who collects Star Wars bags that are shaped like the characters) where the older players are clearly not trying to emasculate their teammates.

Naturally, some people will take umbrage at any suggestion of impropriety, and so both a) the reply thread on Jezebel's site and b) the Jezebel Facebook page are loaded with people who think that the authors are taking things too seriously/seeing things that aren't there. (Because sexism is just good clean fun, am I right?) Here's one of the Facebook responses:

"Why do liberals have to ruin everything? It's baseball. LEAVE IT ALONE. Who gives a flying **** about gender politics in the game. Next you'll be saying how they should provide an equal opportunity for women to play."

To go off on a bit of a tangent (although "tangent" implies that I have a single, focused point, and I don't...): I think it's hilarious that I can't tell whether this guy is being sincere or ironic. The caps, the ***, the 'next you'll be asking for equal rights' rhetoric... this guy could be remarkably dense OR sarcastically clever, and one seems just as possible as the other. It's a great example of Poe's law - less a rule than an observation, it says that internet extremism and parody of that extremism are impossible to tell apart.

(It also behaves a lot like Godwin's law, I'm realizing, insofar as every internet discussion eventually reaches a point where you can no longer tell whether what you're reading is an actual argument or the mockery of that argument.)

Reasons to be cynical: David Cameron's analytical skills

2011-08-31T14:26:00.004-04:00

[Forgive me for being a little late on this one - other stuff got in the way.]

Findings from a paper titled "Austerity and Anarchy: Budget Cuts and Social Unrest in Europe, 1919-2009", by Jacopo Ponticelli and Hans-Joacim Voth:

"Does fiscal consolidation lead to social unrest? From the end of the Weimar Republic in Germany in the 1930s to anti-government demonstrations in Greece in 2010-11, austerity has tended to go hand in hand with politically motivated violence and social instability. In this paper, we assemble cross-country evidence for the period 1919 to the present, and examine the extent to which societies become unstable after budget cuts. The results show a clear positive correlation between fiscal retrenchment and instability."

Wisdom from British PM David Cameron:

"[T]hese riots were not about poverty: that insults the millions of people who, whatever the hardship, would never dream of making others suffer like this. No, this was about people showing indifference to right and wrong, people with a twisted moral code, people with a complete absence of self-restraint."

Well, then, I suppose that settles it. I guess it was too much to hope that Cameron and company might have actually learned something? Something that would lessen the likelihood that this might keep happening, and then happen again? (And again...)

VMAs and Gaga

2011-08-29T15:01:00.003-04:00

In what was an unsurprisingly awful show - Britney and Foo Fighters won the first two awards of the night, making it feel as if we had been transported back to the late 90s - Gaga managed to steal the spotlight at the VMAs, again. What was surprising was that she did it by completely abandoning her shtick - no costume changes, nothing absurd or abstract or excessive. She just played the role of her own ex-boyfriend, Joe Calderone, for the entire night. (A character who has mostly elicited comparisons to Bob Dylan but strikes me much more as Al Pacino-as-Scarface if he were also one of the T-Birds from Grease.)

Predictably, the tween and teenybopper response on Twitter has been a mixture of amusement, disappointment, and transphobic outrage (in a poll on EW, I'm told that Gaga was the number one choice for both the most and least favorite thing about the show). Here's what I just grabbed off the Twitter feed for the VMAs:

no offense lady gaga but if you are transgendered you are not BORN THIS WAY!!!! [this could be transphobic in so many different ways that i won't bother trying to unpack them all]
I think Lady Gaga has lost the plot
Lady Gaga is amazing!
Lady gaga looked messed up last night
The VMA's was more of a freak show than the Cantina on a Wednesday night. Only think missing was Gaga shooting first [it's a Star Wars joke - Gaga is being compared to a green, reptilian alien]

The great thing, though, is this - for the first time in years, Gaga has managed to unsettle and disturb people again. Her method of coming up with outfits and routines that were increasingly bizarre had become, well, routine. And so she did the only thing she could to recapture her audience's sense of wonder and horror: she wore a white V-neck and strapped her breasts down.

When journalism takes an embarassing turn

2011-08-23T14:30:00.006-04:00

It didn't take long for someone to write a mean and cynical piece about Jack Layton's death and the surprisingly warm and loud response that it's garnered - in fact, it took less than 12 hours.

Most of Christie Blatchford's snark is directed at the outpouring of grief, as if Layton is undeserving or the people saddened by his death are somehow misguided, which is both a cowardly thing to do (if you're suggesting that he's unworthy of the attention, why mock the people who are giving it rather than the object of their attention?) and cruel. To be so casually dismissive of grief, especially on the day the man died and when it's still so new and even raw, is indecent and inhumane if not simply inhuman. And to demean it as "spectacle"? I find it hard to critique even the most showy politicians for being a bit effusive - again, these are knee-jerk, gut-reactions to the news that a colleague and/or friend has died. Docking them points for style is just unwarranted.

But when Blatchford does turn her attention to Layton, the venom is actually worse. Her discussion of Layton's letter opens innocuously enough, as she characterizes it as an example of "what a canny, relentless, thoroughly ambitious fellow Mr. Layton was", and these things are certainly true. The letter is not an apolitical one - Layton knew, as did we all, that it was his cult of personality that won the NDP second-place in the election, and that he probably wanted to make some grand gesture and take advantage of that one last time. Blatchford gets nastier, though: she describes his prose as "vainglorious" and "sophistry" that's full of "bumper-sticker slogans" and "ruthless partisan politicking" . Whether it was with the sophistry or bumper-sticker comment, one thing is certain - we've crossed solidly into the territory of shamelessness. Real classy stuff, right there.

She also asks, "Who thinks to leave a 1,000-word missive meant for public consumption and released by his family and the party mid-day"? To which I feel it necessary to reply, who thinks it necessary to use 1,000 words to kick a warm corpse and heap scorn upon the people mourning it?

(I should add that I don't think Jack Layton's parting letter is perfect, by any means. It's sweet, but probably too precious. I suppose we could begrudge him the overt partisanship, but I wouldn't really expect anything less from him. But, really - given that he finalized it from bed, two days before his death? Do we really expect perfection? I'll let Andrew Coyne sum it up for me: "You're allowed to exploit your own death. You get a free, one-time-only pass.")

Jack Layton, 1950-2011

2011-08-22T13:17:00.004-04:00

Jack Layton died this morning. It wasn't surprising so much as sudden - I knew when it was announced that the cancer had spread that he probably didn't have much time, but you never think that today will be the day.

I got it in my head to write a blog about Jack - about how refreshing his choice to campaign on optimism was, about how hilarious and cutting he could be ("that's a hash-tag fail" remains my favorite debate line, ever) - but then his family released his final statement to his friends, the party, and the country. His own letter's concluding lines seem a far fairer tribute than I could ever devise.

"My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world."

Thinking about Rise of the Planet of the Apes

2011-08-09T14:10:00.005-04:00

I caught Rise of the Planet of the Apes yesterday with a friend, and we both reached the same basic conclusions:

1 - On the whole, it was better than we expected. The revolution plot was well-constructed and Caesar (as an adult) looked shockingly real and made for a surprisingly compelling and sympathetic lead.
2 - But it was just as racist as we expected.

I don't know what it is about monkeys and apes, but corporate media doesn't seem capable of writing stories about them without stumbling into racist clichés, representations, and/or rhetoric.

In the new Apes film, the opening scene takes place in Africa, where poachers are capturing the apes for scientific research. The poachers, of course, are generic African mercenaries with rag-tag clothing and cleaver-like swords.

Now, it's not really clear why this is necessary - and the scene is so unnecessary that the Wikipedia summary of the movie omits it entirely. What I'm guessing is that it was meant to show how similar humans and apes are in the first place. As the apes run from the poachers, they hoot and scream - and so do the poachers who chase them. The only obvious inference is that we're supposed to note their similarity, or even note how difficult it is to tell them apart.

But this doesn't really resonate in the intended way, I think. Because if they thought they were saying something about how animalistic humanity is, they probably should have said it in a way that isn't quite so outrageously cliché and recognizably white supremacist. I mean, really - you can't make this point in a way that doesn't display a stunning lack of creativity and, worse, have centuries of racist symbolic weight attached to it?

A joke that's making the rounds...

2011-03-01T09:32:00.000-05:00

A public union employee, a tea party activist, and a CEO are sitting at a table with a plate of a dozen cookies in the middle of it. The CEO takes 11 of the cookies, turns to the tea partier and says, 'Watch out for that union guy. He wants a piece of your cookie.'

Star Trek's dangerous, savage child race

2011-02-08T12:24:00.004-05:00

I was talking about Star Trek: The Next Generation with some people in my department last week, and it gave me a renewed appreciation for the show's ability to be reflexive about its own liberal progress narrative.

Now, to be fair, the examples of TNG's failure to note its own racism and neocolonial attitudes greatly outnumber the contrary examples. (Which, it should be added, are mostly confined to the show's final season, too.) A cursory look at the show's first season, especially, reveals some hilariously racist stuff, especially with the utopian planet of beautiful white people and the dystopian planet of murderous, polygamist, black tribes. (Admittedly, there is a dark-lining to the silver cloud in the former episode, but there is nothing to redeem the latter one.)

What specifically occurred to me, though, was that the show both begins and ends with episodes that challenge its own teleology and smug self-righteousness. Take, for instance, the pilot, where the omnipotent Q puts humanity on trial for being a "a dangerous, savage child race" that goes looking for wars. Picard's response to the charge is to ask Q to "test us", noting that "our mission is long". And while Picard passes the test in the pilot, we eventually learn in the finale that, to quote Q again, "the trial never ends" - that the entire series has been a continuation of the test that began six and a half year earlier, making the show one gigantic exercise in allaying Q's concerns.

In the end, Picard convinces Q to spare humanity because, for "one iota" of a second, the captain realizes that the laws of science are being broken and they need to roll with it rather than waste time figuring out ways to make it conform to their expectations. There's no assurance that humanity is not essentially barbarous, and no confirmation that humans have indeed evolved - only the realization that we're still, and always will be, on probation.

Idris Elba, Mickey Rourke, and how race matters in casting

2010-12-21T14:04:00.009-05:00

The Thor movie trailer has come out and, predictably, some fans are protesting that Idris Elba, who is black, shouldn't have been cast as a Norse god, all of whom are white. Elba as Heimdall is pictured below:

Thankfully, most responses have been supportive of the Elba casting. That said, a lot of them still miss the point of casting him. Take this summary of the issue by Monika Bartyzel at Moviefone:

At some point we all have to realize that changing the skin color of a fictional character is not an affront to anyone, and should be seen no differently than a different hairstyle, a modernized wardrobe or any of the other changes that fall on fictional figures...

Unfortunately, it's precisely this kind of fallacious "color-blind" theorizing that allows critics of the casting-decision to turn around and accuse the author of the Moviefone critique of being a hypocrite:

Could Bartyzel be any more of a hypocrite? She thinks it’s wrong to put whites in the roles of non-whites [she criticized a decision to cast Mickey Rourke as Genghis Khan in another film] but more than acceptable to put non-whites in the roles of whites. In fact she says it’s “racist” to object to putting non-whites in the roles of whites.

Which is a fair enough response - in spite of the fact that most of the arguments on the site are racist gibberish - given how terribly Bartyzel articulated the reasons for opposing the Rourke casting but supporting the Elba decision.

But Bartyzel is ultimately right, even if she goes about explaining it the wrong way. What it actually comes down to isn't color-blindness - as if that's possible or even desirable - but representation and power. We should support decisions like casting Michael Clarke Duncan as the Kingpin or Elba as Heimdall because a) actors of color are under-represented in Hollywood film and TV, and b) the source texts of comic book adaptations are often 50 or more years old, and so were made for all-white audiences and, predictably, feature all-white casts. (And, often, these are subtly racist texts that were produced for an explicitly racist audience. Reproducing those texts exactly, just for the sake of creating a faithful adaptation, means reproducing those racist politics or representation, too. Fidelity for its own sake is often a bad idea.)

Hollywood is full of these kinds of adaptations and full of films populated by exclusively or almost exclusively white casts. What Hollywood is not full of - aside from the films created by Tyler Perry and a few other films marketed specifically for black-audiences (films that often still manage to find space for white actors, mind you) - are meaningful roles for non-white actors.

I'll simplify it, even, and say that representation is power. It's empowering to see images of heroes that look like you, that you can imagine to be you, and disempowering to feel that you either can't identify with them or actively disidentify with the people who look most like you. There are plenty of white male superheroes, wizards, demigods, and so forth, and comparatively few black men playing similar roles - virtually none once you remove any that have been played by Will Smith.

Idris Elba isn't stealing from a scarce supply of white male fantasy roles, but he is contributing to a scarce list of black male fantasy characters. And that's valuable and interesting in a way that, say, Sam Worthington as Heimdall would not be.

Stealing a page from Pitchfork's book

2010-12-17T19:40:00.004-05:00

If someone were to pay me to write a review of the Black Eyed Peas' "The Time (Dirty Bit)", it would probably go a little something like this:

Academic scandal and "political agendas": the controversy at U Toronto's SESE

2010-12-13T13:33:00.013-05:00

My partner, Victoria, is a PhD candidate in the department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education (SESE) at the University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. (It's a mouthful, yes.) Recently, it's gotten a lot of press here in Canada, most of it very angry.

The gist of it is this: a Master's student - Jenny Peto - wrote a thesis (one of those 150 or so page long essays that we don't expect anyone outside of our immediate family and committee will ever read) which - very basically - alleges that two "Holocaust education projects" instrumentalize the Holocaust in such a way as to "promote the interests of the Israeli nation-state." And someone blogged about it, which caught the attention of the National Post and Toronto Star, who promptly labeled her a self-loathing Jewish anti-Semite.

I don't want to talk about the thesis itself because I've only read the abstract. (That is, I don't know whether it is good or bad, though a friend of mine who has read it calls it "quite abysmal". And I'm saying that that's beside the point, anyway, for the purposes of what I want to cover here.) Hilariously, it's not clear that many of the commentators who have contributed to the discussion have actually given it a good look, much less read the whole thing themselves. Nor is it clear that they have any clear idea of the expectations that are attached to a Master's thesis - the demands for more interviews, research, etc. would turn this into the sort of massive, years-long project that no supervisor would approve and no MA student could complete.

The newest addition to this ongoing saga is a list of SESE's MA theses* that have been compiled by Werner Cohn, an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia. The list has been reprinted in the National Post, where Cohn claims that they are "so marred by political jargon and political preconceptions that they should never have been accepted." The theses, it seems, are "politicized" (whatever that means - what, in the study of sociology and equity, isn't politicized?), claims Cohn, and "consist of hate propaganda, possibly in violation of the Criminal Code of Canada."

(It behooves me, here, to point out Cohn's own possible biases and investment in the subject matter. If his personal website - which includes a lot of anti-Chomsky stuff, writings on Zionism, and writings on "Jews who hate Israel" - is any indication, he's probably one of the people who is politically implicated by Peto's thesis. This is ~~an auspicious~~ a key detail and its absence from his text in the National Post article is auspicious.)

Cohn claims that the abstracts he lists (because he didn't read 16 of the 18 theses - like i said, no one does) are "propound political agendas rather than detached scholarship" and "the politics of all eighteen are of one sort and one sort only: radical leftism", and that they "are so politicized that – again on a prima facie basis – I would not accept them as scholarly contributions". (To his credit, I suppose, he admits that it's possible - if unlikely - that he would change his mind if he actually read the things.)

Having read the list myself, I have a few observations to share, too:

If, on the basis of the abstract alone, this stuff constitutes "political agendas" and "radical leftism", then Cohn has either never read anything in the fields of equity and identity politics or else thinks that the fields themselves are not worthy of his attention. Some of the abstracts are pretty innocuous, except for the appearance of terms like "anti-racist", "Canadian colonialism", and the "white" Canadian nation-state. And regardless, this is not somehow a unique cross-section - this is typical of the work being done right now in sociology, race, and/or gender studies. My sense is that his problem is with the discipline, from which he appears to be professionally and philosophically detached. (And not "detached" in the somewhat problematic sense that one can ever be politically detached from necessarily politicized work, but "detached" in the sense of "he just doesn't know.") The National Post might as well have asked a mathematician to weigh-in.

Cohn uses the term "Neo-Marxist" dismissively on another blog, and I think it's a telling insult. Based on that article and the one in the globe - where he hides his own politics under the guise of "objectivity in scholarship" and "scholarly merit" (which he doesn't define - presumably, it is obvious to people like himself, who are ostensibly, if disingenuously, without politics) - my guess is that what Cohn is actually lamenting is his own obsolescence. At the risk of sounding too dismissive myself, Cohn's first published article is now 60 years old - presumably, he is made anxious by MA theses employing post-colonial and anti-racist frameworks that critique and reject what was once canon. That canon being the pro-Western, pro-white, masculinist, heterosexist sociological corpus that Cohn was trained with and - again, presumably - has contributed to. It doesn't matter what they were actually, specifically saying - he was probably ready to dismiss them simply for committing this sin.

Cohn also criticizes OISE for the "political uniformity" of its theses, adding that "no thesis that, for instance, urged a conservative viewpoint, or a Christian one, or, Heaven forbid, Zionism". But this is a red herring if I've ever seen one - those "viewpoints" aren't there simply because they're not up to the task. Imagine a classically liberal - ie. conservative, in popular parlance - analysis of gendered microinequities in the workplace. Could it even admit the possibility? How would it go about collecting data in any meaningful way? What kind of horribly reductive and limited vocabulary would it be forced to draw on? Could it even account for the possibility of systemic discrimination? Just what the hell would that look like? (You might counter with the suggestion that a conservative thesis would challenge the whole idea of microinequities. In which case, frankly, it shows its uselessness that much faster.)

[* Victoria's MA thesis isn't among them, though the temporal scope of his selections aren't clear, and so it's possible that she just fell outside his time-frame.]

The NBA, referreeing, and segue into Malcolm Gladwell

2010-12-08T12:54:00.003-05:00

I don't remember hearing about this study, but apparently in 2007 some researchers found subtle racial-bias in the calls that NBA referees made from 1993-2003. And then, after being viciously attacked by the NBA for using faulty methodology, they used the data that the NBA supplied to refute their claims in order to confirm their findings. Cool stuff, and there's an article about the whole back story on ESPN.

The article references Malcolm Gladwell's Blink a lot, crediting him for popularizing the idea of implicit racism. (which, I'm guessing, was either derived from or unknowingly riffing on the idea of microinequity) I read the whole book, and I kinda hated it. There was no thesis, to speak of - he was writing about the power of implicit bias in the quick decisions that we make all of the time. Sometimes our bias is helpful, sometimes it isn't; sometimes we can retrain ourselves to affect it, sometimes we can't. If there's any central point, it's merely that these near-instantaneous, subconsciously-motivated decisions happen. And if one of my students had written this, I would have given them a poor mark for writing a 'grocery list' essay consisting of a bunch of vaguely related items that combine to make no larger point.

Adventures in TAing, case 9 (in a ? case series)

2010-12-03T13:56:00.005-05:00

The exact process varies - sometimes I steal from Chuck Klosterman and use his "23 Questions I Ask Everybody I Meet In Order To Decide If I Can Really Love Them" - but I've always started the school year with introductions and some sort of ice-breaker question for my students. But I decided to be lazy this year (probably, in part, because this was the first time in 3 years that I had a one-hour tutorial rather than a two-hour one) and just do name and major.

Name. Major. That's it.

And in spite of this simple request, I probably got the most entertaining, aggressive, and bizarre introduction ever. (And I'm posting it here, now, only because he dropped the class.)

I'm _______ and I'm majoring in Business. And I want to get an A+ on the group presentation, because I got an F on one last year and my final mark in the class was a C+. But everything else was an A+ so they changed it to an A because I petitioned it. Oh, and my group hated me because I'm gay.

Added later: The student showed up once more and then dropped the class.

Two totally, completely, absolutely unrelated stories

2010-12-02T12:13:00.003-05:00

#1

This story about the (ex-)casting director of the Hobbit's already a couple days old, but I wanted to respond to one part of what's been the popular response. It comes in the headline on Salon, actually:

A woman says she was denied a job as an extra for not being light-skinned -- was it wrong or just authentic?

Clearly, "authentic" is being deployed problematically, here. First, this is a fictional myth, and so the standard of authenticity is highly interpretive. But more importantly, "authentic" shouldn't be used to cover-up or ignore the racist politics of the source text. And, headline aside, Salon gets this part right:

The kerfuffle over "The Hobbit's" tactless casting call -- with its obvious and utterly unnecessary skin tone limiting of would-be applicants -- serves an uncomfortable reminder of the not-so diverse realm of the Tolkienverse. [...] As my colleague Laura Miller says, 'There's a criticism that there's a crypto racial thing in the darker-skinned orcs and the southern men.'

My only disagreement would be with the "crypto" part. Really? "Crypto" makes me think that it's subtle and/or unintentional. And I don't think it's either.

#2

This story, which is about the racialized casting of Victoria Secret models, is a bit older but hasn't, as far as I can tell, gotten as much play.

The Victoria Secret Fashion Show, which aired last night on CBS, opened with a complete line up of light skinned models.While dark skinned models were sprinkled throughout the show, they seemed to have lined them up so they could all be part of the “Wild Things” segment of the show [...] Yes, wild things… that included tribal dancers and all the models of color in the show.

I'm not aware of CBS or Victoria Secret's response to the complaint that dark-skinned models were uniformly exoticized - and that the white models were uniformly not - but I wouldn't be surprised if the same defense of "authenticity" were made.

There's a joke to be made about probes and probes, here...

2010-11-25T22:35:00.005-05:00

Back during the summer, Toronto hosted the a G20 summit. Predictably, there was rioting and some over-zealous (to put it kindly) riot police decided to variously round-up protesters who, subsequently, they were unable to place at the scene of the property damage or else just physically clear protesters out of areas that, to the best of the public's knowledge, had been declared Protest Zones. (As it turns out, this had only been 'proposed', and no 'official' designation had been given.)

Which means that people sitting on the grass at the provincial legislature, who were under the impression that they were allowed to do so peaceably without threat of violence, suffered injuries as a result of stuff like this:

Hilariously/pathetically, the Special Investigations Unit just released a report that identifies not one culpable officer in this whole mess. I had expected, at the very least, at least a few "bad apple" scapegoats who could be offered up in lieu of having to admit that the problem was systemic - that the police were poorly trained/prepared, that their orders and actions were misguided on the whole, that they just plain did a bad job. (Because we'd never get that kind of admission.)

Instead, we got stuff like this, as described by the Toronto Star:

"Officers declined to be interviewed for the SIU investigations, as is their right. That left the SIU in several cases unable to determine a specific officer at fault."
"Because the officers all wore identical helmets and uniforms, it was impossible to identify which one is responsible for causing a fracture below Nobody’s right eye, said Scott. Two officers were identified as having something to do with the incident, but exercised their rights, declining an interview with the SIU."
"'I did not think that it would be likely that police officers would come forward and identify themselves as having contributed to my injury,' [Norm Morcos, who suffered a fractured hand] said."

(There are other gems not listed in his article, like the problem of identifying officers who illegally covered up their badge, as the one in the picture above did. He can't be reprimanded even for breaching uniform protocol because, of course, he can't be identified. And that's that.)

Now over on Facebook, someone defended the right of the police involved to remain silent, since "Everyone is allowed to remain silent. Basic right of all people."

But this is fucked up.

First of all, if this were a criminal investigation, the cops who refused to be interviewed with respect to the allegedly criminal conduct of their co-workers could be charged with obstruction or accessory - because you don't have the right to remain silent when you have evidence of someone else's crime. If I had witnessed one of my friends bash in someone's head, I would be subpoenaed and compelled to testify - why should the police be held to a lower standard?

Second, this isn't a criminal investigation, anyway - it's a job review. And its purpose is to discern whether the people who we entrust to with our physical security - and who are given tremendous power and privileges to do so - are doing their job or else behaving in ways that are antithetical to it. And they can't. Because the people accused of bashing a fallen protester in the face with a baton, of refusing to let a one-legged man retrieve his prosthesis and instead demanding that he hop, or of kicking a sitting man in the back of the head - or, for that matter, the people who watched it happen - don't have to talk if they don't want to. And the SIU has no other recourse - if they don't freely choose to speak, the case goes nowhere.

So this blows my mind: if these police officers (and it's obviously problematic to focus on a few particular officers when the whole culture of law enforcement should be implicated, but still...) can't assure us that they're fulfilling their responsibilities, much less assure us that they're not acting in a criminally irresponsible way when they've been accused of doing so, how is it that they're even allowed to keep their jobs?

I hate trying to sell stuff online

2010-11-21T14:02:00.005-05:00

We're moving in early January, and are using it as an excuse to get rid of some stuff that Penelope has outgrown: to start with, a Fisher-Price barn-door that plays music, an uber-expensive bouncy seat that she never really liked, an outdoor slide and swing-set (the Swing-Along Castle), and - eventually, once we figure out how to replace a surprisingly vital coin-sized piece that fell off - her original stroller, which she outgrew much faster than we had thought she would. (At 22 months, Penelope is taller than many kids who are twice her age.)

This being a poor time of the year to do yard sales in Toronto, I've taken to trying to sell this stuff on the internet. The barn-door went quickly, but it's proven difficult to sell the other things. I thought that it had to do with the pricing - I started posting each item at half its original sticker price - but I'm starting to think that the problem might the people who I'm interacting with.

Near as a I can tell there are at least 5 distinctive types of Kijiji/Craigslist shoppers, and some categories overlap with others:

1) The no-reply
Of the last five people to contact me about the Swing-Along Castle, all of whom ask me where I live and when they can pick it up, (and, sometimes, whether it's even still available) only one has responded after I've politely shared the requested details. One person even emailed me the same inquiry twice, evidently failing to realize that s/he was contacting the same person regarding the same toy. And s/he still never actually followed up.

2) The geographically-illiterate
I would that think a) selecting my location as City of Toronto, and b) even providing my postal code (which produces an arrow on Google Maps that lands maybe a half-dozen houses down the street from my place) would be enough to allow people to figure out whether it's worth the trip to come here and get whatever it is that they're interested in. But no. People will ask me, for instance, whether I'm anywhere near Whitby. If, by "near", you mean within 50km and up to a one-hour drive during off-peak hours, then, yes, I'm "near" Whitby. But you probably should have been able to figure that out, right?

3) The illiterate-illiterate
To be fair, some of the emails read less like the writing of someone who's illiterate and more like someone who is texting. For example: "pls pm the best price you could offer, tkx". But seriously? Just on principle, now, I don't want to respond to you. And some people just violate the basic rules of internet netiquette and grammar: "I'M INTERESTED IN LEARNING FARM.
IS STILL AVAILABLE?" If I say 'yes', will you stop shouting?

4) The negotiator
It's not that I don't expect some negotiating. But I find myself annoyed by the way that people negotiate. One email was just a number: "50?" Like, not even a 'hi!' And the first example in the previous category fits here, too - the person can't even be bothered to make me an offer. (Granted, my reaction probably also has something to do with the fact that I'm selling my baby's toys. It's not that I want them to value my emotional attachments, but I don't want them to feel devalued, either.) But these are relatively minor complaints in comparison to...

5) The perpetual negotiating machine
When I first posted the bouncy seat, I listed it for $90 - half of its original $180 price. And I got a really quick bite, too. Someone offered $80, which was totally reasonable, and asked me to reply "asap" with my details. So I agreed, and I did just that. And then I got a response that amended the offer to $70. Arrrgh.

My favorite pop song lyric of the moment

2010-11-16T15:42:00.005-05:00

From Ke$ha's current single, "We R Who We R":

"And no, you don’t wanna mess with us/
Got Jesus on my necklace"

Reasons why this is awesome:
1) Jesus = ass-kicking power
2) She rhymes "mess with us" with "neck-uh-luss"

"Canada: Our time to lead: 8 Discussions We Need To Have"

2010-11-08T12:32:00.007-05:00

The Globe and Mail, which fancies itself Canada's answer to The New York Times, has been running weekly features (the "8 Discussions We Need To Have" that are referenced in the title of this post) of ostensible national importance over the past month.

Luckily(?), these discussions are providing me with some pretty fantastic teachable moments for my students, who are learning about ideas of privilege, oppression, power, and politics. This is because the way the Globe is marketing this series is surprisingly (even shockingly) problematic: racist, sexist, classist... really, I'm just waiting for the inevitable homophobic discussion question.

The topics have been showing up on billboards throughout the city, and I've been writing them down or photographing them as I see them. Of course, I'm lazy, so I don't necessarily have those pictures in front of me as I type this. So with the caveat that I might get a word or two wrong, here's what's been discussed thus far, as captured on the billboards:

"Multicultural mosaic or mistake?"
"Do women need to leave Canada to be successful?"
"Boys aren't failing. They just need lower standards."
"Should our military be helping the good guys or killing the bad ones?"
"Your weekend or your career. Choose one."

So when I showed this to my students, I asked "who is the 'we' who need to be having these discussions?" And I told them that they couldn't resort to the knee-jerk "it's Old White Guys" answer, which, while correct, is lazy - with this short list, you can actually prove that it's old white guys through deductive reasoning alone.

One other thing to note, here, is that the 'discussions' are actually 'problems'. So part of the task of identifying who is having the discussion is in identifying who the discussion is about - who or what is the problem that needs to be remedied, presumably by someone else?

'Multicultural mosaic' is a reference to Canada's framing of its officially policy on multiculturalism and immigration. Clearly, the people being addressed here are the people who would consider themselves neither multicultural nor immigrants, people who also feel entitled to decide whether Canadian immigration policy has been mistaken ('mistake' reads pejoratively, to me, as if to say that either assimilation or rejection are implicitly the other options). Only white, native-born, and English-speaking Canadians fall outside the scope of this discussion, so they're presumably the ones having it.
And...
...both concern gender, and are far more revealing when taken together. As one of my female students asked, 'Why am I supposed to leave but we can fix things for boys?' The short answer is because boys are entitled to success, and expected to succeed, and women aren't. The long answer, though, would also have to consider that boys aren't failing in the first place - that, despite the fact that Canadian girls have performed better in school for over 30 years, Canadian men aged 25-40 still make 10% more than women of the same age. But to answer the "who's 'we'?" question, it seems like it's not boys or women, though boys would seem to be less of a problem (because their problem can be fixed) than women.
While not obviously speaking to the -isms in the way that the first three and the last of the five topics do, the military question is no less problematic. First problem: Who's good, who's bad, and who gets to decide? Dunno, though, presumably, it's up to the white guys who were having the previous three discussions. Second problem: Arguably, peacekeeping has never been only about 'helping the good guys', and in its current incarnation as "peace enforcement" is now admittedly even less so. So one of the two options we're given doesn't exist, and probably never has.
Is it even necessary to point out how ridiculously classist the question is? Just how many people even have "careers" at this point, and how many people can actually choose to not work on the weekend?

So the identity of the 'we' who need to have these discussions is, at the very least, as follows: white, non-immigrant, male, adult, middle-to-upper class. Like I said, it's the Old White Guys, but this way you can actually prove it.

(Edit: The sixth discussion is phrased thusly on the billboard: "Money can buy anything. Unless you have a lump in your breast." So we're going the classism route, again.)

A quick post-American-mid-term elections post

2010-11-03T13:44:00.006-04:00

A voter in Virginia, quoted in the New Yorker:

"I'm a constitutional conservative and I do not ever approve of distribution of wealth, and I am not a socialist, this country is not socialist, we are founded on Judeo-Christian principles. I will riot in the street if I have to. I have never been so ashamed of the way Obama has diminished the Presidency. He calls certain people enemies. He doesn’t dress properly. He talks about certain networks. He is just what he is — a Chicago agitator."

1) "He doesn't dress properly."

He's too snazzy a dresser, I guess?

2) "I do not ever approve of [re?]distribution of wealth, [...] this country is not socialist, we are founded on Judeo-Christian principles."

What was it that Jesus said, again? "Greed is good. Greed is right. Greed works"? That was him, right? Not someone else?

How NOT to sell your anchor

2010-10-27T13:23:00.003-04:00

The above picture has been plastered on billboards around Toronto since the end of the summer, announcing the new host of the national news on Global TV in Canada, Dawna Friesen. And it is a terrifying choice. Let me list the reasons:

Anyone who's ever told ghost stories around a campfire, or watched someone do it on TV, knows that it's scary when someone's face is lit from below. And the strongest light source, here, is coming from below.
Friesen isn't smiling. One end of her lips is upturned, yes, but the other is still. She's sneering.
Her pupils looking unusually tiny and her irises look like blue steel. Her eyes just look cold.
I don't know exactly how to explain it, but she reminds me of Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman Returns...
...or a vampire. (Though that conclusion, given my first three observations, is probably easier to understand.)

The Scott Pilgrim movie

2010-09-05T14:49:00.004-04:00

Thankfully, I liked the Scott Pilgrim movie more than I have the books. Some quick thoughts:

Kieran Culkin as Wallace steals every scene that he's in.
The recurring bed gag is great. (I'm not sure whether the bed actually increases in size every time Scott wakes up and there's another guy in it, but it certainly seemed like it did.)
I'm not sure that Scott himself is more likable, but he's certainly less unlikable. In Wright's effort to streamline the story, he's dropped most of what made Scott seem like a directionless jerk (his personal life outside Ramona is effectively reduced to him being in a band, but in the movie a) the band is good, and b) so is Scott!) and compressed the timeline significantly, which makes him seem like less of a loser for never learning or growing - it's only been a few weeks! But this Scott clearly does learn and grow, even if the proof in the final battle scene is a bit precious and too explicit. I think Wright is also cashing-in on Cera's own in-built nice-guy type. But anyway... he's still a bit bland, but I actually want this Scott to win.
The major goof, I think, is that Envy is built up to be this major nemesis, but she appears, she plays, she and Scott have a moment, and then she's gone for the second-half of the film. Weird. Would it have been too much if she was also under Gideon's control at the end, and was also part of the fight with Ramona and Knives? Maybe.
Wright's version of the Nega-Scott battle - its foreshadowing, its placement, its hilarious and wholly appropriate resolution - is faaaaaar better than O'Malley's.
I had trouble with the film's grammar in places, which wasn't like a comic nor was it much like a movie. There are spots where the scene and time change rapidly from shot to shot, to show that Scott is in a daze, but it left me completely disoriented and confused. Which was maybe the point, but I found it aggravating rather than appropriate.
And it was nice to see my hometown in a movie without it being passed off as some other city.

MMA and SYTYCD

2010-09-01T14:07:00.002-04:00

It's occurred to me a few times that the UFC and So You Think You Can Dance have followed bizarrely parallel paths:

Both started as hybrid formats where specialists in one area competed against specialists from another, with neither necessarily having any familiarity with the other's form (boxing vs. karate, hip-hop vs. ballet, etc.); as a performance it could be ugly, but its unpredictability was part of its charm.
Both were quickly dominated by specialists whose training made them particularly adaptable in countering/performing the styles of others (jiu-jitsu and contemporary)
Both have evolved (?) to a point where particular specialities have taken a back-seat to a broad-based training in multiple disciplines (the single-specialty folks are a rarity, and are pretty much doomed to fail - the boxer on the last UFC card, the breaker in the last season of SYTYCD); the athletes are undoubtedly better, but they're characterized by a sameness that has eliminated a lot of the fun and all of the novelty.

'It's just a game'

2010-08-24T15:03:00.004-04:00

My team lost our semi-final game in softball, last night, under some dubious circumstances.

We overheard one of the players on the other team (the only player not in uniform, no less) ask one of his teammates whether sliding was allowed. This was strange, because a) it's a semi-final, and you should know this rule by now, b) sliding is not allowed, and it's treated as a pretty big deal, so it's an easy rule to remember, and c) it's a playoff game, and not knowing the sliding rules suggests that he's a ringer, the use of which is supposed to earn your team an automatic disqualification. And so, after we learned his name I used an iPhone to look up their official roster list on the league's website - and, sure enough, he wasn't on it.

Long story short, our team decided to not report our opponents. I felt obliged, though, to let them know that we knew what they were pulling, even if we weren't going to officially call them on it. (Admission: This was not meant to be wholly selfless. Or mostly, even.) And, so, I got an angry response about how they didn't actually use the website (that's why the one player didn't appear there, evidently) and "it's just a beer-league", anyway.

I hate that response. The people who resort to lines like "it's just a beer league" or "it's just for fun" never actually mean it. And we know that they don't mean it because that statement is never followed by "...and so if it means so much to you, you can have the win". And that's because they're lying.

What "just..." actually means - implicitly, if not explicitly - is that they want to ignore or disregard the rules at will. The problem, here, is that the rules constitute the bare minimum in terms of what we can expect of one another: I can't expect you to be a good sport, but I can expect you know that you shouldn't slide. Except that for the "just..." people, particular rules - and which particular rules is unknown to us in advance - can simply be ignored. And that's the key bit: that we don't know you're ignoring a rule ahead of time. (Which seems like it should be obvious enough, and yet...)

Ironically, in the four years I've played in this softball league, no one who's deployed some variant of "it's just a game" has ever conceded the point that's being argued, much less the game. (If it's "just" a game, you wouldn't know it.) Even more painfully, it's always used exclusively where the arguer is pushing for some sort of advantage - to ignore a rule that would penalize them, rather than one that would reward them.

It's like the person in an argument who announces that they'll be the bigger man/woman by abandoning the fight and not having the last word. And, so, manages to grab the last word. I hate that guy.

Representing 'Evil'

2010-08-18T14:00:00.005-04:00

Erin has written this fantastic post on, well, evil in films that ties together Chigurh (from No Country for Old Men), Hannibal Lecter, and black widow spiders. You should read it because, like I said, it's fantastic. If the line "It takes a man to style himself like a seven-year-old girl" doesn't have you wanting to read it right now, then nothing will.

I wrote a comment on Erin's blog, and wanted to repeat myself here, just a little bit. In comparing these three, Erin labels them "creature[s] of nature", though she rightly qualifies and complicates Hannibal a bit - but, at least in Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal has no history, and this is just as good as being a creature purely of nature. She also notes that it would be unsatisfying to 'explain' Chigurh, just as the origin provided in the novels set chronologically before Silence of the Lambs only seem to damage Hannibal's character. It seems as if art's most persuasive and frightening villains are diminished in being understandable - in being made human.

For instance, from the pilot of Family Guy, we get this 'origin' for Adolf Hitler:

It's particularly absurd, but I think it manages to express, in 10 seconds, what was wrong-headed about trying to 'explain' where Hannibal Lecter comes from. No matter the explanation, the origin will always be too banal and too mundane, even too relatable or too sympathetic - nothing short of showing Hitler emerging from Hell itself will be satisfying, because we don't want our villains to be explicable - we want them to be exceptional.

And this expectation and satisfaction is horribly problematic. Because this is exactly how politicians and pundits get away with constructing The Terrorists as evil entities that exist somehow outside politics and history. Because our art teaches us that we shouldn't want to know where evil comes from, and that in any case it emerges directly from nature and is merely acting on that nature, like a black widow or a tornado. We don't need to know why a suicide bomber is a suicide bomber anymore than we need to know why Chigurh kills - they just do.

I don't remember where or when, but Geoff once made the comment on his blog that there was something in the hypervisible misogynistic violence of the Sin City film that he found appealing, and it was a bit troubling because it was so gratifying as a film experience and obviously disgusting as a gender politics. And I feel the same sort of unresolvable ambivalence about these evil characters in No Country for Old Men and Silence of the Lambs.

Shit and $#*!

2010-08-13T08:33:00.004-04:00

In news that absolutely everyone already knows, the Twitter feed Shit My Dad Says has become $#*! My Dad Says in its new iteration as a sitcom. And it stars William Shatner and it will incorporate actual lines from the Twitter feed, which means that, at the very least, Shatner will be hilarious.

But that's not why I'm writing this. I'm writing this only because of the title. Because that has got to be the best-ever use of bleep symbols to spell out exactly what they're supposedly obscuring. (Though I have to wonder who at CBS or the FCC actually thinks that there's a meaningful difference between 'shit' and '$#*!')

[Bizarrely, this post has been referenced on The Book blog, a mostly baseball blog which I read regularly. And it's bizarre because, as far as I know, no one who runs it actually knows that the Neil who writes this blog is the same Neil that posts there. Follow the link to see me argue the merits of using *! over !+, grammar mistakes and all. (I don't really proof-read this stuff.)]

Rihanna has made some strange (dumb?) choices

2010-08-10T12:33:00.006-04:00

Rihanna is mostly famous for two things, and not necessarily in this order: "Umbrella" and being assaulted by then-boyfriend and fellow pop-star Chris Brown.

So it's a bit baffling to reflect on some of her recent song choices:

* From the first single following her break-up with Brown, "Russian Roulette":
And you can see my heart beating
You can see it through my chest
And I’m terrified but I’m not leaving
Know that I must must pass this test
So just pull the trigger

* From her recent duet with Eminem, "Love the Way You Lie":

Just gonna stand there and watch me burn
But that's alright because I like the way it hurts
Just gonna stand there and hear me cry
But that's alright because I love the way you lie
I love the way you lie

At my most optimistic, I could maybe see that the first song is trying to celebrate her survival - she's stronger for having had the relationship. (But it feels more like she's rationalizing what happened, almost trying to excuse his behavior, as if in 'testing' her he was ultimately helping her. I think it's fucked up.)

And the new song? I can't see anything remotely redeemable in it. If I'm trying to be optimistic, the best I can do is suggest that she's a masochist. But there's nothing more here that's even remotely recuperable.

Rihanna, though, disagrees: "He pretty much just broke down the cycle of domestic violence and it's something that people don't have a lot of insight on. [...] The lyrics were so deep, so beautiful and intense. It's something that I understood, something I connected with."

"Broke it down"? If she means that it's a wholly uncritical stream-of-consciousness first-person account of the ways in which misogynists explain and excuse their behavior, then yes, he did a good job of showing just how an abuser can twist things to try and make their behavior sound reasonable. But to call it "deep" and imply that he shows "insight"? No. There's none of that here. I mean, for fuck's sake - the song is about a guy who hits and threatens to murder his girlfriend, a woman who is seemingly okay with it because she "likes the way it hurts". Who "connects" with that?

(The video is even worse because it a) makes the abuse sexy and b) tries even harder to implicate both of them in the violence. "Deep" and "beautiful", indeed.)

Adventures in TAing, case 8 (in a ? case series)

2010-08-09T10:52:00.003-04:00

[In a preemptive effort to stave off boredom, and save you from having to read punishingly bad grammar and spelling, the following has all been paraphrased.]

What the student wrote: 'I didn't understand the assignment and I talked to 5 other people from our tutorial who didn't understand your expectations. 1) Do you want us to give our opinion or to tell you what the authors of our texts say? In my other courses, where I get grades like A and A+, they don't want me to just repeat the people we read and are more interested in my opinion.' 2) You say that you want me to develop my discussion of 'power' and I know a lot about the topic, but do I have to use course texts or can I use other texts that I've read?'

How I responded: 'I'm sorry that you found the assignment so difficult, but if you refer to the list of topics online, you'll see that the professor addressed your questions. 1) "Your evaluation is based on your answer to the question and your knowledge of course readings", meaning that while your argument might represent your own opinion, it must be supported by references drawn from course readings - and more references than the two quotes that you used. 2) "No outside sources are permitted", since, as I mentioned before, you're supposed to be demonstrating your knowledge of our readings and a familiarity with the issues that we've covered.'

How I wanted to respond: 'If you can't read the directions that are printed at the top of the essay topics list - all seven sentences of them - you are screwed. Get out of university. Now.'

The LOST epilogue

2010-08-08T13:41:00.005-04:00

Assuming that it hasn't been taken down yet, (as a lot of these clips have been, at ABC/Disney's request) this link should bring you to the complete 12 minute epilogue to LOST. In summation - it's a cute (maybe overly cute) bookend that wouldn't have worked as a part of the final episode but is unlikely to ruin anyone's appreciation of the show. Which is to say that while it doesn't make any substantial contribution to LOST's lore, it's entertaining.

*spoilers ahead*

The first act, which is about 8 minutes long, shows Ben-as-Hurley's-no.2 and, story-wise, is the lesser of the two acts. Ben serves as 'the show', here, to the two Dharma Initiative employees who are 'the fans'. It's part information-drop (for instance, an official explanation is offered for why women can't get pregnant, though I a) don't know why this was necessary, since it was easy to guess, and b) think it creates an additional hole in the writing, since it seems like we're supposed to assume that Ben knew this but he clearly didn't when he recruited Juliet. but anyway...) and part meta-commentary.

This is the part that's probably too cute by half. But at least if the show is telling us to let go, again, it's in a wholly ironic way, as opposed to the too sincere delivery of the same message in the finale. In the finale, the light had all the (ultimately unknowable) answers; in the epilogue, we're teased with Ben's binder of DVDs - a far more appropriate LOST version of the suitcase from Pulp Fiction.

The second, shorter act features Ben's rescue of Walt and a super-brief cameo from Hurley, now seemingly settled into his new role and ready to offer Walt a job - as Hurley's apprentice, presumably. (If I'm being pessimistic, I might ask whether Walt is the best person for the job, given his somewhat malevolent powers - whether he's better suited to be the next Man in Black than the next Jacob.) This is the lore bit of the epilogue, which is nice even if it isn't strictly necessary - the mission doesn't end just because Jack, Jacob, and the Man in Black have died, and it won't ever end - but wouldn't have worked in the finale, and so is perfect as an epilogue for the DVD. It's the lead-in to the Further Adventures of Hurley, Ben, and Walt series that will never happen.

And if it doesn't make you smile, you probably never liked the show in the first place.

Checking out early reviews of the Scott Pilgrim movie

2010-08-05T13:55:00.002-04:00

The early reviews are largely good at Rotten Tomatoes - though only 3 'top critics' have weighed in so far, two disliking it and one ambivalent - but here's a negative review from the Hollywood Reporter. And it repeats a lot of my complaints about the characters in the book series, which isn't a good sign:

What's disappointing is that this is all so juvenile. Nothing makes any real sense. The "duels" change their rules on a whim, and no one takes the games very seriously [...] Certainly Cera doesn't give a performance that anchors the nonsense. His character sort of drifts, not really attached to any idea or goal other than winning the heart of an apparently heartless woman...

So, yeah. Doesn't sound like Cera or Wright has tried to do much to address the great big black hole that is Scott's character. Or that the latter has tried to limit the magic realism/fantasy in any way that makes it reasonably consistent and not wholly nonsensical.

My favorite of Damon Lindelof's hate-tweets

2010-08-05T09:18:00.002-04:00

"You're a dirty liar. You never knew, you made it all up, you betrayed us all. You betrayed me and I hope you rot, motherfucker."

-J.J. Abrams tweet to Damon Lindelof, following the LOST finale.

The Avengers movie

2010-07-26T09:01:00.007-04:00

I realize that it's early, and that there's a very good chance that they're not done putting the team for this movie together... but really? Marvel has already cast 8 people for the Avengers movie, and only one of them - and he's not even an actual member of the team - is not white? And only one of them is a woman? There have been something like 100 members of the Avengers, and you couldn't find room for, like, Luke Cage or Warbird?

And when they realize this and start adding more women and non-white people, it'll look like blatant tokenism and/or an afterthought, since they've already made their priorities and key players clear. My guess? They'll go the route of The Ultimates and kill two birds with one stone by casting an Asian woman as The Wasp. (Cynicism Win.)

The Bechdel Test

2010-07-25T23:45:00.004-04:00

I can't believe that I had never heard of this before: http://bechdeltest.com/

In short, it's a quick little test to assess a) whether women are actually present in films, and b) whether they are given a purpose outside of their relationships with men. It sounds like it should be easy enough for film studios to pull this off, right? And, yet, it's amazing to see how many films - especially the stuff that's not explicitly marketed at either men or women, and so usually taken to be gender-neutral - fail it miserably. (Just check out the link.)

Now, it's super-important to add that passing the test doesn't indicate that a film is feminist and failing it doesn't make a film misogynist. Nor does a particular result make a movie good or bad. It simply does what it purports to do - measure the presence of women in our movies.

The test has three questions:
1) are there at least two female characters with names?
2) do they talk to each other, and not only men?
3) do they talk about something other than men?

It's not the most rigorous criteria, and my memory isn't perfect, so there's bound to be some room for disagreement. But let's run the test on the last 10 movies that I've either seen in a theater or rented:

3/3
The Kids are Alright
The Lovely Bones
Zombieland

2/3
-

1/3
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Kick-Ass (I can't recall whether the teenage girls ever talk to one another)
The Messenger
A Serious Man (do the mom and daughter ever speak?)
A Single Man (though only Julianne Moore speaks, so it could just as easily be a 0)

0/3
Crazy Heart
Inception (imho, I don't think that Mol counts)

Fyi, if I changed the test to measure for men, every film would get a 3 out of 3.

Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour is decidedly not

2010-07-22T08:12:00.010-04:00

There's a moment toward the end of the final book in the Scott Pilgrim series when Stacy asks where Scott, Ramona, and Gideon disappeared to during their battle, adding, "What was that all about?" Scott provides a rapid-fire response that sounds nonsensical (because, frankly, the battle was nonsensical), and his friends give the only appropriate response - silence, and a quick change of topic.

They might have been reading my mind - between fights on the astral plane, characters dying and then returning to life via free lives accessed in some space of purgatory, "the glow" on the subspace highway, swords being pulled from chests - twice (but in the real world, not in a psychic one), and Gideon's "cryogenic chamber", it's hard to tell whether there are any rules in the world of Scott Pilgrim. But it's a telling moment, too. Like the cliché says, when the characters seem to be complaining about the plot...

I've made it known that I haven't liked the last few issues of Scott Pilgrim. And I'll go on record in saying that this one is easily the worst - it is, as the kids (ie. me, when I'm pretending to be cool) say, a hot mess. But it didn't have to be. So, at the risk of repeating what I've already written elsewhere, I'll restrict myself to three complaints - two of which encompass the series as a whole, and one of which is the new detail that makes this book the poorest of the series. (My apologies in advance for poor spelling and wonky grammar - this entry seems to be more error-laden than most. That's what I get for not re-reading these things in their entirety.)

Complaint the first - Scott

Okay, I get it. Scott is supposed to be a cipher for the (presumably) nerdy and emotionally-stunted target-readership. He's purposely shallow because it allows us to project ourselves on to him. Because we also realize that we're our own worst enemy (Nega-Scott was a nice touch, though the set-up was awful) and we all want the mysterious hot girl. This is why people see Judd Apatow movies - the lead is usually a loser and a bit of a dick, but there are millions of young guys that find that relatable and want to believe that they can be dickish losers and still get the hot chick. But managing a good approximation of hetero-male-geek wish-fulfillment does not good writing make. And cipher or not, he's also the main character in a 1200 page story. I need something more than wish-fulfillment.

Because Scott is a dick. I was complaining about his character arc to some people yesterday, and said that he gets less likable as the series progresses - and then corrected myself because, in fact, it's more accurate to say that he gets more dislikable. He doesn't just squander the naive-lovable-loser charm of the first book, (or maybe it would be better to say that he tries to hold on to it well past the expiration date) he actually transforms into a willfully ignorant and insensitive prick. When Scott begins shouting at Knives about having casual sex, I want to reach into the comic and punch him in the face. He was a jerk to her when he dumped her in the first issue, but it was at least somewhat forgivable - or, rather, though he handled it badly, I wanted to forgive him. He was torn between his girlfriend and his dream-girl and, while he screwed it up, it seemed like he did it as well as he could have. These are, after all, the sorts of awkward break-ups that one stumbles through in their youth and is supposed to learn from.

Instead, Scott's come-on in the new issue takes insensitivity to new heights - knowing that Knives has never stopped loving him, that he hurt her horribly, and that everyone knows he's still hung up on Ramona, he asks her to sleep with him. That makes him an incredible douchebag, and not someone that I want to root for. At all. (Granted, this is when he has been separated from Nega-Scott, and I think we're supposed to understand that this is also responsible for his douchebaggery. But, a) that's not at all clear at this point in the story, which is a problem, and b) using a device from out of left field in order to undercut the emotion in the intimate personal exchanges that constitute the entire first act of the book is deceptive and annoying.)

I realize that, in real-life, people don't grow linearly - we change, we regress, we grow, we relapse. But books aren't beholden to these requirements, and most would be horrifically boring if they were. That Scott doesn't become a better person - and, in fact, seems even less self-aware and more malevolent - does nothing to recommend this book.

Complaint the second - magic realism/fantasy

When Scott Pilgrim's more fantastic elements are at their best, they're working with the more mundane elements of the story and not against or in-place of them. My favorite stuff is the most dream-like and ethereal magic realism - warp doors and Legend of Zelda dreams that lend atmosphere and depth, respectively. When they're at their worst, they suffocate the story and re/displace it - not magic realism at all, but magic absurdity. Magic nihilism, even. (On Geoff's blog, Dan suggests that it magic so totally overwhelms the realism that the book fully crosses over genre-lines and into fantasy. And so, rather than the magic sometimes encroaching on reality, as in the early books, the book features "realism encroaching on fantasy". I think he might be right, too.)

Take the Save Point from book 3 - faced with an unavoidable and horribly awkward meeting with his ex Envy Adams, Scott looks around desperately for an out of some kind. When Scott's supporters call him relatable, this is the kind of scene that they have in mind - one in which we've been forced into an uncomfortable situation and wish that we could have saved in advance, because a) we know it's going to go badly, and b) we wish we had a do-over. So the Save Point, while seemingly silly and random, is actually wholly appropriate to the scene - it enhances the pathos of Scott's situation and it increases our nervous anticipation, because we are keenly aware that Scott doesn't have a do-over. (And this is important, too - the Save Point 'exists' but Scott isn't able to use it. He, like us, wishes he could, but he can't - because the damned things don't exist!)

But the magic is the story in this final book: from Nega-Scott appearing seemingly out of nowhere to Gideon's cryogenic chamber to Scott's return to life from death to the psychic battle in Ramona's head... the book isn't grounded in recognizable human drama, much less remotely realistic settings. Which, I suppose, I saw coming because the series has tended increasingly toward absurdity and fantasy - so I shouldn't be surprised. Where the clever subtlety in the first book was in using the magic realism to represent what we couldn't have, that subtlety is deployed for wholly different ends, here: instead of failing to reach the Save Point, Scott uses a Free Life to return and fight Gideon again. Magic realism functions as deus ex machina with all the subtlety of a sword to the torso - Scott is killed and ends up in some Purgatory-like space (why? dunno.) where he meets up with Ramona again (how? dunno.) and uses his Free Life. (well, at least that wasn't pulled out of a hat - it was set up several books ago, as O'Malley reminds us.)

And, despite this, I actually don't mind the fight scenes being ridiculous and fantastic - because, at least in the earlier books, it works. But I would like for that ridiculousness to be somehow internally consistent, beholden to some set of self-defined limits, and contained. When it isn't contained, it threatens to turn the entire exercise into some snark-filled, self-reflexive, post-ironic joke.

Take, for instance, the narrator's increasingly explicit presence. Early in the book, Scott has a particularly awkward scene with Knives outside the Cameron House. When Knives and Scott kiss, we can tell for ourselves that it's awful and that they've made a mistake and feel terrible for it. Why the narrator has to tell us this, and tell us in as obnoxious a way as possible, I'm not sure. To undercut its emotional impact, certainly - because it's a painfully uncomfortable moment.

I'm wondering, actually, whether O'Malley's narrator is a sort of reaction to the author's earlier stuff (including Lost At Sea) after finding it, in retrospect, a little too emo, a little too precious. How else to understand his increasingly incessant need to assert ironic distance from the material, to undermine its emotional resonance and make fun of damn near everything? When the narrator appears in book 1, it's to cheer Scott on - to say 'Way to go' when Scott and Ramona kiss the first time; when he appears in book 6, it's to depress us and poke fun - to say that Scott and Knives' kiss was horrible "for everyone" and "that includes you". The problem, here, is that O'Malley isn't just poking fun at his characters - he's also poking fun at me for wanting to be invested in the characters and their feelings. And so it just feels mean-spirited.

(That really wasn't just one point, was it? It kinda veered into a point about self-reflexivity and irony. But there's a connection there, right? Ah, well.)

Complaint the third - Ramona

In my blog on the last book, I said that Ramona had clearly supplanted Scott as the central and most interesting character in the book - and had probably done so a long time ago, too. Ramona is mysterious and seductive where Scott is superficial and obvious. (This is not with the potential for problems, too, though - as Sara suggests on Geoff's blog, Ramona represents "[p]robably exactly how 20-something hetero men (and beyond?) feel about [women]. Complex, interesting/alluring/scary etc... but... vague." She's not really a real person, but more a projection of what a hot girl should be.)

So, clearly, this inequity had to be redressed. The obvious answer would be to elevate the hero, Scott, somehow - to have him grow, make him worthy of his dream-girl. That doesn't happen, though. Instead, O'Malley takes Ramona down a notch. When Ramona is asked, near the end of the book, where she's been the past four months, she says that she's been "dicking around" by watching The X-Files and playing on the internet. Nothing mysterious, no - she's been just as aimless as Scott, doing equally banal things instead of trying to fix her life. And we know that she's been dumbed-down to Scott's level because all the other characters sigh and sarcastically ask when the wedding will be. Here, it feels like the readers are being flipped off, again: "Oh, you guys! You thought that Ramona was all mysterious and deep, but she's not - she likes the internet and X-Files and dicking around and SHE IS JUST LIKE A DUDE."

The thing is, we didn't need Ramona to be reduced to a joke in order to understand that she's flawed. We already know that she's frightened of commitment, that she has a pathological need to drop her entire life when it grows too comfortable and start a new one elsewhere, and that she doesn't particularly like herself very much. This is the stuff of a tragic heroine, and the above reservations aside, Ramona is easily the deepest character the series has (though maybe this says more about the dearth of deep characters in the series...) - why squander that so needlessly?

And lastly

Despite these complaints, I actually have some hope for the movie. Because part of my problem is that Scott has something like 1300 pages within which to stagnate, and O'Malley had 6 years over which his dreamlike magic and precious optimism slowly turns into fantasy-overload and cynical irony. The shorter run-time of a film should make Scott more bearable, even if he similarly learns nothing, and the briefer turnaround of the movie project should at least bring some thematic and stylistic consistency, even if it is consistently absurd and cynical. But that's a worst-case scenario.

Sorry for ranting so long, and probably sounding so grumpy. Was it clear that I was disappointed? Because that's the short version of this review/critique/essay: I was disappointed.

World Cup rules and fitting the penalty to the infraction

2010-07-09T09:35:00.005-04:00

Unless you've been deliberately avoiding the World Cup, you've probably heard that Ghana was eliminated from the World Cup a week ago when they should have advanced to the semi-finals. With minutes left, the presumptive game-winning goal failed to count because Suarez, a Uruguayan player who is not the goalkeeper, jumped and batted it out of the air with his hands just before it crossed the goal-line.

Unlike in the NHL, where a non-goaltender's illegal stop of a near-certain goal results in the awarding of an automatic goal, FIFA awards a penalty kick - which Ghana missed. Suarez was tossed out of the game and earned an automatic suspension, but the move was a no-brainer. If he doesn't stop the ball, his team is ejected from the tournament - sportsmanship aside, (and it seems like there's very little value placed in sportsmanship during the World Cup) there was no reason that he shouldn't have had it in his mind to stop the ball by any means necessary.

Over at The Book blog, which is largely a baseball analysis blog but it occasionally covers other sports too, a commenter named Greg Rybarczyk wrote that,

the game has rules, and with respect to those rules, there are violations, and for those violations there are prescribed consequences/penalties/sanctions. [...] If one is outraged at the fact that the Uruguayan player used his hands to stop a goal (which is agianst the rules, and has a prescribed consequence), where is the outrage when a player intentionally kicks the ball out of bounds (which is also against the rules, and also has a prescribed consequence)?

I wrote in response to Greg, and wanted to write here, too, that Greg is wrong because he doesn't account for the degree of the infraction - is it likely to directly affect the score/result? - and whether the penalty to the guilty player/team is of a similar degree - if it is likely to affect the score, does the penalty/reward adequately redress that affect?

Giving possession of the ball to the opposing team when it’s kicked out of bounds in soccer seems like a totally appropriate response - the team awarded the throw, by virtue of gaining possession, has almost certainly improved their chances of scoring. A quick look at the World Cup stats tells me that teams typically turn the ball over about 150 times per game - and if they're averaging about 1.5 goals per game, that means they only score on about 1% of their possessions - so we're talking about an improvement in scoring likelihood, in most cases, that's under 1%. Conversely, the team that committed the infraction has taken a small penalty - not a significant one, given how easily and often the ball is turned-over in soccer, (and even only 70% of throw-ins are successfully corralled by the team throwing the ball in) but it wasn't a significant infraction in the first place.

But the 'penalty' against Suarez, and the kick awarded to Ghana, doesn't make sense when we apply the exact same logic. While the illegal stop was made against a ball that was 100% likely to score, the 'penalty' given to Paraguay was a penalty kick for Ghana that’s only about 80% likely to score. That's a huge difference - clearly, since it led to Ghana's eventual elimination - and should be an obvious indication that the penalty is not appropriate to the infraction. To say that Ghana was 'awarded' a penalty kick or that Paraguay was 'penalized' is euphemistic, at best - in taking a 20% hit to their chance of scoring, Ghana was effectively penalized for Paraguay's cheat. That's just twisted.

Quick update: FIFA has apparently said that they won't review this rule, which is asinine. But they will review goal-line technology of the sort that would have awarded a goal to England when they were eliminated by Germany. One has to wonder whether the rule would be reviewed if Ghana and England were each in the other's position, and England had lost certain victory due to a handball...

Gandhi and 'Terrorism and Espionage'

2010-07-08T10:12:00.004-04:00

I wrote just a short while ago about how media coverage in the lead-up to the G20 had likened protesters to animals, non-Torontonians, and, just generally, the Other. I didn't write about it on my blog, but I also noted on Facebook that CTV news used the descriptor "known activist" in a clearly pejorative way, as if it meant the same thing as "terrorist".

But this isn't exactly new or unique and news media is just reflecting wider-held attitudes. Case in point: my friend Sue was at a bookstore - Chapters, at Richmond and John in Toronto - and was looking at their 'Terrorism and Espionage' section. She found Che there, which is unsurprising given his violent opposition to American-backed dictatorships - he fits, and is maybe even a model for, Western images of what a terrorist looks and acts like.

A bit more surprising was Frantz Fanon, who is implicated, I guess, because of his writing on decolonization and his association with the revolution in Algeria. (But Fanon is still primarily a theorist, a thinker and writer - not a revolutionary leader or guerilla-figher like Che. One wonders why Marx doesn't somehow make it into this section, too.) Clearly, though, there's evidence here of a major slippage between a particular sort of revolutionary and terrorism. And to the extent that a difference exists at all, then these guys end up in this section because they're not white and their interests are opposed to those of capitalism.

Because, certainly, the grounds for making it into this section had nothing to do with the advocacy and/or exercise of violence - how else to explain why and how Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi were included in the 'Terrorism and Espionage' section? Seriously. Are there any more famous activists than these two? And they're catalogued under the heading of 'terrorism'? And do we need any further evidence that activism - especially non-white activists - and terrorism are being effectively collapsed into a single entity?

It's no wonder that the casual public has so little sympathy for activists who take their cause to the streets, and for the hundreds of activists who were beat up and jailed by police during G20, only to be released without charge. They were terrorists, after all, weren't they?

A break from politicized posts...

2010-06-24T20:13:00.004-04:00

We've lived just on the edge of Toronto's Greektown for almost a year now, and I only just noticed something strange about the strip-mall at the end of the street.

Conventionally speaking, the strip-mall runs north-south. But since it's on the west side of the street, the strip-mall 'reads' from south-to-north. And so the combination of the restaurant on the far left and the one of the far right is suspiciously unlikely and geographically appropriate.

The extreme left/south:

...and the extreme right/north:

What California or Florida have to do with places that serve mostly Greek food, though? I have no idea.

Constructing 'the protesters'

2010-06-23T09:57:00.005-04:00

"protesters...are beginning to flood the downtown core" (Toronto Star)
"protesters descend on the city" (CTV)
"Feeding the protesters" (Toronto Star)

I was talking to my students last week about how the G20 protesters are figured as people on the fringe, non-Torontonians, and, implicitly, non-Canadian. The first two quotes make the non-Torontonian and non-Canadian claims, I think. The protesters, who we know to be a menacing collective because the media's occasionally using the definite article ('the'), are not from 'here' because they are flooding or descending from some shadowy place of anarchy to transform the ostensibly safe-haven of Toronto into a zone of danger. (Euphemistically referred to as the 'security zone', of course, because Toronto cops surely aren't prone to violence, and dropping thousands of cops into an urban setting to quell protest has always had a calming effect. Clearly.)

The bit about feeding them also reinforces the sense that these people live dangerously on the margins. 'Feeding the protesters' not only frames a benevolent act of community as somehow brutish - it immediately recalls 'feed the animals', as in 'do not...' - but reminds us of the poverty (and all the things that poverty connotes - laziness, criminality, etc.) that characterizes many of the people who are protesting.

"Dress like a militant protester, you run the risk of being tear gassed" (Toronto Star)
"What the demonstrators are saying" vs. "What the public is saying" (Globe and Mail)

These distinctions also reinforce the split between protesters and the mainstream media's implied audience - non-protesters who are voyeurs and might have a perverse interest in the protesters, but can't possibly identify with them. The first article playfully infantilizes the protesters by reducing them to fashionistas ("militant and fabulous") who can be imitated as if they were Halloween costumes, while the second is even less subtle in drawing a clear distinction between the law-abiding citizen-readers and the fringe.

Because, clearly, one cannot oppose any aspect of the G20 Summit while also being a law-abiding citizen who reads the Globe and Mail or watches the CTV news.

On the BP oil spill

2010-06-21T16:20:00.004-04:00

"Gulf disaster needs divine intervention as man's efforts have been futile. Gulf lawmakers designate today Day of Prayer for solution/miracle."
-Sarah Palin, on Twitter

"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.

Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"
-Epicurus

Marketing Canada: fake lakes and 'pristine natural beauty'

2010-06-20T15:18:00.010-04:00

1. In the lead-up to the G8/20 summit at the end of the week, most of the Canadian media is focusing on a $2 million space for foreign journalists, where the centerpiece is a fake lake and beach so that the journalists who can't attend the G8 meetings can still 'experience' some approximation of their natural setting.

Needless to say, most people who aren't members of the ruling Conservative party aren't impressed. From The Globe and Mail:

[NDP leader Jack] Layton asked how the Prime Minister can justify the costs. [...] "We’ve got a government here that has to create an artificial lake when Canada has more lakes than just about any other country in the world.”

2. The Conservatives are defending it as a marketing ploy, though it's not clear what they're selling - is Canada a source of plentiful artificial lakes? And do the journalists covering G8/20 even care about Canada's lakes, real or not? From the CBC:

"The Experience Canada space will host over 3,000 media and other guests, and will serve to highlight Canada's pristine natural beauty, as well as promote leading Canadian businesses and industries," according to a statement issued by the Prime Minister's Office.

"In fact, it's a $2-million marketing project," [Prime Minister Stephen] Harper said, "We must not miss this opportunity."

3. But the real goal is probably to use the fake lake as a sort of distraction object. Because if you're trying to market Canada, you certainly don't want foreign media to be looking at the streets of Toronto, where the G20 is actually being held. A lot of concrete barriers and chain-link fences, sure, but not much "pristine natural beauty" here:

Unless, of course, the government is trying to sell Toronto as a police-state-themed amusement park.

Does FIFA have any credibility at all?

2010-06-19T21:18:00.005-04:00

1.

From the Toronto Star: 'FIFA is preparing to monitor the World Cup’s most vulnerable matches for match-fixing threats. [...] FIFA’s monitoring of legal and illegal betting markets suggests the World Cup has been “clean and clear” so far, with no suspicious wagering patterns identified.'

2.

From Tom Tango on his The Book blog: 'This is FIFA’s recap of the USA Slovenia 2:2 game. You will notice the controversial missing 5th goal is not there. If you want to see the goal, you need to see it on Youtube. And the message board at FIFA is totally devoid of discussions of the non-goal goal.'

Me: A lot of people have also pointed out that the offside wasn't called by the linesman, who typically makes this call, but only by the referee. And this is a problem because while the linesman is positioned so as to have a nearly perfect line of sight, this was the ref's perspective:

If he could see evidence of any foul, one would have to wonder why he didn't appear to notice all of the Slovenian defenders who were restraining the Americans - which were very easily seen from where he was standing. (And there were more of them than are visible in this picture.)

3.

It's possible that the referee is just terrible at his job and made a mistake. It's also possible that there's something shifty going on. And it's possible that FIFA is covering it up - mistake or not - and cares more about not looking bad than they do about entertaining the possibility the ref made the wrong call. Despite the claims they've made regarding match-fixing and how much they want to stop it - which, after all, have to do with betting patterns, right? Regardless, it all looks bad.

A letter to the Toronto Star

2010-06-09T19:46:00.001-04:00

Re: New copyright law would cut artists’ earnings (June 9)

I'm not really sure where Sophie Milman sourced her legal advice, but she's wrong when she writes that "just as with vinyl-to-cassette prior to 1997, ripping songs to a DAR is actually against the law". It's generally agreed that ripping music from a CD to your computer constitutes 'personal use' under the law. [Exclusive to the blog!: Nor is it technically illegal to file-share in Canada, as courts have shown unwillingness to find defendants guilty and the police lack the resources or desire to pursue music pirates, especially those who do so for personal use.] It may not be explicitly legal - neither, for that matter, is abortion - but it's certainly not illegal. If Ms Milman was looking to make a legal argument, she probably should have made sure that she knew the law, first.

I suppose that it isn't surprising that the music industry would play the levy card again, but the old suggestion that we be charged repeatedly for the exact same recording is indicative of the lack of creativity that got the recording industry into this mess in the first place. And just as the industry tried (hopelessly, and with still dubious legal grounds) to shut down file-sharing rather than find ways to profit from it, their efforts to police personal use is likely to only further alienate their customers. If only they spent as much time and resources in making these new formats into a unique and value-added experience worthy of our money...

MIA and ethics in interviewing

2010-06-03T11:15:00.004-04:00

Really quick bit on the MIA and Lynn Hirschberg interview controversy that's been smoldering for a week or so (in short: Hirschberg portrays MIA as a hypocrite who styles herself as a revolutionary but lives in a mansion with her rich husband). From the New York Observer:

In the published piece, M.I.A. is described as "eating a truffle-flavored French fry" as she mused about what type of artist she is. According to the tape, it was Ms. Hirschberg who introduced the concept of fry-ordering.

"They have, like, truffle, they have like three different kinds, it's very elaborate," Ms. Hirschberg says on the tape, explaining the menu to M.I.A. at the Beverly Hills Wilshire Hotel. M.I.A. said that, yes, she would like a starter. "Can we order the French fries that come on the bar menu, the basket?" Ms. Hirschberg instructs the waiter.

This only came out because MIA was more canny than Hirschberg expected - she secretly taped the interview, probably because she knew Hirschberg has a reputation for doing seemingly innocuous interviews that turn into scathing character-assassinations.

Hirschberg is either lying or being disingenuous when she says that "I don't think the French fries illustrate that much about her character", because it's clearly meant to illustrate something. I would call it Dickensian in its upper-class-is-morally-defunct symbolism, except that I think Hirschberg's unsubtlety would make even Dickens blush. (Hilariously, Hirschberg criticized MIA's immediate response to her profile - MIA posted Hirschberg's phone number on Twitter - as "unethical".)

As a brief aside: The Observer also notes that we might be at a point where journalism needs to tighten its standards, since every interviewee now has the potential to publicly call them on their bullshit. And that might be the most interesting development to follow.

Categorizing Lost's 'mysteries'

2010-05-27T14:32:00.009-04:00

This is a cute post from BuzzFeed mocking people who are frustrated that Lost didn't answer many of its questions. It has a point, of sorts - not all mysteries are worth solving, nor are all answers satisfying - but I think that it's worthwhile to separate out the legitimately frustrating questions from those that either don't require a solution or would simply be better off without one.

So here they are - split into 3 larger groups and 6 smaller categories, 2 categories of which are within each group:

GROUP ONE: Questions that don't need to be answered, and may not have answers anyway

1) Questions that shouldn't be answered because we might as well ask why bad things happen to good people:
* Where did The Island come from? What is The Light? Who created it?
* Where did the Island Guardian powers - like hiding the island or granting Richard immortality - come from? And why, if these powers are so wide-ranging, are they also limited - why couldn't Jacob raise the dead? And, for that matter, why and how was Man in Black able to resurrect Sayid when Jacob couldn't?
* Why is Desmond special?
* Why does the Island heal some things - like Rose's cancer and Locke's spine - and not others - like Ben's cancer?
* How does the donkey wheel work to move the island?
* Why do the sonic fences work against Smokey? How was the ash able to keep him at bay?

2) Questions that shouldn't be answered because it really doesn't matter, does it?:
* Did the bomb go off?
* Was it really Desmond's delay in entering the numbers that caused the plane to crash?
* Was the sideways-universe created by The Incident or the bomb?
* What's the origin of the Ben/Charles feud?
* Was Sayid really turned evil, or, as Hurley said, did he simply become what people expected of him?
* Did the psychic know that Claire had to get on the plane? How?

GROUP TWO: Questions that could use answers, and might have answers, but don't require them

3) Questions that don't need to be answered because the answer seems to already be implied:
* Why can't babies be born on the island, and why was there no such problem in the 70s?
* Was Christian always Christian? Was Smokey sometimes impersonating him? Was he always impersonating him?
* Why wasn't Sun transported back in time?
* Why did Juliet's husband die after she wished it?
* What's the deal with the four-toed, Egyptian statue?
* Was the Dharma Initiative a force of good or bad?

4) Questions that probably don't have a good answer, but whose answers probably aren't important, would be contradictory or needlessly confusing, or simply wouldn't be very illuminating:
* Who was shooting at Sawyer and company's boat when they were being chased across the water during all the time-flashes?
* How was Juliet's sister's cancer cured if Ben's cancer couldn't be?
* Was there really a box that granted wishes? And what is it, really?
* What is the Temple, where do its occupants sit in the Others' hierarchy, and what sort of magical powers does Dogen have that could repel Smokey?
* Why does Sayid, who killed dozens of people as a torturer and then as Ben's lackey, get to go into the Light when Michael, who killed two people - one out of desperation and one accidentally, and only to save his son - but also seemingly redeemed himself, get stuck on the Island?

GROUP THREE: Questions that should be answered (even if they can't be answered)

5) Questions that can't possibly have a good answer, and are probably just evidence of bad planning/writing:
* Why would Chang - or whoever else built The Swan - include Egyptian hieroglyphics in the timer, which are displayed only after it reaches zero?
* If Smokey can only appear as dead people, how did he appear to Locke and Shannon as Walt?
* Why was Richard surprised that Ben could see him when they first met? And why was Harper, who was bringing orders from Ben, able to sneak up on Juliet and disappear just as quickly? Were we meant to understand that the Others could become invisible or travel magically?
* Who was asking Locke to 'help me' in the cabin? And why wasn't he asking Ben, who admitted that no one - Jacob, or someone trying to pass himself off as Jacob - ever spoke to him?

6) Questions that have been dangling for so long or were made to seem so important that we deserved an answer, dammit!:
* Why did small animals die when Walt got angry, and what was so wrong with him that even The Others wanted to get rid of him?
* And relatedly - why are the kids so important? Why do we want to kidnap Walt and Aaron? Why did we kidnap those other children? (It can't just be that they can't procreate on the island, right? And it's not like they knew about Candidates at that point...)
* What's the deal with Eloise and her seeming omniscience, in both the living-day present and in the afterlife?
* What's the deal with the Hanso family, who were the financiers behind both The Black Rock and Dharma and were featured prominently in the Lost Alternate Reality Game?
* What's the Man in Black's name? And if he doesn't have one, why? (Because deliberately not mentioning it seemed significant, at first, and just annoying, later.)
* Do The Numbers refer to the Valenzetti Equation or the final six Candidates? Or both? And how are they related? Is it mere coincidence (?!) or fate that the final six Candidates are assigned the same numbers that appear in the Valenzetti Equation? And if it's the latter, how does that compromise Jacob's whole 'i want you to have a choice' speech, or diminish the centuries-long process of finding a suitable replacement and watching most of the Candidates die in the process?

There are probably other categories that we could invent, and some people can probably take issue with where I've slotted particular questions. Let me know.

Reflections on the Lost finale

2010-05-24T10:31:00.004-04:00

It's been less than 12 hours since the show ended, so these will be a bit half-baked. I'll keep it to three general thoughts:

1) So the flashsideways is technically taking place after the mainstream timeline, insofar as it's an epilogue set in some limbo- or purgatory-like afterlife that the characters are sharing. I didn't really see that one coming. I'm wondering whether there's a bit of a joke hidden in there, since 'everyone is dead' was one of the theories first offered to explain the mysteries of the island. But the tone of the epilogue would seem to suggest that this isn't the case. (So my complaint that I had no idea what the stakes were ends up a bit off-the-mark, since there really were no stakes.) And it provided the happy ending that would have only been bittersweet otherwise. We know that Kate leaves, Jack dies, and Hurley takes Jack's place - and we don't know what happens to them afterward - but we're told that it basically doesn't matter.

2) Shockingly, and aside from the reveal of the flashsideways-as-afterlife, there were no twists in the finale. Everything we learned about the nature of the island, about the Man in Black and Jacob, turned out to be absolutely true and we really didn't learn anything new about the island. It was straightforward, epic-drama - the world would end if Locke escaped and if Jack couldn't restore the light. And I thought it was pretty effective stuff, too.

3) So whether the show was 'good' or not hinges, I think, on whether you buy the overtly religious ending. That the show moved in this direction wasn't a surprised - the science/reason v. fate/faith opposition that so strongly characterized the first couple seasons was indisputably won by religion/faith side this season, and was probably a foregone conclusion as soon as Jack started to believe he was fated to return there. (Which is to say that, unlike in Battlestar Galactica, it didn't come out of left field.) But the strength with which the epilogue pushed a very Christian - that multi-faith stained glass window aside - resolution to the series was a bit startling. (At least they had the sense to make a joke about it, when Kate comments on the ridiculousness of Christian Shepherd's name.)

I found myself liking how heartwarming the epilogue was, but after this much time I'm starting to feel a bit cheated. I was moved in the moment, but I think that the credit for that goes to the actors and my own substantial investment in the show - I could ignore or miss the larger spiritual politics because I found it so damned pleasant. (This kind of sleight-of-hand is the same complaint I had of the Sun and Jin death scene, in a way - a touching resolution to their story that is at once undermined by the realization that they're abandoning their daughter, and probably abandoning her to Sun's father. Once the emotion of the moment wears off, you realize that they're actually pretty selfish.) I don't know whether there was a way to offer viewers that happy ending without going in the direction of religion, but, as-is, it feels incongruent with the first five seasons of the show.

But the ending on the island, with Jack dying in the field where he first landed, Hurley and Ben panicked about what happens next, and Kate leaving someone behind, again? That seemed more apropos, more like the Lost that offers half answers and an unexpected new status quo. Maybe the pressure to offer an unequivocal ending was too much. Maybe Cuse and Lindelof thought the flashsideways was more subtle than it turned out to be. Maybe the show was so hopeless at points that we needed the finale to remind us that hope and love exist and that the characters really care for one another And maybe the whole afterlife thing was the only way to pull that off. I feel some satisfaction from the characters' happy ending and I'm simultaneously numbed by the particularly Christian-styling of the message. I'm not sure what else I can add.

Quick update on Lost and the Theory of Everything (now at version 3.0)

2010-05-13T15:26:00.004-04:00

Once again, I've re-revised my position on how the flashsideways relate to the main Lost U: I'm thinking, again, that the flashsideways follow, narrative-wise, after the resolution of the main story.

The short explanation: If Jacob's Mother was telling the truth when she said that it's bad for humans to capture/harness The Light - and it seems reasonable to suspect that this much, at least, is true - then it's probably also bad that Mother (and Jacob and Smokey) should have it, too. (In brief: Even if they're well-intentioned, there's no reason to think that they're somehow the only people in existence who can't be allowed to have it - that no one else should be allowed to find it or use it because bad things will happen, but these people are an exception. And given all their magical powers, they definitely have it.)

And this is why Jack is a particularly good target to be convinced to accept the mantle - he still wants to fix things, and replacing Jacob essentially makes him the most important fixer in the world. Like Jacob in this past episode, his benevolent intentions make him the ideal, and entirely self-deceiving, candidate.

Why self-deceiving? Because I suspect that The Light should be allowed to leave the island - that the ostensible source of what's good and life-giving probably shouldn't be confined to a cave on an island. So when Smokey-as-Locke finally escapes, it'll be like Pandora's Box, only in reverse, and this is why, for example, the universally bad parents of the main Lost universe will become good parents in the sideways universe, and so on.

And, having written this, I'm at least 95% sure that I'll be proven totally wrong.

Robinson Cano, baseball, and racism

2010-05-13T14:36:00.003-04:00

It's been a rather recent development in baseball blogging to note the contrary ways that white and non-white players are generally talked about. I'm actually pretty surprised that sports bloggers would pick up on this, especially since it's relatively subtle stuff. (Or, at least, much more subtle than what typically passes for 'racism' in mainstream journalism.)

Take this bit by ESPN's Jerry Crasnick, in describing the New York Yankees' second baseman, the Dominican-born Robinson Cano:

"[Cano] learned an even more enduring lesson in September 2008, when [manager Joe] Girardi benched him for lollygagging after a ball in short right field against Tampa Bay. Cano, seven months removed from signing a $30 million contract extension, needed someone new to prod him after third-base coach Larry Bowa left the Yankees to join Torre in Los Angeles."

What exactly is Crasnick adding to the story with that second sentence? Why does a report on Cano's benching require that we be told Cano's new financial situation unless we're meant to understanding that getting rich has made him lazy and complacent? And what's his rationale for the claim that Cano requires someone else to keep him focused, as if an elite athlete needs this kind of babysitting?

Moshe Mandel at the baseball blog TYU notes how the subtly racialized characterizations of Cano are especially apparent when he's compared to his white counterpart on the Boston Red Sox, Dustin Pedroia:

The Bronx incumbent is smooth, super-cool and has a hitting DNA to die for. But Pedroia plays harder and has a greater emotional investment in the day-to-day outcome of his team. In other words, he cares more than Cano. From Fox Sports' Bob Klapisch:

"The Bronx incumbent [Cano] is smooth, super-cool and has a hitting DNA to die for. But Pedroia plays harder and has a greater emotional investment in the day-to-day outcome of his team. In other words, he cares more than Cano."

How do we know that Pedroia cares more? That Cano is "super-cool"? That Pedroia "plays harder"? Or that Cano has "hitting DNA"? Who knows? But what we do know is that these associations of success with hard-work and intelligence (Pedroia) or else biology and natural talent (Cano), and the privileging of the deliberateness and accomplishment involved in achieving the former - that is, the natural talent can backslide or grow complacent because he hasn't earned it, whereas the learned talent knows failure and is less likely to take success for granted - are undoubtedly racialized assumptions. (Obviously, I'm thinking about this because of my Lady Gaga post from a couple days ago.)

And this is especially true given that these assumptions rely on supposed 'information' about the players that would be virtually impossible to locate or verify - have the writers run Cano's blood through tests to quantify his ability, or are their assumptions about Pedroia based on the way that he gets down on hands and knees with a toothbrush to clean the kitchen floor? (Though I suppose that being able to 'evaluate' or 'assess' these players is what supposedly makes these writers experts in their fields. Supposedly.)

Mandel also supplies this quote from a baseball talent evaluator, assessing which of two young pitchers who've recently been signed to big contracts - the white Justin Verlander and the Hispanic Felix Hernandez - is a safer bet:

“Now we’ll see what the contracts do to both guys. It won’t faze Verlander, but I guess it’s possible Felix could get a little complacent. His makeup doesn’t suggest it, but you never know."

This quote requires a little less explanation, I think - if his 'makeup' doesn't suggest it, then what does? And why does the white guy get a free pass?

Baseball commentators on TV, I should add, are routinely terrible. (This is why the website FireJoeMorgan was created: because the former players who dominate the jobs, in particular, have a surprisingly poor understanding of how the game works - success rates, probabilities, likelihoods, percentages - outside being able to offer glimpses into player psychology.) That they should be terrible at their job and racist? Ugh.

Lost: stumbling to a conclusion

2010-05-12T16:14:00.005-04:00

So I didn't like the last episode of Lost - "Across the Sea", the one that that was purportedly going to fill us in on where Jacob and the Man in Black came from. Two of my friends, though, liked it well enough, and supplied the following comments:

Alex "finds it incredibly amusing that Lost viewers get disappointed when 'nothing was made clear,' as if that was something that has *ever* happened. From where do they derive this expectation of clarity?"
Geoff writes that "It would not be Lost without the messy. If you have not come to enjoy the messiness, I am surprised you still watch the show."

These are fine points, but I don't think that either really addresses my problem with the episode. And simply, it was this - if this is the big mythology-information-dump leading up to the finale, it should have left me certain that I know what the stakes of the final showdown between Jack's group and the Man in Black are. And it didn't.

Sure, it told me that Jack and MiB are brothers, that the mysterious power source at the center of the island is a light, that MiB simply wants to leave for the sake of leaving... but these were hardly the burning questions that I wanted answered. What I felt that I needed to know was what would happen if MiB were to leave, and why he needed to be stopped. (If, in fact, that needed to happen.) And not only is the 'why' not clear to me, but MiB is made so sympathetic - and Jacob's mission is made so doubtful due to the unreliability of the character whose job he has taken - that I feel less certain that MiB has to be stopped at all.

I should add that Geoff uses gnosticism to provide a plausible answer to my most burning questions. This is what he writes:

the energy at the center of the island is the light of creation, or something like that. The Smoke is the opposite number, split off when the light was disturbed by someone corrupted by men — this is pure Gnostic mythology. Somehow the smoke is or has the light now and if it leaves the island everything goes out everywhere.

Okay, I can buy that. But even if Geoff is right, that particular thought never occurred to me until I read Geoff's review. I didn't even notice that the light went out in the cave, nor did I think, when it was first pointed out to me in an article elsewhere, that a) this would necessarily mean that MiB now has/is the light, and b) the world should end if he leaves with it. If this is true, it actually becomes the entire point of the show. And if I need someone's blog or a thorough understanding of gnosticism to point out something so fundamental to my understanding of the show, then it hasn't been made clear enough.*

* [What's especially annoying about this is that the connection made between 'Adam and Eve' from season one and the bodies of Mother and Brother was drawn in the most hamfisted and patronizing way - with horribly incorporated cut-scenes. Why be so painfully clear about such a minor detail, when you so badly explain something so much more important with the creation of the smoke monster and disappearance of the light?]

The transgressive(?) Lady Gaga

2010-05-11T14:36:00.005-04:00

I've been meaning to write about Lady Gaga for weeks. Unfortunately, what I wanted to write grew to this mammoth range of topics that became too daunting to even start. (This is a common problem for me.) So I'm going to try to pick out one specific element.

So for this blog, anyway, it's the recent hubbub over Gaga's lack of self-consciousness regarding her race and the role that race plays in the kind of appropriation that is central to her various art practices.

So why does Gaga get all the love? How much of it is because, as a small young blonde woman she appears to be transgressive in a way that artists like M.I.A. or even Trina cannot be transgressive, because to begin with they are already seen as non-normative, simply because they aren’t white?

This is probably an apt point. By virtue of her whiteness, Gaga is not 'naturally' transgressive - she has to work at it, has to adorn her body and performance with the markings of transgression, and so she gets extra credit for having had to make deliberate, intelligent, and artistic decisions that require her to extend beyond her own bubble of normativity. M.I.A., on the other hand, is already 'naturally' an Other - born into the body of an Other, with links to an Otherized culture, her Britishness notwithstanding - and so we give her less credit for having achieved something, since she presumably had something more transgressive to begin with. M.I.A.'s 9-month pregnant body on the Grammys a couple years back, versus Gaga's varied prosthetics on this year's Grammys, draws this implicit difference out perfectly - the former has an excess of body and nature, the latter an excess of intellect and artifice.

Which is all well and good - and wholly accurate, in isolation - but ignores Gaga's indebtedness to (mostly) white performers like Madonna, Bjork, Abba, Christina Aguilera, and even Britney Spears. My sense is that Gaga is taking a race-blind approach and stealing and mixing from every/any source available. And while race-blind appropriation is definitely problematic, we need to account for these white sources, too, especially when they're arguably more central to Gaga's art.

Clearly Gaga is not oblivious to her own “normativity”; she actually uses it as a weapon, drawing in the viewer with the expectation that she will be blonde and submissive, and then upsetting those expectations by doing intentionally weird, gross things. But while she’s playing with her whiteness, she (& her critic fans) seem somewhat oblivious to her white privilege. And the attendant attention she gets, while women of colour’s contributions to redefining music and gender performance are marginalised.

I'm not quite on-board with this one. The authors recognize Gaga's reflexivity and self-awareness to her normativity, but castigate her for failing to acknowledge that it's her privilege that allows her to subvert normativity in the way that she does. Okay, I'm with them on that - subversion that's undertaken by people who can still pass as normal, as opposed to people whose bodies preclude the possibility that they can be considered normal and so become subversive almost by default, is a particularly safe kind of subversion, and we should account for it. But there's an element of blame, here, too, where Gaga is being faulted for contributing to the marginalization of women of colour in the same field. I have to wonder what else Gaga could do - if she can't help but embody white privilege even as she attempts to subvert or ironize it, what options are left to her?

M.I.A.’s comments seem particularly spot on: while the spectacle of Gaga is dazzling, ironically as a singer, her music is the least progressive thing about her. Especially when you contrast it with M.I.A’s bonkers rhymes and bold call-outs to volatile political conflicts.

Victoria was annoyed particularly by this last section of the blog post, and I feel the same way. There's an assumption, here, that Gaga's pop-proclivities should invalidate the rest of her body of work - that her work in fashion, for instance, is somehow devalued or delegitimated because Gaga writes chart-toppers instead of inscrutable music with politicized lyrics. And that's really not fair, for at least two reasons: for one, we probably wouldn't even be discussing Gaga if her audience was the same (demographically and with respect to size) as M.I.A.'s because her fame and ubiquity are key to her appeal, and two, it just isn't reasonable to expect that every artist is transgressive or obtuse in every aspect of their artistic practice. And Gaga is certainly more obtuse than any other pop-queen, so that's worth something, isn't it?

One of the reasons that Bon Jovi drives me nuts

2010-04-23T10:51:00.006-04:00

Bon Jovi has this annoying habit (and it's not limited to them, sure, but their examples seem particularly egregious) of just recycling their old songs. I realize that plagiarism, while still technically occurring here, is usually ignored when you're plagiarizing yourself, but geez...

This first example is the subtler of the two, and it relates to the chorus - they have incredibly similar intro lines where the title is shouted over three beats, and the fade-out back into the chorus is structurally similar, too, and again repeats the song title. The chorus on the whole is rather similar, (I lack the vocabulary to describe it - I have absolutely no training in music) though I suspect that has to do with both being so utterly conventional rather than one being derived from the other. (And I'm sure I could find two if I actually listened to their music. I picked up on these only because Bon Jovi is ubiquitous.) Bizarrely, they're on the same album, too - wouldn't it be better to just cut one of them, rather than repeat yourself?

"It's My Life"

"One Wild Night"

This pair is far worse, I think. "We Weren't Born to Follow", which was released just last year, sounds - on the whole, but especially during the chorus - like a slightly slower version of "Born to be Your Man", which predates it by more than 20 years. Seriously, just listen to the chorus of each (about 50 seconds into WWBtF, and 90 seconds into BtbMB) - they are the exact same song, with virtually the same melody and structure. The newer one is just a bit slower, and so sounds a bit deeper - and I suspect that if you slowed the older song down, they would match almost perfectly.

"We Weren't Born to Follow"

"Born to be My Baby"

Sure, John's voice has a pretty limited range, but are they really so creatively defunct that they need to shamelessly recycle songs?

Adventures in TAing, case 7 (in a ? case series):

2010-04-20T23:48:00.002-04:00

The best question I have ever been asked during a final exam:

"I don't know if you can tell me, but I forget which it is: Joan of Arc or Noah of Ark?"

What makes this question even better? Neither Joan nor Noah (of Ark?) appeared in any course reading or lecture.

Lost's theory of everything, revisited

2010-04-06T21:08:00.004-04:00

So following this week's episode of Lost, it would seem that I was not only wrong, but that the relationship between the regular Lost universe and the so-called flashsideways universe is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what I had guessed after the season premiere. Oops.

That is, it looks like the alternate reality in which the Losties never went to the island takes place, in our story, before the ongoing saga on the island. And that Desmond, having gained a vision of the reality that was erased when Juliet set the bomb off, is going to convince them that the universe is wrong and they need to (somehow) reestablish the previous one. So, presumably, at the end of the series they'll choose to go back, ending up - diegetically, if not temporally - back where we began the season in the main universe, with our heroes in the crater, not realizing that they had succeeded, only to undo what they had already gone and done. We might even learn that the Man in Black was unleashed in this alternate reality, that he's given everyone what they (thought) they wanted - Hurley is lucky, Desmond has Widmore's respect, Jack is the father he wanted his father to be - and that they'll have to reject it in order to save the universe.

So here's my proposed order for how things unfold:
1) Juliet hits bomb and sets it off in 1977.
2) Island implodes/explodes, but does so with enough time for Chang and Widmore, at the very least, to escape.
3) MiB is freed.
3) The Losties get what they want from MiB in the ensuing years. This is an important difference from my earlier supposition, which was that they get a happy ending. Jack gets to be a good dad, and this is happy; Desmond is Widmore's right hand man and has his approval, which is a bit less obviously happy because he doesn't have Penny; but it also looks like people who are carrying a lot of guilt - Sayid, Kate, Sawyer - are being allowed to punish themselves, which is decidedly not good.
4) Desmond will convince the Losties that what they want isn't as important as what needs to be done. They'll restore the previous timeline, somehow.
5) Everyone wakes back up where they were in 2007, when the season premiere began with Jack and company in the crater.

So that ties things up. I'm not sure that I like it - that there needed to be an alternate reality where they never went to the island, especially when it feels like the wind-up might be unsatisfactory in the mainstream universe - but at least it hints at the ultimate meaning of alternate reality. And it made this other universe appear to have a purpose, which it had been lacking for a few episodes.

Chaos and 'success' at the Olympics

2010-02-18T09:36:00.002-05:00

From the Guardian:

It is hard to believe anything will surpass the organisational chaos and naked commercial greed of the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta or the financial disaster of the 1976 Games, which bankrupted Montreal, yet with every passing day the sense of drift and nervousness about the Vancouver Games grows ever more noticeable.

There are plenty of good reasons to hate on the Olympic Games, and this one in particular - though I'd put the destruction of 1800 units of affordable housing and an accompanying process of gentrification which has made Vancouver the most expensive city in the world to live in right at the top, instead of the 'chaotic... transportation system' - but it's amazing to me that everyone is taking the spit out of Vancouver after the relatively free pass that Beijing was given.

Remember the Beijing Olympics. Y'know, the one that featured city with such unsafe air that they pulled cars from the roads in the weeks leading up to it, that faked the opening ceremonies several times and in several different ways, that destroyed the housing of tens of thousands of people to build their venues and 'relocated' them outside the city to live in places and with people they didn't know and couldn't choose, that said they would allow protesters to apply to protest but heavily discouraged applying and then disallowed every application that was made, and which built a $450 million stadium that's been used for only one (!) sporting event since the close of the 2008 Olympics and so is going to be turned into a shopping mall (!).

And we're meant to sincerely believe that Vancouver's Olympics might be worse than that? Wikipedia tells me that the cost of 2010 games is $1.6 billion for operations and $6 billion when including all infrastructure costs. And the city is expected to lose something in the neighborhood (or at least this is what I was hearing a couple weeks ago, before they started canceling events and flying extra extra snow in) of $150 million. The Beijing Olympics, on the other hand, were very roughly estimated to cost $15 billion for operations and $40 billion in total. (Though I've heard $65 billion, elsewhere.) There's no way they avoided losing billions - or tens of billions - of dollars.

But, again, according to Wikipedia, the 2008 games were a "logistical success". That's reassuring.

Quick comments on the Opening Ceremony of the Winter Olympics

2010-02-13T10:22:00.004-05:00

The opening show devoted huge amounts of attention to the First Nations traditions of the west coast. I've read a couple of complaints about this focus, (and I commented on early complaints about the branding of the Vancouver Olympics in general) but they largely - the latter link more than the former - miss the mark. It's telling that there was no real attention paid to Aboriginal people in their particularity: they spoke and danced as a mostly undifferentiated collective, while the spotlight and starring roles fell exclusively on/to the white celebrities. I don't know whether to describe the role of the Aboriginal people in this show as a fetish or a reflection of white guilt. Maybe it's both.
At one point in the show, while representatives from all the participating First Nations, Metis, and Inuit communities danced in the center of the stadium in some orgasmic fantasy of exoticized pre-historical (that is, pre-European) peace and love - this part was definitely in the 'fetish' category - I snarkily asked Victoria when the white guys were going to show up with guns. And then, with no intended irony, a bunch of mostly white people in entirely white outfits encircled them and stood, watching. It turned out that they were security, providing a barrier between the athletes, who were about to parade in, and both the dancers and the audience. That didn't lessen the creepiness, though.
The head of the Vancouver Organizing Committee made note of the various peoples of Canada: "Aboriginal Canadians, new Canadians, English Canadians, and Francophone Canadians." I'm thrilled to hear he's caught up with the 40 year old Official Multiculturalism discourse that says Canada is a state with 'three founding nations' rather than the older 'two founding nations' rhetoric. Too bad that he managed to toss everyone else into the ridiculously inadequate "new" category.
On a kinder note, the choice to use five athletes in lighting the cauldron - when it's customary to use one - was nice. VANOC said that when we found out who was lighting the cauldron, we'd say 'of course'. And they're right, this time. It was also nice to see people running alongside the truck that carried Wayne Gretzky to the outdoor cauldron. After 106 days where I was unable to escape hearing about the torch relay, this was the one moment that felt genuine and not wholly contrived.

The Theory-of-Everything: Lost season 6 version

2010-02-04T00:12:00.004-05:00

To start: Let's call the Lost timeline where the plane crashed on the island Lost-Prime. And let's call the one where the plane lands Lost-X. And we'll call the gimmick that had us moving between one and the other a flashsideway, because that seems to have already caught on.

My need to find a theory of everything comes from Jacob's line in the season 5 finale, which was repeated in the recap: It only ends once. What this means (I think) is that Lost-Prime and Lost-X can't be separate timelines or alternate realities - we can't be witnessing what would have happened versus what did happen because that would allow for two endings.

So this is my either very right or very wrong answer: Lost-X is actually happening (within the story) after Lost-Prime. Something will happen at the end of the series in the Lost-Prime timeline that will send them back and make it so that they never crash - and what follows will unfold in the flashsideways, which we're meant to think are totally unconnected but actually provide us with the various characters' resolutions.

Here's where I'm coming from:

The very first detail: the mysterious cut on Jack's neck. They made too big a deal out of this for it to be a meaningless detail. It can't possibly matter within Lost-X, but I have a feeling that we should be watching out for Jack to see if he acquires a neck wound toward the end of Lost-Prime.
Juliet says "it worked". Ostensibly, we're meant to understand that she somehow knew that Lost-X had been created, but I think that it's more than that. Recall that Desmond was similarly close to the pocket of energy when the hatch blew up, and that his consciousness was dislodged and began to shift in time. My guess is that what we were supposed to understand was throwaway dialogue - the bit about going out for coffee sometime and Sawyer saying sure - is dialogue that we'll hear her speak in Lost-X, when she and Sawyer meet again for the first time.
Subtle character changes. Sure, Hurley saying he's lucky and Sawyer appearing to be nice are probably red herrings - it'll probably be made clear when they get character-centric flashsideways that Hurley was being sarcastic, which is not unusual, and that Sawyer is casing Hurley. But the Jack and Locke scene was weird and not easily dismissed. Locke was an angry guy before the island, but that anger seemed to motivate him. This Locke is a cynic and a skeptic - not angry, just defeated. And this Jack is surprisingly open-minded. Sure, he's tried to fix the unfixable before, but it was out of some pathological need to fix things and people. You don't get the sense, though, that the suggestion that he can help is about him.

But why does it matter? Well, regardless of who they are and where they come from, Jacob and the Adversary appear to be playing some sort of cosmic game to prove the other wrong. (As suggested by the season 5 finale, they've played this game before.) Ostensibly, Jacob believes that people are good and his adversary that people are bad. Periodically, one assumes, they cause a group of folks to wash up on shore so that they can play a game with them.

Whether the ship/plane is itself full of despondent people or they choose to focus on them in particular and remove the rest from the field of play is up for debate - surely, the various lists play a role in this process - but the key figures in the game are all very much damaged*. As he tells Ben, the Adversary thinks that they're pathetic, whereas Jacob thinks they can be redeemed. (This is not unlike an issue of The Sandman, from the 'Brief Encounters' trade, where Dream and some of his siblings have a wager about whether Emperor Norton can be corrupted, and whether it's enough to dream.)

So my guess is that the Lost-Prime line will get dire and depressing: people will die, the Adversary will appear to win. And meanwhile, things will turn out okay in the Lost-X line and those pathetic lives won't look quite so pathetic at all. (There will be clues, too, even if they're as subtle and the Jack and Locke clues.)

Next week's episode is titled 'What Kate Does', and I suspect that Kate will do something important in both of the timelines/dimensions - it may even be the case that her story appears to end in both - and maybe one will be happy and the other one sad. Except that it only ends once. The ending she gets in Prime? To paraphrase Jacob, that's just progress on the way to hitting the reset button/bomb.

[* This is why Jacob responds to Ben's pleas with 'what about you?' Ben may be damaged, but he isn't in play, and that literally makes him inconsequential. (No one said that Jacob isn't a dick.) Except that Ben isn't, because he's still a variable and can do stuff like, say, kill Jacob - who knows whether the parameters of their game and the players they've chosen will be an issue in the end, though.]

"Just"

2010-01-21T13:19:00.004-05:00

I got an email his morning that began "Just a quick reminder..." about a report that I was supposed to have submitted last week. I get a lot of emails like this, and I send a lot of them too, usually in the summer to people on my softball team - "Just wanted to remind you that I haven't been paid for registration..." - or during the rest of the year to my students - "Just wanted to let you know that there was no document attached to your email..."

There's something very passive-aggressive about the "just". Ostensibly, it's supposed to indicate that you're not angry or annoyed - the email is "just" about this or that, even if the reader might have immediately assumed otherwise. But it's never "just" about the topic and the fact that the sender has to deny being annoyed right off the bat is usually a good indication s/he is, in fact, even more annoyed than you initially thought.

The only worse and even more passive-aggressive opening to this kind of email? "Just a friendly reminder..."

...of the decade

2010-01-10T10:52:00.004-05:00

On any given day, I'm sure that at least half of these would still appear on each 'favorite' list. So this is hardly definitive, but I'm kind of wishy-washy that way.

I'm also not offering any rationale - lists like these seem self-indulgent enough already. So just imagine that I've written 'because i say so!' beside each one.

SONGS
'My Girls' - Animal Collective (2009)
'Golden Age' - TV On The Radio (2008)
'I'm Not Going To Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You' - Black Kids (2007)
'Lovestoned/I Think That She Knows' - Justin Timberlake (2006)
'John Wayne Gacy, Jr.' - Sufjan Stevens (2005)
'What You Waiting For?' - Gwen Stefani (2004)
'Lover's Spit' (Bee Hives version) - Broken Social Scene (2004)
'Take Me Out' - Franz Ferdinand (2004)
'Danger! High Voltage' - Electric Six (2003)
'Maps' - The Yeah Yeah Yeahs (2003)
'B.O.B' - OutKast (2000)

ALBUMS
Sound of Silver - LCD Soundsystem (2008)
In Rainbows - Radiohead (2007)
Silent Shout - The Knife (2006)
Supernature - Goldfrapp (2005)
Let It Die - Feist (2004)
Thunder, Lightning, Strike - The Go! Team (2004)
The Slow Wonder - A.C. Newman (2004)
Funeral - Arcade Fire (2004)
Your Blues - Destroyer (2004)
Is This It - The Strokes (2001)

FILMS
Wall-E (2008)
The Wrestler (2008)
Children of Men (2006)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Lost in Translation (2003)
Adaptation (2002)
Ocean trilogy (2001-07)
Moulin Rouge! (2001)
High Fidelity (2001)
Almost Famous (2001)

I would do TV, too, but I think I would end up listing at least 6 or 7 shows that end up on every other list I've seen. (Lost, Mad Men, even Survivor...)

Last post on Avatar (maybe?)

2010-01-09T10:09:00.005-05:00

Saw this on Facebook - it's pretty damn funny, so I'll let it speak for itself.

Ke$ha and white trash aesthetic

2010-01-08T08:52:00.004-05:00

I don't have cable TV, so I was late to the game in being exposed to Ke$ha, the latest pop-tart-of-the-moment. (I'm sure that some would be tempted to give this title to Lady Gaga, but I have a feeling that Gaga's career will actually have some longevity and/or artistic relevance.) She's notable, thus far, for two things: providing the female vocals to Flo Rida's embarrassingly awful "Right Round" and her own painfully annoying debut single, "TiK ToK". Which you can see right here:

So when I saw this, my immediate reaction was that someone - or some company- has discovered that a white trash aesthetic is commercially viable. (I didn't realize that there's a 'white-girl rap' scene, which I suspect plays up this look.) And so the video struck me as hugely exploitative - some label found a trashy girl with whiny vocals and is mocking her while appearing to celebrate her. (As opposed to, say, Britney or LiLo, whose trashiness the label tried to hide.)

And then I looked Ke$ha up on Wikipedia and visited her website. She calls her style "garbage chic" and explains that the dollar sign in her name is ironic, and describes the album to Maxim as "a cross between Beastie Boys and a tranny with a hangover". (What that actually means, I'm not sure.) And the website with all the howling wolves and web 1.0 design quirks? That simultaneous celebration/revulsion for white trash culture is pretty much the calling card of more-clever-than-thou hipster humor. So it's not some evil corporation that's (wholly) appropriating the white trash aesthetic - it's Ke$ha herself.

A slightly related note: When I first started reading the sociocultural lit on white trash, I picked up the rather obviously titled White Trash. One of the rather interesting things that emerged from it was that none of the authors actually laid claim to the identification, nor did they really comment on their personal aversion to the topic - most of them said that they either were white trash or feared being white trash, but all of them distanced themselves from it to a large extent. (One article seems to be an exception, in which the author lauds country music, but it's also an exception in that she's possibly the only author in the collection that doesn't feel/fear that she was white trash.) It led me to remark to some friends, in a play on subaltern politics, that 'white trash can't speak' - that only reformed white trash can speak of white trash in an academically meaningful sense. Even in pop music, it seems, it can only be ironic.

More on Avatar

2010-01-01T13:21:00.001-05:00

I found myself thinking at one point that the make-up was fantastic. It takes some pretty impressive effects work to make you forget that it's computer-generated.
I hated the story, for so many reasons. It's incredibly generic, as far as the mechanical details are concerned. There's the grizzled war-veteran lead-baddie, who is obsessed with killing stuff for no clear reason; the amoral CEO who explicitly notes that he's answerable to the shareholders, not his conscience; the angry young prince who needs to learn that his rage will destroy him; the romantic interest who is at one with nature and must nurture the lead; the main character who is damaged and needs someone to help him put it all back together, but has to find that help in the wrong places before finding it in the right one. And the actors are serviceable - Col. Quaritch is fantastically camp as the villain, though I'm not sure that this should qualify as a 'good' thing, necessarily.
The two most popular ways to interpret the film are as environmentalist fable (this seems to be how Cameron is pushing it and what most mainstream critics privilege) or a neocolonial narrative, those who seize on the former often doing so to the exclusion, implicitly or explicitly, of the latter. But it's not necessary to separate them out like this - ostensibly primitive people have always been associated with nature and their comparative lack of technology with environmentalism, even if the associations don't hold upon closer examination. But the point is that the two themes have been so entirely conflated that one always implies the other.
The fact that whole groups of people can be given a symbolic weight that doesn't necessarily coincide with their lived reality is not a new argument, but it's one worth reiterating here. Jan Pieterse's collection of European images of black people over the past 500+ years is particularly good at illustrating how the representation of alien people says more about "us" than it does about "them". He traces how representational strategies of Africa, to focus on a tiny section of the larger book, change dramatically to reflect tensions at home - the 'noble savage' was popular among reformists who wanted to critique their peers indirectly, while the ignoble or devilish savage gained currency in advance of and during periods of imperial expansion. But accurate or not, those representations are read as truthful in some sense, and romanticizing the noble savage is just as problematic as demonizing them.
Which strikes some people as counter-intuitive, I know. The 'good' stereotype is preferable to the 'bad' one, right? Not so much. Among people who think they know better, the bad stereotype at least has the advantage of being obviously false. But the romantic noble savage, of which the Na'vi in Avatar are a perfect example, is not so obviously fake. Worse, in reality the people who are idealized as noble savages tend to be punished for failing to live up to these impossible expectations. Again, Pieterse notes how the transformation in representations of Africa was also due to the disappointment of the Europeans who failed to find the characters they expected, and so came to assume that the people they did encounter had fallen from a prior grace like Biblical devils.
I should also add how annoying it is that these native vs. conqueror stories always feature a parallel romantic story. It ends up making it unclear whether the hero has actually came to sympathize/empathize with the natives or whether that's only a secondary result of having fallen in love with the female lead. And it only contributes to the whole romanticization/exoticization of the natives on the whole - they would be less sympathetic if they weren't also worth lusting after. (And this is another way to think about how their depiction reflects us rather than some other, how they exist for us as viewers looking to be entertained rather than for oppressed peoples striving for liberation.)
On Facebook, someone asked me whether the native vs. conqueror narrative could have a happy ending and not be problematic. I suspect that it can, though nothing that I've seen comes to mind. A poetry professor during my undergrad once said that he hated how the Toronto Transit Commission placed poems on the subway, suggesting that they weren't invitations to read poetry but, rather, were inoculations against poetry. I have the same feeling about the happy ending in these sorts of movies. Rather than motivate people to action, they console us - rather than encouraging white people to confront their guilt, they forgive it. Avatar is especially egregious insofar as it goes a step further and tries to erase race altogether - unlike the male leads in Pocahontas or The Last Samurai, Jake is literally transformed into one of Na'vi. Similarly, while the return of the Europeans and the industrialization of Japan hang over the endings of those other films like a dark cloud, there's no suggestion that the humans will come back with more soldiers and bigger guns to start what they've finished. Because massive corporations are known for having a conscience, no doubt, and people who fancy themselves civilized have always backed down when the indigenous populationthreatens to revolt. Right. You have a problem when even Pocahontas could be said to be more politically progressive.

About Avatar...

2009-12-21T12:40:00.002-05:00

1) Full disclosure: I have not seen this movie. (If I do, at some point, it'll be because it literally looks good.) Despite this, I don't feel particularly bad about critiquing it. Given the number of reviews, the Wikipedia summaries, etc. that are available to me, I don't know that it's necessary to actually see the thing.

2) There's a pretty decent article here by Annalee Newitz that confirms up my concerns about the movie. In brief, it laments the sub-genre of films wherein a white guy - the Guy That (white, male) Viewers Can Relate To - is tasked with assimilation/eliminating an alien other, only to reverse course and join them. The link mentions Dances With Wolves, though Pocahontas and The Last Samurai also came to my mind immediately. Newitz also characterizes it as an expression of white guilt, about colonialism but also, I would imagine, about environmental damage. And in being an expression of guilt it's also, indirectly, an expression of an incredibly over-sized sense of self-worth and importance. (I'm thinking particularly, here, of Tom Cruise's character in The Last Samurai, who literally becomes the titular character and offers to teach the Japanese Emperor about samurai culture, as well as the guilt that the filmmakers are expressing for the industrialization and modernization of Japan, which serves to more subtly take credit for Japan's subsequent rise to international military and economic power.)

3) I find it impossible to remember what Sam Worthington looks like. To my mind, he has the most bland and unexceptional face I've ever seen on a celebrity, and he looks somehow like a different person every time I see him. (This, as opposed to my problem with Ed Burns, whose face I can remember but whose name I can never remember - and which I spent hours trying to recall when it first occurred to me that the problem I have with him is not unlike the one I have with Worthington. Also, I really can't stand Ed Burns.)

Apologies...

2009-12-17T12:27:00.003-05:00

I haven't posted anything in many weeks, despite having plenty of things that I'd like to talk about - things have been busy and there was a family emergency. (I wanted to talk about very Canadian topics, mostly: the clamp-down on free expression leading up to the Vancouver Olympics and the recent prisoner-torture controversy in Canada and how badly it's been handled by military and political leadership, especially.)

But most of that is very old news, now - maybe I'll get around to it, later. For now, though, I thought I'd post something from my personal life, for possibly the first time. We always still a cheesy and badly photoshopped family-sticker in our Christmas cards. This being the first year that there's more than two of us, though, I put a bit more effort into it. But only a bit:

This is just... wow

2009-11-25T22:16:00.002-05:00

Not that you needed me to tell you this, but don't go looking at Oprah.com for intelligent reflections on the topic of feminism.

Case in point: a recent article that, in its single lucid moment, notes that the feminist label has been "corroded" and taken on a negative connotation that is difficult to shake, that its stereotype suggests "a woman who's basically unattractive both in looks and spirit". For most of us who call ourselves feminist - and who don't see ourselves as "unattractive both in looks and spirit", much less see that in our friends who identify as feminist - this is a problem. And feminists tend to respond in one of two ways: to try and recuperate the word or to continue being a feminist in practice without naming it as such.

Salmansohn, the author of the Oprah.com article, tries something else. And it's awful. The blurb under the headline sets the stage nicely: "Being a strong, powerful woman doesn't mean you have to be tough, overworked and unattractive. Karen Salmansohn explains how power and success come from being in touch with your feminine, sexy and loving side." Implicitly, then, we're meant to assume that feminists aren't unfairly maligned, but that they actually "have to be" unattractive. Salmansohn isn't just reporting the stereotype - she's validating it. Like I said, awful.

Writes Salmansohn: "We don't have to make a choice between feminine or powerful and successful. We can be all those things." Sure, sounds great. This attitude is, in fact, a premise that's central to pretty much every feminist movement - it is feminism. Except, according to Salmansohn, it isn't. Because this is what she wrote in the preceding sentences: "I find this negative connotation to be shameful and highly unhelpful. Women could truly benefit from finding a more inspiring word than 'feminism' to stand by, as well as stand for, when seeking to become our most powerful and successful selves." Apparently, it doesn't matter that feminism can already provide what she's looking for - she's been shamed into refusing it.

And where does this shame come from, anyway? Salmansohn opens the piece with a story told by a male friend who can't fathom that he was mugged by a woman and convinces himself that "he was a transvestite". And Salmansohn uses this anecdote to segue into her lament, opining that "there's still a disconnect between a woman being 'beautiful, leggy, sexy' and being powerful—even in a low-level career like mugger." Sadly, but appropriately, it's a man's failure to acknowledge female power that leads the author to declare feminism a lost cause - because, clearly, if some trans/homophobic guy has "a disconnect", what hope could women possibly have?

The problem here is not "feminism", the movement or the word, but the all too telling implication that feminism won't get anywhere unless it toes the line with the heteronormative men who still refuse to legitimize it. Except that looking for legitimation within the order that you ostensibly oppose isn't likely to change much of anything. "Empowering" women by encouraging them to play on men's terms, within a sexual economy that privileges being desirable to straight men, isn't something new - it's simply more of the same.

(I'll avoid taking many direct shots at the idea of "feminine-ism". It's a patently idiotic idea that, in its ignorance, steals from feminism as much as it claims to revise it, and reduces gender equality to calls to embrace your "male and female sides" - a bland pastiche of the second-wave and self-help rhetoric that needs only to add bits about 'actualization' or 'realizing your full potential'. And it reduces men's participation to that of an audience: "what's not for a man to love?" It's in this shameless reproduction of a heterosexual economy premised on men's desire for women, and women's requirement to be desired as objects, that it falls over that the line that separates the merely ludicrous from the ironically sad.)

Adventures in TAing, case 6 (in a ? case series): don't do what Donny Don't does

2009-11-19T10:36:00.002-05:00

Prefacing your request for an extension #1 - due to illness:
'I forged a doctor's note in another class.'

Asking for an extension #2 - due to chronic lateness:
'Can I hand the second essay in late so that I have more time to finish the first essay?'

Asking for an extension #3 - due to ???:
'I need a good mark because I can't petition the grade. I have too many petitions already.'

Bargaining for a better participation grade #1:
'But I talk to you after class all the time'
(All of these after-class discussions related to late papers, not the content of the course. And yes, sadly, they did happen 'all the time'.)

Bargaining for a better participation grade #2:
'But I took really good notes.'
(The student also kindly offered to email them to me.)

Asking for study tips:
'I didn't have the chance to read any of the readings, yet. Do you have any advice for how I should study for the test?'
(Nine weeks into the course, no less.)

Batman and Robin (the comic book, not the movie)

2009-11-18T08:26:00.002-05:00

I was planning on a writing a very brief blog post about Grant Morrison's Batman and Robin, which I found amusing enough when Quitely was drawing it, and much less so when Tan took over from him. And it would be short because, by the sixth issue, I just totally lost patience with it. Tan's art is muddy and hard to follow and Flamingo, while dressed up in an appropriate homage to the 60s show, is simply an awful character. (He laughs and has some sort of ambiguous resistance to pain and/or injury. That's it - he doesn't talk, doesn't do anything other than fight.)

Then Geoff pointed out this short essay at 4thletter, which argues that these six issues are a rewriting of Alan Moore's Killing Joke, a new version that's situates Jason Todd as the Joker to Dick Grayson's Batman and, further, fractures the character of the Joker and spreads his various aspects (with diminishing returns, I think) among the villains of the piece. Which is clever, but it isn't enough to redeem the awful art and generally boring story. (Maybe if it was, oh, two issues shorter and Tan didn't draw one page of it. Maybe.)

V, cult audiences, and disappointment

2009-11-14T18:48:00.002-05:00

It seems like this TV season has a few new players vying to take Lost's place. Of these shows, V is the only one I've seen, and it makes its goals pretty clear. The opening shot is of Elizabeth Mitchell (late of Lost) lying in bed, and the camera zooms in on her face as her eye opens. Lost has started episodes this way no fewer than 18 times, enough so that it's clear the producers of V are making a winking reference to it.

But V isn't just trying to suck in the Lost audience - as a lot of people have noticed, the cast is overflowing with actors from other sci-fi shows with cult followings: Inara and Wash from Firefly, Tom from The 4400, Kara from Smallville, and Tory from Battlestar Galactica spring immediately to mind. Part of the fun, I'm sure, is trying to read the characters that these people are better known for against their V counterparts - Alan Tudyk's Dale is Wash, at least until they pull the rug out from underneath us by revealing he's a V sleeper agent; Rekha Sharma's Sarita Malik appears to be an FBI agent who's suspicious of the Vs, though her role on BSG makes us immediately suspicious of her.

That said, the first two episodes have been disappointing. We were promised a reveal on par with the original series' dislocated-jaw-hamster-swallowing, but it hasn't materialized - and we're already two episodes into only a four episode block before it disappears until the spring. (And given that nearly 1/3 of their audience disappeared in between the premiere and the second episode, we can't be sure that it'll ever return.)

Brief comment on Twilight

2009-11-13T10:10:00.003-05:00

With New Moon about to premiere, I thought I should finally getting around to commenting on Twilight, which I watched a couple months back. (I also read parts of the book, but couldn't bring myself to read more than a page here or there in isolation. It is badly, badly written - Bella "shudder/s/ed" four times on one page. Either buy a thesaurus or send her to a doctor, because this girl is obviously sick.) And having seen the movie, I get why people like it - it's hot. Pattinson and Stewart do a remarkably good job of making it look like their blood is boiling over with super-heated hormones and it's all they can do to keep it from exploding out of their perpetually fluttering eyelids and, yes, shuddering bodies.

But that doesn't make it good, or even not bad. And it also isn't enough to totally distract you from the often subtle, and sometimes less so, creepiness of Edward and Bella's relationship. When you notice that the characters seem to model their behavior on stereotypes of abuser and victim - especially in the hospital scene near the end, which made my skin crawl - that kills the sexiness pretty fast.

[Only somewhat related: I just learned that the villain in the Buffy: Season Eight comic is also named Twilight. I'm guessing there's a joke here, as Buffy fans on the whole despise the Twilight series for undermining Buffy's feminism, but has it been made explicit? Is there anything more to the joke than the name?]

Where the Wild Things Are

2009-10-31T14:37:00.004-04:00

There's a particularly great scene in Where the Wild Things Are when Max and Judith, the most disagreeable and distrusting of the Wild Things, get into an argument over whether he plays favorites. It quickly devolves into something else:

Judith:
I can see how it is, the king has favorites. It's really cute. Do you have a favorite color? Can I be your favorite color? Heh heh heh...

Max (sneering):
Heh heh heh.

Judith (also sneering):
Heh heh heh.

They exchange a few rounds of mocking and increasingly loud and obnoxious laughter. It stops after Max leans in and shouts as loud as he can. There's a brief pause.

Judith:
You know what? You can't do that back to me. If we're upset, your job is not to get upset back at us. Our job is to be upset. If I get mad and want to eat you, then you have to say 'Oh, okay. You can eat me, I love you. Whatever makes you happy, Judith.' That's what you're supposed to do!

Max stares, dumbfounded, for a few seconds. The Wild Things are composites, condensed figures in the Freudian sense - they are, variously, analogies for Max's parents, his sister, and himself. And depending on which position they enact at any particular moment - and there are reversals aplenty - they also force Max into their opposite and show him to be equally variable. If Judith becomes Max, then Max becomes his own mother.

It's easy to take away a message akin to 'childhood is hard and then you grow up', or to suggest that the film has something to say about the process of childhood, the difficulty of growing up and letting go, or childhood's end. The Wild Things show anything but linear growth: they go sideways, back and forth, up and down, and in circles. And Max's character-arc isn't exactly unambiguous, either. (Perhaps it's less ambiguous than in the book, where it's not clear that Max learns anything. Or that there's a lesson to be learned.)

'Effective' endings

2009-10-31T12:24:00.004-04:00

[This is the last post I'll make about Paranormal Activity - promise!]

One of the common responses to complaints about the ending of Paranormal Activity - it even popped up in reaction to my first blog about the film - is that the ending is "effective". (I'd link to the response to the Youtube clip as evidence of this, but it appears the clip has been pulled.) I suppose that "effective" is being deployed in a very utilitarian sense, here - it's a scary movie and the ending is scary. Which has to be the most banal and meaningless use of "effective" that I can imagine.

It's also just plain wrong. The demon-face ending is not effective. I could see someone making the case that it's affective - it's definitely frightening, in the moment. But that moment of affect detracts from the effectiveness of the film as a whole, and it does this in two major ways.

First, it plays up a scare that violates the generic logic of an ostensibly 'realist' first-person POV horror-film, a genre replete with certain implicit rules and precedent - Blair Witch or REC - about how scares can and should be depicted. Explicit CGI alterations like the face or Micah's flying body fall well outside those boundaries.

Second, it violates its own internal logic. The epigraph thanking Micah and Katie's families establishes a certain boundary within which the ending must land - if we're to believe, even if only for the duration of the film, that this was made and legally distributed, then the film can't obviously end in a way that would logically lead to it becoming police evidence. Or in a way that would cause to wonder why Katie's family would ever agree to its release, much less Micah's. It doesn't make sense, and clearly one or the other - the epigraph or the ending - needed to go.

Sorry if I'm being repetitive. I must be feeling particularly whiny.

One of the alternate Paranormal Activity endings...

2009-10-28T13:07:00.004-04:00

I complained about the ending to Paranormal Activity (it seems to be referred to on YouTube, at least, as the 'CGI-demon face' ending) and mentioned the existence of at least two other endings. This, apparently, is one of them. (Though it still has the creepy, but dumb, evil-smile right at the beginning of the clip.)

It's better than the theatrical ending, though not by much. The complaint that it's anti-climactic and drawn-out much too long are well-deserved, though Katie's death is legitimately surprising. (Couldn't it have simply ended with her rocking and/or leaving? Something subtler, and more in keeping with the subtly creepiness of the film on the whole?) And it still suffers from that 'realism' problem. If the theatrical ending is bad because it's horribly 'unrealistic', it is also bad because there's no way it ever would have escaped police custody, much less been distributed as a movie - and that latter complaint applies just as readily to this ending.

Blair Witch, at least, could plausibly be released because it would have been impossible to prove whether the film was a hoax because the filmmakers corpses were never recovered and none of the three was obviously implicated in the murder of the others. But Micah and Katie's bodies would be all too real.

I still haven't been able to find the third ending, which actually sounds like it would be the best one. (Though, to be fair, based on the description I was expecting this one to be something else entirely.)

Canada's Economic Action Plan and stimulus for actors

2009-10-23T09:03:00.005-04:00

The Conservative government in Canada has been working hard on a recession-busting campaign that they refer to as "Canada's Economic Action Plan". There have been a lot of complaints about its efficacy - about how the money has been apportioned and how much of it has actually been paid out. Equally disturbing are the things that the government is taking credit for - what should be routine maintenance, like replacing old door-knobs, is being touted as Action Plan spending, complete with signage. That kind of desperation isn't inspiring. (Nor is the partisanship of it all - the Tory-blue website and signs are not particularly subtle.)

Most recently, the joke seems to be that the Action Plan's only obvious economic impact has been in its own promotion: in the past couple weeks, $100k on a press conference and $50k plastering ads the side of a train have gotten a lot of attention. In total, the estimates vary between $35 and $60 million.

What's been mostly unremarked upon, though, are the numerous slick commercials that have been produced. I can't embed the commercials, but follow this link and click on the very first video and pay particularly close attention to the bit that starts around the 34 second mark. "What does the Economic Action Plan mean to Canadians?", it asks? It means that an out-of-work actor from Student Bodies can find a job in propaganda.

The RCMP's guide to Radicalization

2009-10-22T12:56:00.004-04:00

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police have this helpful internet guide to identifying and understanding 'radicalization' and how it contributes to domestic terrorism. Let's take a look!

Radicalization, they explain, is

the process by which individuals — usually young people — are introduced to an overtly ideological message and belief system that encourages movement from moderate, mainstream beliefs towards extreme views.

They do, thankfully, also explain that this is not necessarily "bad" thing - Martin Luther King and Jesus are listed as two examples of benevolent radicals. But the list of "good" exceptions is super-short. And they continue:

The English word “radical” comes from the Latin radis, or “root.” Its connotation (as in the word “radish”) is of being buried in the ground, rooted, fundamental. So a radical is a person who wishes to effect fundamental political, economic or social change, or change from the ground up.

"Buried" and "fundamental" - spooky! But the buried bit is also worth drawing out a bit more, because the site is actually concerned with discern which otherwise normal (that is, "normal", but more on that in a minute) people are terrorists in disguise.

The assumption that domestically radicalized terrorists are somehow “different” is belied by the “Toronto 18” trial. The media repeatedly draw attention to the “ordinariness” of the defendants. This is borne out by the wiretap recordings being played in court, in which defendants communicate in a sort of “hoser-gangsta” patois, talk about how much they love Tim Horton’s doughnuts, and exclaim over the wintertime beauty of rural Ontario.

“Ordinariness” is a key factor in the domestic radicalization phenomenon. [...] There is no reason that Canadian born terrorists would not like Tim Horton’s doughnuts. It would be more surprising if they did not.

Evidently, the RCMP loves to put things in "quotes". And check out the words that they single out in this way, especially "different" and "ordinariness". (Twice given this treatment in the few sentences above.) The words assume an undeniably suspicious and malevolently ironic character: the suggestion is that these radicals are different, just not different in the way one would expect (that is, we would expect that they should not like Tim Horton's doughnuts); that they are playing at being "ordinary" because they have learned the art of "ordinariness".

Many ethnic, cultural and religious constituencies in Canada remain deeply concerned about “homeland” issues. Indeed, continued identification with communities and countries of origin remains a component of the Canadian approach to multiculturalism. The Islamist “single narrative” — propagated by Islamist ideologues of every stripe, from Osama Bin Laden to street corner preachers — is fundamentally different however. Not only does it lie at the heart of the Islamist extremist worldview, it also identifies Canada as part of the problem.

"Real" Canadians, of course, have no "homeland", much less a nefarious "single narrative". Unless, of course, you count the narrative of Western progress and the mythology of middle-power Canada and its benevolent peacekeeper identity. But I suppose it could be argued that these are two narratives. (Not that I would buy that argument.)

There is a tendency in the media to portray conversion to Islam as a sort of “fast track” to terrorist action. However [...] [m]ost converts to Islam are simply that — average people who have found that Islam speaks to them as a faith.

Note that "average" isn't placed in quotation marks. No need to qualify something as self-evident as the averageness of the white Canadian, right? They don't practice "ordinariness", after all - they simply are ordinary, even if they're Muslim. So to be clear: brown Muslims pretend to be "ordinary"; white Muslims are average.

Women are also lending their voices to the Islamist ideological message, often employing a strange inversion of the language of struggle and emancipation. In 2005, Shabina Begum, a British teenager [...] observed that [...] “young Muslims, like me, have turned back to their faith after years of being taught that we needed to be liberated from it.”

A "strange inversion" because, clearly, emancipation can only operate in one direction - from white folks to brown folks. But I suppose it makes sense that the RCMP, a body with the sole purpose of providing Canadians with protection, would be unable to make sense of people who want to be protected from "average" Canadians.

But seriously, I have no idea how this document is supposed to help anyone identify radical terrorists. Look for "ordinary" people who aren't actually ordinary, I guess.

Paranormal Activity, Blair Witch, and bad endings

2009-10-17T20:11:00.004-04:00

Spoiler alert!

I watched Paranormal Activity on its opening night. Simply put, all of the comparisons to The Blair Witch Project are wholly justified. (Apropos of nothing, it's the first film I've seen in a theater since Penelope was born. There's no particular reason why this film was the first - it just worked out that way.)

The way that PA starts with subtle scares - creaks, lights turning on, gently moving doors - and gradually escalates - bangs, spontaneous combustion, slamming doors - is damned effective. By the time the sheets on the bed begin to move we're scared in part because, well, the scene is scary but moreso because we're already anticipating its escalation to... well, it's one thing to spoil the plot and another thing entirely to ruin one of the most terrifying scenes I've ever seen.

If PA improves on the BW model in any respect, it's with its rather rigid structure. It moves back and forth between what the stationary camera in the bedroom records in black-and-white at night and the characters' discussion of what's happening and what they should do about it in color during the day. And those breaks - knowing that the characters, and we, are safe when it's light out (that is, until the film nears the end, when even the day is no longer off-limits) - keeps us from feeling exhausted and keeps the film's scares from seeming arbitrary or, worse, dictated by the cliché structure of a genre exercise rather than the internal logic of the story.

And they also make the nights that much more frightening, the anticipation that much stronger, and the pay off feel that much better because it's deserved. I noticed that the audience would nervously, and collectively, shift in their seats as we transitioned to the stationary night cam near the beginning of the movie. By the end, people were gasping simply because the title for "Night 23" appeared on the screen and the picture faded to black. You know they're doing something right when we're scared by the expectation of being scared but still haven't any clue how it's going to happen. (As opposed a scene in a typical horror film where the scare is practically choreographed for us: If the perspective is over the hero's shoulder and a few feet behind, is there any way that it won't end with someone grabbing him/her from the back?)

But I didn't particularly like the last 20 seconds or so of the film. In Blair Witch, the ending is ambiguous but powerfully suggestive, harking back to one of the myths that we heard in the first 1o minutes and leaving us with little concrete evidence of the characters' fates even as it leaves us with a strong sense that we know what happened to them. (Even if we don't exactly know how it happened.)

Paranormal Activity missteps, though, and it starts with the day preceding the final night. It's implied that Katie might be possessed by the demon that's been haunting them, but this comes entirely out of nowhere. (She had been sleepwalking earlier in the film, yes, but that episode made seem fearful, not sinister.) When night falls, the scene unfolds incredibly alike the finale in Blair Witch - off screen screams, a character racing downstairs, a commotion in the dark, and silence. When we hear footsteps climbing up, it's not certain that things have gone wrong. And then Micah's body flies at the camera - which is terrifying, but wholly inconsistent with the more mundane scares that we've seen to this point. And if that weren't enough, the possessed Katie, who has presumably thrown Micah at the camera, shuffles into the room after him, bending over his body, and then roaring at the camera and breaking it. Roaring with a computer-enhanced demon-face. That's right. A movie that began by exploiting our all too real fears that creaking doors might not "just" be creaking doors resorts to bad CG and a demon-face. What. The. Fuck.

While I was writing this, I checked Wikipedia because I remembered hearing that there were alternate endings. And there are two, apparently: one in which only Katie returns from the ground floor, and she sits on the floor beside the bed; another in which, again, we only see Katie and enters the room only to slit her throat in front of the camera. I would have preferred either one. And then I read this on the same page: "The ending currently attached to the release of the film was suggested by Steven Spielberg." Spielberg, incidentally, wanted to remake this film and had to be convinced that this was far scarier than anything they could do with a bloated budget. Why am I not surprised that his one (ostensibly) contribution is the very worst of the bunch?

(And while no one asked, I would've gone with an ending quite unlike any of the three they made. I wouldn't have had Katie return from the ground floor at all - it would have been Micah. And if anyone cares to ask, I can try to explain what and why in the comments.)

The half-life of funny (to offensive)

2009-10-14T15:36:00.004-04:00

Ace Ventura: Pet Detective made $72 million in 1994. (It was the 16th highest-grossing film in North America that year; for comparison's sake, Slumdog Millionaire was 16th last year and made $141 million.) And given that it was so popular, you'd think I would remember if it had earned any complaints or criticism for its rather questionable portrayal of a certifiably insane trans/queer villain and a homophobic hero. Here's a reminder of the latter:

I can easily imagine a character like Finkle/Einhorn still featuring in a comedy in 2009, but I can't fathom anyone including a scene like the one above. Ace's reaction was evidently thought harmless, even funny, by most audiences in 1994, but this sort of humor has all the charm of hate speech, today. And that's a really short turnaround, isn't it? To go from 'acceptable for a general audience to laugh at' to virtually unfilmable in 15 years?

(Or am I simply wrong in thinking that homo/transphobia can't be quite so obviously celebrated and laughed at anymore?)

When ads lie: frozen pizza

2009-10-13T15:56:00.004-04:00

I have never eaten a good frozen pizza.

'Passable', sure; 'digestible', most often; 'not worth it' a good third of the time. But never 'good'. And all frozen pizzas are plagued by the same shortcomings: the cheese either isn't mozzarella or it's the cheapest possible kind, the frozen vegetables are identically tasteless, the crust can always be mistaken for cardboard, and it never heats evenly - sometimes the middle is still cold even as the crust is burnt.

So given that frozen pizza is generally quite bad, I guess it makes sense that frozen pizza brands often liken the quality of their food to that of a pizza delivery place. A couple of examples:

The problem is, to my mind, that they are always wrong - frozen pizza is never as good as the worst delivery or take-out place. And it's not just that they're stretching the truth. I'm sure that every pizza slice, for instance, is the "world's best" in someone's mind - someone surely must appreciate the cardboard crust, or at least think that the price-point and convenience outweigh the deficiencies in taste. But even those people could never confuse a frozen pizza with one that was never frozen, much less one made by a place that specializes in fresh-made pizza.

What's worse, the brazenness of their lie always reminds me that frozen pizza is just plain bad and will always be bad. Why not make more modest claims? Advocate for their brand on the grounds that it's cheaper than delivery? More convenient than take-out? McDonald's might as well claim that the patty in a Big Mac is better than veal cutlet.

Because the Winter Olympics aren't already white enough

2009-10-07T19:23:00.005-04:00

I can almost understand why people like Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort have an audience. They, and their audience, perceive science to be a legitimate threat to their theology and, thus, their way of life - and they're right, it is. So it makes sense that desperate, if not particularly critical, people would want to rally around them.

What I don't get are the people who say shit like this:

Who is fighting to ensure that the immigrants of European descent* are adequately represented at next year’s Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games?

"Adequately represented"? 80 countries were represented at 2006 Winter Olympics, only 33 of which sent 10 athletes or more. Of those 33, only seven are not located in Europe or North America and only four of the seven are not countries overwhelmingly populated by white people: Australia (40 athletes), Brazil (10), China (78), Japan (112), Kazakhstan (56), New Zealand (18), and South Korea (40). The seven largest contingents - Canada, Germany, Italy, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States - combined for about half of the total number of 2500 athletes.

People of European descent are overrepresented. And Rachel Marsden? You're a moron.

Canada or the USA without European immigrants would look somewhat like Africa.

Which Africa, exactly? The one that was fetishized by European Renaissance explorers as one of eternal sun, populated by people of such outstanding moral character that they were understood be nearer to God than all others? The one that was fetishized by Enlightenment conquerors as one of unending dark, populated by people of such lecherous nature that they were understood to be hardly better than demonic children? Or the Africa of the 21st century, the one that has endured centuries of colonial oppression, exploitation, and systemic dehumanization of its people?

It’s no coincidence that the best countries in the world are either European or founded by Europeans.

Oh, snap! In your face, Japan!

It's easy to be "best" when you've amassed your wealth via the enslavement and robbery of entire nations. The hard part is being merely "good" when you've already been taken for everything you had and, to add insult to injury, need to ask favors of the people who enslaved and robbed you in the first place.

And it's no coincidence that the biggest genocides in the world were perpetrated by European nations or those founded by Europeans. Of the 12 genocides that happened between 1490 and 1950, 10 were undertaken by Europeans or their descendants. And white folks hardly escape the blame for many of the latter genocides, even where their influence isn't as obvious. But I'll get to that...

Everywhere they go, European immigrants make things better – until they’re asked to leave, at which point everything usually descends back into chaos. Not that they ever get any thanks for it.

How terribly unfair. If only they hadn't wiped out - sometimes intentionally, sometimes not - entire nations of the indigenous population of the Americas with small pox. But the dead are ungrateful assholes like that.

But let's look at Burundi and Rwanda, apropos of nothing. Belgian colonizers took the Tutsi/Hutu class distinction and reinscribed it in law as a racial distinction, organizing the two "ethnicities" in hilariously arbitrary fashion - for example, by measuring nose size. And what is generally agreed to have been a pretty stable social system ("descends back into chaos" supposes an original chaos that did not exist) became, less than 100 years later, so divisive that it led to not one but two genocidal civil wars: in Burundi in 1972 and Rwanda in 1994.

Yeah, I'm sure that the 1 million or more who died would really like to thank Europe for sharing the logic of racial superiority and ethnic war.

So how are the Vancouver 2010 Olympics paying tribute to these increasingly marginalized European immigrants and their defining contributions to Canada? By ignoring them completely, it seems.

Ah, yes. Because the TV spots starring all those white athletes, as narrated by Donald Sutherland, certainly seem to indicate that white folks are being ignored. And the Olympics' and team Canada's major corporate sponsors - like VISA, McDonalds, or Coke - may well be ubiquitous, but that's really just code for "marginalized". Because we all know that the execs at Lakota are actually calling the shots, right? I bet the vendors won't even sell one can of Coke - it'll be raw seal for everyone!

And seriously - haven't we had enough of this white self-victimization bullshit, yet? Attempts of this sort to level the playing field**, as it were, do not marginalize the people who occupy the center. The goal, I imagine, is to reduce exclusivity - to make the center more inclusive, rather than force the center to the margin. Requests that over-representation be corrected - and to ask for equal representation is not to ask for under-representation - shouldn't be taken as an excuse to run for the margins.

I’m descended from the people who built my country, but they’ve been forgotten.

I'm not sure whether this is best described as hyperbole or idiocy. Both, probably.

*I'm not really sure what she's up to with this "European immigrants" schtick. My guess is that she wants us to think that she's poking fun at political correctness. And, if we believe that, then maybe we won't be cognizant of how utterly and obviously racist her diatribe is. Seriously - read the article but replace her euphemisms with "white".

** It's up for debate whether the aboriginal iconography of the Olympics, which is what the author is whining about, actually attempts to do this or whether it merely pays it lip service. Miga, Sumi, and Quatchi - the official mascots - were chosen for their cuteness and marketability, not because they are in any way an accurate reflection of aboriginality or because they want to displace Ace or Youppi. This is the worst kind of multiculturalism - the kind that makes other cultures suitable for consumption by the dominant social group without ever opening dialogue, that asks them to enjoy it rather than to understand it.

"Balance" and "theory"

2009-10-01T11:58:00.004-04:00

I often watch The View when I feed Penelope her lunch, and turned it on this morning just as their panel was discussing the new Cameron/Comfort edition of On the Origin of Species. (The equally absurd and awful contents of which I blogged about a few days ago.) During the discussion, Heidi Montag and Sherri Shepherd (mis)used two words that, when deployed in these arguments, drive me absolutely nuts: "balance" (as in, the introduction provides "balance" to the evolution vs. creation debate) and "theory" (as in, both evolution and creationism are "theories").

1) To call the Cameron/Comfort edition "balanced" is outrageous - even if I agreed with Heidi's definition of "balance". Comfort is writing in the 21st century, Darwin in the 19th - genetics wasn't even a word when Darwin wrote, which makes Comfort's discussion of DNA both anachronistic and irrelevant. (Irrelevant to a debate about Darwin and/or evolution, but it's obvious that Comfort's actual target is science as a field, not Darwin as such.) Comfort can - and does - misrepresent Darwin's argument while Darwin, for obvious reasons, cannot refute his erroneous claims. Heidi also commits a sin that I'm all too familiar with as a teacher - she conflates complaint and critique, mistakes a wholly fallacious straw-man argument for rigorous analysis. Bringing balance to a debate requires, at the very least, some responsibility on the part of the commentator to accurately represent the position that is being critiqued. What Heidi calls "balance" would probably be libel if Darwin weren't long dead.

2) a. The "theory" bit is equally annoying. At some point, it became conventional outside academic circles to use "theory" as a derisive or pejorative term - the implication being that a "theory" is not simply unproven but is purely speculative, a mere hypothesis. Of course, if you can use Wikipedia, much less know anything about science, you know that a theory is far more complicated than this, that it's an analytic concept and that it proceeds from controlled observation - it's deductive - rather than preceding it, as would a hypothesis. It's on this basis that the Darwinian theory of evolution is astoundingly incomparable to the "theory" of creationism.

b. What's even more annoying, of course, is that creationists - and Sherri was doing this, implicitly - collapse i) the Darwinian theory of natural selection as the reason for evolution with ii) the fact of evolution. Evolution has occurred and we have a fossil record that proves it - hell, the non-fossilized remains of much smaller human beings from several centuries and millennia in the past are evidence of evolution, too. What remains is not for us to determine whether evolution occurs, but to determine how it occurs. And while the fossil record for the entire world is small, yes - the conditions under which organic material is fossilized are quite specific and rare - this shouldn't give us reason to doubt that evolution has occurred. It's a problem, yes, but insofar as it presents us only with the transitional forms - because all life is a transitional form that evolved from something else, which is transitioning to something else - and not with a roadmap of how it got there and where it was headed. And that's where the theory bit comes in.

The funny thing is, of course, that I'm actually quite critical of the way that scientific "truth" is produced and sold. Too often, scientists have encouraged us to conflate fact and theory just as eagerly the creationists do. But they get a well-deserved free-pass on this one.

Adventures in TAing, case 5 (in a ? case series)

2009-09-29T19:54:00.003-04:00

It happens that some of the pop culture references I make just don't work, despite my best efforts to keep it as contemporary as possible. Maury and The Bachelorette - effective. Lost - not so much. More generally, I forget that they take certain trends for granted - that, for teenagers, there was never a time before Britney Spears or when slasher and date films weren't, to some degree, self-aware and being actively ironic.

And so, this came out of a discussion of the use of disability in genre films, where I suggested that genre films use physical disability to imply a correlating psychological or moral deformity:

Student 1: That's not true. In Scream, Dewey is disabled but we don't think he's the bad guy.
Neil: Sure, but Scream is an exception. It's poking fun at its genre.
Student 1: No, you're thinking of Scary Movie.
[Other students begin to nod and agree that I must be confusing Scream with Scary Movie.]
Neil: No, I mean Scream.
Student 1: Are we talking about the same movie?
Neil: Scream 1, 2, and 3. With Neve Campbell.
Student 2: With, you know, "Scream". The guy with the white mask.
Neil: With the black robe and the extended face.
Student 3: With Courtney Cox.
Neil: Yeah. It's making fun of horror movies.
[More rumblings that I must still be confusing Scream and Scary Movie.]
Neil: Doesn't anyone remember how all the characters are aware that they're in a horror movie? How they talk about it? How Neve Campbell says that the victims are bimbos who run up the stairs when they should run out the door - and then she runs up the stairs?
Student 1: I don't remember that.
[Looks of confusion and silence from the students]
Neil: Was anyone old enough to see it when it was first released?
[Silence]

The X-Men and identity politics #3: Jason Powell and the limits of mutant activism

2009-09-27T08:42:00.004-04:00

Over on Geoff's blog, Jason Powell has been doing an amazing job of critiquing every issue in Chris Claremont's run on Uncanny X-Men. He's also caused me to reassess some of the things that I wrote in the paper that I have linked in the sidebar - to acknowledge some material that I had either ignored or forgotten. So this is write-up is something of a corrective post-script.

Jason has just wrapped up his analysis of UXM #235-8, a storyline set in the mutant-enslaving African nation of Genosha (not so subtly modeled on South Africa's apartheid state). This is not the same team of apologist and acculturationist X-Men from the Lee/Kirby or Claremont/Byrne days that I complained about. As Jason notes, this is a team that doesn't find a world order that's worth protecting and decides to attack it instead: "Wolverine’s oath to tear down an entire nation built on racism feels utterly right for an X-Men story. As if this is the kind of thing they should have been doing from Day One."

Jason's probably right, though I have to give him additional credit for having revealed both how gradual and convincing the slow transformation of the X-Men - on the level of individual character, Storm and Wolverine, but also the composition of the team itself - from an anti-mutant police force to a pro-mutant terrorist cell is achieved. And there's no denying that the team that tries to destory Genosha is composed of terrorists - sympathetic ones that should encourage us to avoid reductive explanations of terrorism, but terrorists nonetheless. Jason remarks that one of the issues - and I think this comment is applicable to the storyline as a whole - is "the apex of Claremont’s creativity and expression on the Uncanny X-Men series". It's also, sadly, an indication of the concept's limits.

The storyline completes the reversal that began with the old Brotherhood of Evil Mutants becoming the government-sanctioned super-team Freedom Force - the X-Men have, effectively, become the new Brotherhood. That Claremont could pull this off speaks volumes to his skill in building the transformation up slowly and carefully over a period of years, but it's telling that he blows the team up over the next 12 months. You can turn the X-Men into terrorists, but you can't then write an ongoing book about terrorist "heroes" who punish governments for human rights abuses. (At least, not until Warren Ellis and Mark Millar did so with The Authority, which feels as if it owes something to this version of Claremont's X-Men.)

Nor could Claremont, after writing such a convincing and inspiring change of direction, take a step-backward and return to superheroics-as-usual. And so, after the Inferno crossover that has nothing to do with politics and a couple of stand-alone issues, Nimrod reappears to kill Rogue, Wolverine and Longshot leave, Storm is thought dead, and the other four X-Men sacrifice themselves to escape certain death. And then Claremont builds the concept back up from the ground, (and, in so doing, creates something quite unlike what we've seen before) reunites and returns the group to face a different kind of Genoshan threat, and is summarily removed from the book.

But for those few months...

The creationist's guide to Darwin...

2009-09-25T20:01:00.011-04:00

Kirk Cameron and company are releasing a new edition of Darwin's Origin of Species, including a new introduction (by Ray Comfort) that's full of non-sequiturs, fallacious arguments, and anecdotes from scientists-turned-Christians*. (And, occasionally, something kinda useful - like descriptions of Darwin's more problematic premises about women and race. Totally eschewing the fact that Darwin was actually quite the anti-racist in his time. And ignoring the fact that the Bible is far more misogynistic and racist than Darwin could have ever hoped to be. But I digress...)

The hits come early and don't stop coming. Take this ill-conceived metaphor for natural selection:

Consider for a moment whether you could ever believe
this publication happened by accident. Here’s the argument:
There was nothing. Then paper appeared, and ink fell from
nowhere onto the flat sheets and shaped itself into perfectly
formed letters of the English alphabet. Initially, the letters
said something like this: “fgsn&k cn1clxc dumbh cckvkduh
vstupidm ncncx.” As you can see, random letters rarely produce
words that make sense. But in time, mindless chance formed
them into the order of meaningful words with spaces between
them. Periods, commas, capitals, italics, quotes, paragraphs,
margins, etc., also came into being in the correct placements.
The sentences then grouped themselves to relate to each other,
giving them coherence. Page numbers fell in sequence at the
right places, and headers, footers, and footnotes appeared from
nowhere on the pages, matching the portions of text to which
they related. The paper trimmed itself and bound itself into
a Bible. The ink for the cover fell from different directions,
being careful not to incorrectly mingle with the other colors,
forming itself into the graphics and title.

First things first - no scientist believes that there was ever "nothing", nor did matter come from "nowhere". And regardless, Darwin doesn't concern himself with the beginnings of the universe, so the relevance of this passage to his book could only be apparent to - and be written by - someone who doesn't understand the book or its theories. Or science, for that matter. "Mindless chance" hits closer to the mark, if "mindless" is meant to mean "without direction from on high". "Chance" a bit pejorative for my taste - insofar as an organisms competition for resources depends on factors beyond its own control, chance plays a big role. But biology determined whether, say, dinosaurs would be wiped out by an unlucky encounter with an asteroid while alligators would survive, not random chance, which is what "chance" here seems to imply. And that bit about ink "being careful not to incorrectly mingle"? He's mixing up his theories - its creationism that thinks the universe can be correct or incorrect according to some mystical standard, not evolution.

Who proof-reads this crap, anyway? Certainly none of the scientists who granted them testimonials. But anyway...

To liken DNA to a book is a gross understatement.

Actually, it isn't. Because "understatement" implies that the analogy, on some level, works. It doesn't. To liken DNA to a book is an exercise in absurdity.

After completing the mapping of the chimp genome in 2005,
evolutionists are now hailing the result as “the most dramatic
confirmation yet” that chimps and humans have common
ancestry. Their overwhelming “proof” is the finding that the
genetic difference is 4 percent—which is interesting proof,
because it’s actually twice the amount that they’ve been
claiming for years.

Those sneaky scientists - hypothesizing one thing and then, after years of research and testing, amending their position slightly. Damned flip-floppers, why can't they remain stubborn and unmoving in the face of new and contradictory evidence? You know, just like religion? Well, that's the scientific method for you.

In addition, even if the difference is only 4 percent of
the 3 billion base pairs of DNA in every cell, that represents
120,000,000 entries in the DNA code that are different!

And, oh, about 2.9 billion that are the same - 2.90 billion versus 0.12 billion.

Men and monkeys also have another fundamental
difference: humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes while
chimps have 24, so the DNA isn’t as similar as you’ve been
led to believe.

Who is "you" in this sentence? Someone who knows nothing about science and about how remarkably close, when compared to the rest of nature, this similarity actually is? Maybe someone who is easily fooled by the lack of context that's presented in this introduction? Because it can't be a "you" who knows anything about biology.

But I've wasted enough time. A commentator interlaces some hilarious refutations of Kirk Cameron's video introduction to the book here:

And a brief and hilarious rebuttal to Ray Comfort's video extolling the common-sense linkage of bananas and intelligent design. Except that common-sense ignores their actual origin and spread across the globe - their evolution, if you will - which is part mutation and part cultivation and is explained in more detail at the end of the video:

Scary stuff.

*Remember how arguments would be resolved in team games when you were a kid? When there were no adults around, I mean. If someone on your team showed any indecision, much less entertained the thought that the other team was right, it didn't matter that he or she was the only one - a tiny minority - that thought so. Some jerk on the other team would take that as proof that you were wrong - even though the rest of your team was certain you were right.

This guy is that jerk.

(Besides, for every Antony Flew there's a Bart Ehrman. And even Flew, held up as evidence that science can lead a person to God, is a deist who believes in the existence of an unknowable, disinterested original force that he calls God, not the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God.)