China, the Olympics, and political games

There's been a lot of talk recently about whether athletes should boycott the Beijing Olympics, in light of the recent protests/riots and an army crackdown that's seen between 16 (the Chinese government's number) and 80 (the Tibetan government-in-exile's number) Tibetans killed. The talk won't lead anywhere, of course - if China's human rights record wasn't bad enough to deny them the Olympics in the first place, then drawing more attention to what we already know certainly isn't going to convert anyone when it's too late to shift the games to a new location.

But I found this interesting (as reported in the Toronto Star) - it's a quote that comes from the CEO of the Canadian Olympic Committee, Chris Rudge, and it seems rather indicative of the international sports community's response to the controversy:

"I think particularly to use the athletes who have made so many sacrifices, to use them as pawns in a game that is politically, idealistically and socially very complicated would be unfortunate. I don't think we can ask one constituency, which are a force for good, to stand up and act on everyone's behalf."

Too bad it doesn't work that way. In fact, I'd say that it's a myopic* argument that takes as its premise that international sports is somehow disconnected from international politics. Sure, he's right to say that boycotts are part of a 'political game' - but so is participation. As ostensible participants in China's Olympic games, the athletes and their countries - Canada included - have unavoidably become tacit supporters of the Chinese government and their actions. But how that has escaped the notice of so many people - including the people responsible for international sports policy - is beyond me.

*I had originally written "idiotic", but decided that "myopic" is likely more accurate. And prettier to read.

* * *

Update: At least France's foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, is honest about how politics play in the decision to compete in the Beijing Olympics. Depressing, but honest:

"When you're dealing in international relations with countries as important as China, obviously when you make economic decisions it's sometimes at the expense of human rights," he added. "That's elementary realism.''

The 'new' social network and netiquette

An acquaintance of mine, Kate, who's doing a grad degree in Internet Studies, has written a number of blog entries about Facebook and the way that it's changing our perceptions of internet socializing and expectations of privacy. She also makes various mentions of how it's altered expectations with regard to who is deserving of being a 'friend' on these networks.

Among other things, Kate writes that "suddenly, everyone’s grandmother, boss and ex boyfriend was using facebook and wanted to be your friend". Most interestingly for me, she - among many others, I should point out - also notes that it's now considered rude to refuse a friend request on Facebook from just about anyone. That guy that you only kinda knew in Grade 8 and haven't seen since? The girl from high school who you didn't even remember? A co-worker you don't particularly like? You can only decline them at the risk of looking like a jerk - which you will inevitably hear about, since you almost definitely have a half-dozen or more friends in common. It's like we're all captains of a schoolyard dodgeball game, picking teams from the kids along the fence and dreading that awkward moment when someone gets picked last.

This is in stark contrast to previous social networking apps - Friendster, Livejournal, etc. I can remember getting a Livejournal account in 2002 (I think) and my old roommate explained that he didn't want to lj-friend me - and it wasn't a weird, uncommon, or unexpected sort of thing to say. There was some expectation of privacy with these things - an expectation that's totally disappeared in the latest generation of social networks. Now I have my grandma and my parents on my Facebook.

Why I like 'Stuff White People Like'

By now, you've probably seen Stuff White People Like, a hilarious send-up of hipster/urban, upwardly-mobile and aspiring-upwardly-mobile
-but-currently-living-in-someone's
-basement (mostly male) white folks between 18 and 35 and their sense of self-satisfaction and intellectual superiority. (I added the link to the side of my blog exactly 9 days ago, but I'm not mentioning that for your information so much as to impress you with how I knew about it before you did.) If you haven't, click on that link.

What's emerged in a number of the responses, of course, is how particular the author's sense of whiteness is - my specificity in the last paragraph, for instance, has a certain ridiculousness but also encapsulates their target subject (and target audience) perfectly. For instance, from the entry on '#84 T-Shirts':

"It is also imperative to understand that faux vintage shirts (”Getting Lucky in Kentucky”) are completely unacceptable. They are beloved by the wrong kind of white people, and must be avoided at all costs."

While this "wrong kind of white people" is implicitly present throughout the list, they're only mentioned explicitly in the rare entry. This makes sense since they are, within both the logic of this list and, I would argue, hegemonic racial logic on the whole, not white - or, at best, off-white. In Bobby Noble's first book, he argues that "whiteness often emerges as a distinct racial identity when it can be identified as somehow primitive or inhuman". I would suggest that there's a bit of a critical slippage between white people (in the general sense) and whiteness (in the theoretical sense) in this quote - that the whiteness Noble describes is actually the off-whiteness of certain white people that I described above. I think this is what Noble is getting at when he subsequently says that "[t]o see a white as a white rather than as just 'another person' that white needs to be marked out as different from those white who observe him/her". This sort of work is most often subtly (and effectively) accomplished through the denigration of the "wrong kind of white people" as 'white trash', the invocation of 'taste' or 'class' (in both the economic and cultural respects), or any number of similar variants. Stuff White People Like manages, in its hyperbolic way, to be quite revealing of these mechanisms.

It also manages to prevent white people from turning invisible once the passing blow is made at off-white and non-white people. Numerous critical race scholars have noted that whiteness is characterized by an invisibility - it is, contradictorily, so hypervisible that it assumes normality and a taken-for-grantedness, and so escapes notice as a race or color. A number of my white friends have admitted a certain ambivalence or discomfort with the site that they simply can't articulate, and my guess would be that some of that discomfort relates to the blog's refusal to let whiteness remain invisible and to scrutinize its taken-for-grantedness. As far as subversive gestures go, this isn't a grand one - but it's a start.

Two related but not entirely connected notes:

-One of the most amusing features of every entry is the section that tells off/non-white people how, in understanding why white people like the given item, they can turn the situation to their advantage. Often, interestingly, this advice would have the effect of rendering those same mechanisms of white privilege invisible once more - to the white person, anyway - since they encourage affirming whiteness or assuaging white guilt. Sure, the knowing off/non-white person isn't fooled, but were they ever fooled?

-It's also been interesting to see how many of my non-white friends are troubled by their resemblance to the white person that the blog interpellates - with respect to both the implied white subject and the implied (white) reader. Whiteness is, after all, a concept and a label for a field of racialized social power, and not actually a reference to an essentialized body or type of skin. That's no clearer than when someone who identifies as non-white realizes that s/he is, according to the website, white as a daisy.

How to "win" an internet debate when you're wrong

I recently involved myself (as I'm apt to do) in a totally absurd argument about artistic genius, social influence, and individual effort over at Comicboards.com. (Yes, the familiar cliché about having to post message after message because "Someone is wrong on the internet!" does apply.) It basically amounted to someone claiming that, for example, Harry Potter is the creation of an individual genius that transcends issues of influence and cultural antecedents, and two others of us arguing that it's absolutely insipid to claim that Rowling acted in a vacuum and that Harry Potter could not have existed if, for example, Tolkien had never written Lord of the Rings. To anyone with a modicum of knowledge of social or cultural theory, this is hardly revolutionary - at its simplest level, our ability to communicate relies on our use of a symbolic order that precedes and exceeds us, and within which we are constantly acting and being acted upon.

To this other debater, though, this is an opportunity to invoke some of the stupidest and most underhanded means of declaring victory in an internet debate. So my issue isn't so much with this particular argument as it is with the sorts of strategies that she deployed in order to fake a "win". This list is incomplete (feel free to propose new items), but succinctly sums up the unfortunate turn that this discussion took in the past 24 hours or so:

1. The common sense victory - Reduce your position to an unfair, but totally undeniable, truism and assert that your opponent's disagreement with you equals a rejection of the truism. (For instance, assert that you're just supporting the artist, whose craft requires hard work and dedication (the truism), and that anyone who doubts the "wholly individual" genius of an artist lacks respect for that artist's enormous efforts.)

2. The moral victory - Announce that you're walking away from the debate. (Bonus points for returning because you just couldn't let your opponent continue to get it wrong.)*

3. The victory in absentia - Mock one of your opponents in a forum that is restricted or to which s/he doesn't have access, but to which you know a number of other participants in the forum have access and will be able to witness your victory dance. (Bonus points for classiness if 3 follows directly after 2.)

4. The lowest-common denominator victory - If all else fails, play the intellectual laziness card by suggesting that your opponents' efforts to refute your argument - via various appeals to textual authority, social theory, and lived human experience, as well as their need to correct your theoretical errors - and refusal to agree with you is evidence of irrationality and a closed-mind. (This is especially effective if your opponent is right.)

5. The ad-hominem victory - Ignore all the arguments and poke fun at your opponent with a non sequitur or other incomprehensible and ostensibly humorous gesture in order to emphasize that while his/her seriousness is surely derived from insecurity and anxiety, you are so comfortable in the truth of your opinion that you can openly joke about it. (Although I'm lost on exactly what this one is supposed to accomplish and how it could fool anyone.)

It's incredibly difficult to do any of this offline - or, at least, to do without someone calling you on it immediately - but all too common online. And this is why I sometimes hate the internet.

*I am, of course, occasionally guilty of engaging in this one myself.

Big Brother's bizarre definition of racism

Can someone explain this to me? I was watching Big Brother (I know, I know...) last week, where a real-life (white) couple has been split up and assigned to different team-couples, both of which were nominated for elimination. If that's not absolutely clear, it's unimportant anyway: this is the confusing part. The girlfriend campaigned against her boyfriend, explaining to the other players that he's a racist and that he was upset that she had previously dated a black guy. When word got back to the boyfriend that this was happening, she pulled him aside and explained that she hadn't called him a racist (which she had, but I digress...), but rather she had said that he doesn't approve of interracial relationships. And the boyfriend - rather than remaining horrified over what she had said or even over her inability to recognize that a wholesale objection to interracial relationships is, yes, quite explicitly racist - was relieved and they made-up.

So...can someone tell me what I'm missing? Are there people who actually think that an undifferentiated opposition to interracial dating is not somehow racist? So much so that they don't even bother to explain such obvious nonsense on tv?

Lost and irony

Lost has really refined the whole last-shot-surprise-reveal thing this season, so much so that its predictability seems to be turning a few people off. One thing that I don't see getting a lot of attention, though, is how well they're working the thriller approach that they seem to be riding.

Consider the very different ways that irony is deployed in the last two episodes. In 4x03, Sayid tells Locke that the day he trust Ben is the day that he sells his soul; in the flash-forward, he's working for Ben and trusting him with his life. A week later, 4x04 gives us a flash-forward where we're told Kate has a son and an island-time narrative where Kate assures Sawyer that she isn't pregnant with his baby. 4x03 has primed us to believe that this exchange means it must be Sawyer's baby, (and Kate's awkward exchanges with Jack in the flash-forward further suggest this) but the producers play with that expectation in order to swerve us again at the end. The baby's not Sawyer's, it's not even Kate's - it's Aaron, Claire's son. (And then, of course, you remember that the psychic told Claire that she had to raise Aaron, which makes things that much more ominous...)

So maybe Lost has been a bit one-note thus far. But as long as they manage to keep playing-off what they've done without obviously repeating their tricks, it still works ridiculously well.

Cute, though slight, note on Lost

Trivia from lostpedia.com:

* Jacob was portrayed in 3x20 by prop master Rob Kyker. (No word yet on who provided the face in 4x1 - assuming, of course, that it was Jacob's.)
* The voice that speaks the line "Help Me" in 3x20 belongs to executive producer Carlton Cuse.
* "Jacob" is J.J. Abrams' middle name. (Jeffrey being his first name.)

I've noted, as have many others, various meta-levels at work in Lost many times before. Jacob seems like an obvious target for more self-reflexivity of this sort, so I probably shouldn't be surprised by some of these details. And while I have to admit that it's likely a mistake to read Jacob more particularly as a trope on Abrams, Cuse, and company, (Though they do say that they have a "Bible" for the remainder of the show, don't they? Hmm...) I have to admit that it's awfully tempting.

Adventures in TAing, case 2 (in a ? case series)

Case 2: Students' reactions run the gamut from bemusement to total disbelief when I tell them that first-person pronouns are perfectly acceptable in their written work - and not only that, but that I expect to be able to 'hear' the voice of a human being in their writing, rather than some approximation of a robot aimed at spitting out objective proofs. When I posed the question of voice to about 35 students in a class last week, a whole two thought that 'I' statements were valid in scholarly writing - and both were quick to slap on restrictions. One student asked me if it wasn't better to use indirect statements like "One can argue that...", though this strikes me as the worst way to feign an authoritative voice - not only is "one" clearly a poorly disguised "I", but the sentence is passive and sounds entirely uncertain of what it's about to claim. Can one argue or is one arguing? And who talks like that, anyway?

(For the longest time, I suspected that this was a failing of Ontario high schools. While, personally, I can recall learning the 'persuasive essay' form in high school, this was in Grade 13, which has since been abolished. But now that I have 3rd and 4th year students in my English tutorials, who have spent years writing papers in whatever disciplinary-specific fashion they've been taught - this is a class for English minors - it would seem that the high school system can't be entirely to blame.)

The X-Men and identity politics, pt. 1

In response to a complaint at the X-Universe Message Board that there are hardly any gay mutants - despite the fact that the mutants in the X-Men's universe are popularly understood as analogous to queer or racially Othered youth - a poster named Tiger Shark wrote the following: "the X-men is already a metephor for minorties everywhere and of all kinds, so there's no need to trot out a 'gay' X-Man just to fill a quota".

There's something immediately appealing about this logic, though I'd suggest that it ultimately fails. It's appealing, I think, because claims to X-Men's metaphoricity are incredibly seductive. Under the logic of metaphor, an implicit comparison allows for the attributes of a to be read on to b. So X-Men is not just a superhero comic - depending on who you talk to, it's also about race relations and civil rights, homosexuality and homophobia, 'the red scare', Jewish-American assimilation, and/or teen alienation.

That said, a metaphorical relation implies equivalence, and some of these metaphors are more equal than others: given the overwhelming normativity - the characters are almost universally whiten, malen, able-bodied, middle-to-upper-class, and heterosexual - of the X-Men, the race and sexuality readings can be contradicted and deconstructed without much effort.

The same poster later accused me of "being too literal" and "lost in minutiae", though these sound like reasonable demands to place on language. We should be skeptical of a comic book that, literally, presents us with dozens of heterosexual characters but asks us to understand (misrecognize?) them figuratively as non-heterosexual. A certain degree of dissimilarity is expected in a metaphor, but this isn't just minutiae that I'm getting stuck on - it's a fairly evident contradiction that's embodied in nearly every X-character.

[This was all inspired by a specific textual incident, but I'll get to that in the next installment. My apologies if you've read my 'Mutant Readers, Reading Mutants' paper, which I posted here, and this sounds redundant. But most people don't want to bother with a 20 page document, and it feels helpful and necessary for me to rewrite some of those arguments in a more concise manner and with some tweaking and more contemporary examples.]

A prescient exchange in advance of Heath Ledger's death

[Note: I promise to get back to posting stuff with more regularity. In the meantime...]

Following news of Heath Ledger's death, a friend made a passing comparison yesterday to Brandon Lee as another actor who died quite suddenly and unexpectedly just when it appeared that he'd reached the A-list. (And I just checked: Brandon Lee was also 28.) Streebo and james, two readers/commenters at Geoff Klock's blog, also recalled a thread in which Geoff responded to my criticisms of Ledger's Joker - which may be his final character, given that his only subsequent film is still shooting - and in the same thread I noted a certain visual similarity to Lee's Crow. And then our dialogue gets even creepier. I recovered these bits from the comment section on Geoff Klock's blog:


neilshyminsky said...
Tuesday, December 18, 2007 3:21 PM EST
Having watched the trailer, I'm also noticing a lot of similarities between Ledger's Joker and The Crow: the aesthetic, the posture, the stare. Which all, again, seems very un-Joker-like.

geoff klock said...
Tuesday, December 18, 2007 3:35 PM EST
un-Joker like is only half the problem. The real problem is why on earth you would want the Crow haunting your movie?

Headphones v. Speakers

[Getting back into the habit of posting on here after a few weeks off - please forgive my tardiness! This is just a short post, though.]

I made my 'best of' music list before Christmas and left Panda Bear's "Person Pitch" off. I had listened to it a couple times over the speakers on my computer and it left me completely unmoved. But when I read Pitchfork's list later that day and saw that they called "a headphones record", I was reminded that my first response to The Knife's "Silent Shout" worked just like that - completely unimpressed with how it failed to fill the room, but blown away by what it seemed I couldn't hear before when I played it on my ipod. And, just like "Silent Shout", it feels like an entirely different album now that I've listened to it over headphones while riding the subway. And, honestly, I have no idea why there would be such a huge difference. (It's not as if this happens to me all the time.)

Music Lists: 2007

I'm going to be blogging only very infrequently over the next 2 weeks, so I might as well indulge in a bit of list-making before I take a vacation. So here's some comments on music that grabbed my attention in the past year...

5 Pleasant Surprises

5. Mika - Life in Cartoon Motion
'Grace Kelly' is pure joy; the rest of the album is almost as fun, but it's also entirely vacuous. That's why it's a 'pleasant surprise' and not in the 'favorite/best' list.
4. Kelly Clarkson - My December
If 'Irvine' is any indication of what she's capable of, I could actually start buying Kelly Clarkson albums. This album makes this list on that one, Radiohead-ripping song alone.
3. Rihanna - Good Girl Gone Bad
Likewise, this album could have been 10 tracks, all 'Umbrella', and it would be here for that reason alone.
2. Spiral Beach - Ball
Teenagers have no business writing a song like 'Kind of Beast'. Or the rest of this album.
1. Bruce Springsteen - Magic
'Radio Nowhere' could've been written by The Boss in the 70s. Springsteen gets his teeth back.

9 Disappointments

9. Arcade Fire - Neon Bible
To be fair, almost anything was going to be a disappointment.
8. Kevin Drew - Spirit If...
The 'Broken Social Scene Presents' title should have clued me in: it's a Broken Social Scene album, only not as good.
7. Klaxons - Myths of the Near Future
The first song is catchy; the rest of the album is exhaustingly just more of the same, track after track.
6. Dragonette - Galore
There are three songs that I really love on this album; the rest belong on really bad pop radio.
5. Stars - In Our Bedroom After the War
How can an album whose title references both sex and war be filled with such dreadfully middling AOR MOR?
4. Editors - An End Has a Start
I was so bored that I cleared all but two songs off of my iTunes.
3. Paul McCartney - Memory Almost Full
McCartney has released consistently good-to-great solo material for over a decade, now. I suppose the time was ripe for a snoozer.
2. Timbaland Presents: Shock Value
How is it that someone so good at doing material for other people's albums can put out such an awful album himself?
1. The New Pornographers - Challengers
I love the title-track, but didn't the New Pornographers used to be, like, a rock - or, at the very least, pop-rock - band? Nearly every song here is an aimless sort of mid-tempo indie-folk number. Which would be forgivable, I suppose, if it weren't so boring.

9 Favorites
(It's far easier for me to describe my disdain than it is to explain why I like the music that I like, so I'll just include my favorite songs from each album.)

9. Radiohead - In Rainbows
'Bodysnatchers', 'Nude'
8. Los Campesinos! - Sticking Fingers Into Sockets
'We Throw Parties, You Throw Knives', 'You! Me! Dancing!'
7. Caribou - Andorra
'After Hours', 'Sandy'
6. Black Kids - Wizard of Ahhhs
'I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance with You', 'Hurricane Jane'
5. Arcade Fire - Neon Bible
'Keep the Car Running', 'Ocean of Noise'
4. Iron & Wine - The Shepherd's Dog
'Resurrection Fern', 'Wolves'
3. Feist - The Reminder
'My Moon My Man', '1234'
2. Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?
'Suffer for Fashion', 'Gronlandic Edit', 'She's a Rejector'
1. LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver
'North American Scum', 'All My Friends', 'Someone Great'

Juno and (un)deserved endings

We watched 'Juno' yesterday - I enjoyed it and laughed embarrassingly in at least a dozen places, but there was one nagging little problem that I only figured out when I got home.

The story is largely divided into two parts: Juno and friend/boyfriend Paulie (and school) and Juno and the adoptive parents of her baby, Vanessa and Mark. The former scenes are overly witty and sardonic - not unlike Knocked Up or Superbad if they had been directed by Wes Andersen, I suppose. The latter part is still clever and snide, but it's heavier and tinged with an anxiety and cynicism that's much more recognizably adult and is entirely absent in the other scenes. Juno (and, too a much smaller extent, her dad) is the only common element.

When the movie ends, each half seems to rely on the other to bail it out: Vanessa and Mark's story ends well in advance of the film's conclusion, which saves us from dwelling on its tragedy, and Juno and Paulie's relationship takes on a sudden emotional weight that seems to have been produced almost entirely by an implicit comparison to Mark and Vanessa's relationship. (This comparison is made by Juno, of course, so as ensure that the viewers aren't entirely responsible for figuring out why the Juno-Paulie situation has a sudden dramatic weight.) And it feels, to some degree, like that weight is unearned. And maybe it is... but, despite myself, I find that the figurative move still seems to work in the end because of Juno. (And Ellen Page, of course, for showing some ridiculous range.) The whole genre exercise that Juno's school friends and family are taking part in may not deserve the emotionally weighty ending, but Juno herself does - and that's enough.

Follow-up: The baseball race game

Note: The baseball race game probably doesn't make a lot of sense unless you read my previous post. So go and do that first.


I quickly compiled a group of eight ostensibly black all-star baseball players. Without cheating by attempting to Google names or teams or what have you, can you tell me which four players are - within the race logic that C.C. Sabathia described below - black and which four are not? No trick questions - four are American born-and-raised and four are originally from the Caribbean. (I removed the logos from their hats to take away that potential clue, but I've otherwise left the original pictures untouched.)

After you've made your guesses, click on the comments to find the answers...

Baseball's C.C. Sabathia on black and black-but-not-black

Back in March, Cleveland Indians pitcher C.C. Sabathia made a big deal of lamenting the lack of African American players in professional baseball. ESPN and others picked up on it, in part because Sabathia was very deliberately trying to draw attention to the North Vallejo Little League that he sponsors, as well as the Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities and Urban Youth Academy programs, which are aimed at young black American boys. Explains Sabathia: "I want to show them. I came from there. These are the fields I played on. There is a way out, and it could be baseball."

But the issue is a slippery one, and there are major problems with the discussion in the way that Sabathia and ESPN framed and continue to frame it. They use African American and black interchangeably and synonymously; so not only are all African Americans black, but it seems that all blacks are African American. Having set a sort of syllogism thusly, Sabathia seems to reach the conclusion that ballplayers of African descent but who are not American (ie. black Hispanic players from the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Venezuela, etc.) are not black, and begins to problematically demarcate the difference between black and, I suppose, black-but-not-really-black.

To this point, Sabathia makes some interesting references to sight and the visibility of black (and black-but-not-black) ballplayers, and I want to quickly tease out how complex they are. He suggests that it's important that black bodies be visible on the field, since, he suggests, black American kids aren't playing because they don't see themselves represented:

"They don't see us playing," Sabathia said. "When I grew up, I was a pitcher and I liked the Oakland A's. I liked Dave Stewart. I was a big left-handed hitter, so I liked Dave Parker. You had Barry Bonds playing in San Francisco, guys like that. There were a lot of guys to look up to."

This is all well and good, except that the number of black bodies is actually increasing - it's just that those bodies are, within Sabathia's logic, black-but-not-black. But for Sabathia, this is a problem - these bodies are misrecognized/mistaken by kids for black bodies. So even if kids do appear to see themselves represented, it isn't actually bringing them to the game because it's a false recognition:

"I don't think people understand that there is a problem. They see players like Jose Reyes and Carlos Delgado and just assume that they're black."

How black American kids intuit that Jose Reyes and Carlos Delgado aren't actually 'black', I don't know. For Sabathia's logic to work, we have to assume that something about Reyes' and Delgado's inauthenticity explains how they fail to attract African Americans to play ball, that the misrecognition at work is either eventually defeated or is itself self-defeating. It's a very white project, though, to participate in this sort of game aimed at drawing a line between those inside and those outside of a well-defined category of the proper citizen, or proper player. It's obviously xenophobic, yes, but I suppose that it seems somehow less obviously racist when this sort of disturbing nationalist rhetoric comes out of a black man's mouth.

Because we haven't had any Islamaphobic panic in a while...

There's nothing quite like a domestic abuse tragedy to work the media into a frothing imminent-religious-war frenzy. A 16 year-old girl in Mississauga (a suburb of Toronto) was killed by her dad on Monday - what makes this story such big news, though, is that it their family was "devoutly" Muslim and the girl had, against her family's wishes, stopped wearing her hijab and started dressing like her non-Muslim friends. The quotes and commentary from the article that's on the Toronto Star site is predictable and problematic:

*She wanted to be "free" and independent of her family's devout Muslim beliefs. But that was a problem.

*"Her dad wanted her to be a person who followed the religion. But she wanted to follow her own rules, wear her own clothes."

*Wendy Horton, executive director of Etobicoke's Youth Without Shelter, said that while she's shocked by the level of violence in this situation, she isn't surprised by its root cause. Parents who want their children to remain faithful to old world ways are often at odds with kids growing up in Western society.

*"She wanted to show her beauty but her dad wouldn't let her."

This sort've stuff is also common in the network TV reports - Global TV was calling the murder an instance of "culture clash" and reported that the girl just wanted to "be herself". The Globe and Mail's article, at least, offers some another perspective, differentiating between the domestic abuse and the Islamophobia that it's inspired:

*Across Canada, the killing has taken on larger proportions. On call-in shows and websites, many have used the incident as part of a wider indictment of fundamentalist Islam. One Canadian conservative blogger suggested Canadians boycott taxicabs driven by Muslims. In a statement Tuesday, the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations called on Canadians of all faiths to address issues of domestic abuse, and called for “the strongest possible prosecution” of those responsible for Ms. Parvez's killing.

The point they're driving at, if only implicitly by way of the CCAIR quote, is that this isn't an Islam v. West/Christian thing. There are domineering parents of every faith and abusers can find any reason to hurt or kill their family. I'm completely intolerant of fundamentalism, but the problem here is that our attention is being drawn to a particular kind of fundamentalism, which manages to simultaneously absolve other fundamentalisms of fault and excuse their abusers as somehow lesser. (At least they don't kill you, right? And if they did, at least it would be, it seems, for a better reason!)

While I was marking...

I had the Beatles Anthology DVDs playing in the background while I marked today, though I would occasionally look up when they played some archival concert footage. I noticed that the clip from Sweden just seemed...wrong. I started tapping out the beat on the table with my hand and realized that what was bothering me was how the audience was clapping on the beat. (That is, on the first and third beats of a four beat bar of music. Don't ask me to explain what actually means - I can't, for the life of me, tell you.) I can recall reading numerous times that white pop music audiences always clapped on-beat until bands like the Beatles and Stones started appropriating jazz and blues music, but I've never really understood how it is people ever found the on-beat. I tried imitating it and lost it within seconds every time.

Thoughts on some other comics I recently bought...

Buffy: Season 8 #9 - Count me among the people for whom this thing is just 'meh'. I don't really get why 'No Future For You' necessitated 4 issues when it seems like, at most, a two-parter. But my problem is mostly that it's a retread: Faith has to have a crisis of 'faith' in Buffy and her own self-worth, which was already done to death in the TV shows and doesn't do much of anything new for us. Her new status quo with Giles seems somewhat interesting (though I don't totally get the necessity of operating out of Buffy's reach), but I could have just as easily done without the story that led to it. (It fits into the big bad's plan, of course, as explained at the issue's close, it seems to me that the story should still manage to stand on its own.)

The Umbrella Academy #3 - I bought the first two issues a week before this issue was released. Had I written about those, my comments would've been positively glowing. As it is, this issue is more perfunctory - the characters have been introduced and their rather odd relationships established, so this is the first big-battle issue where we get to see that the anti-hero really is a hero, that the sister who betrayed them really does care, etc. These clichés aside, the first two issues - featuring such quirks as the gorilla-body transplant, the 60-year old time-traveler in a 10 year-old's body, the orchestra whose symphony will end the world - have earned plenty of goodwill. And Ba is always incredibly, especially when he cranks up the Mignola-ness to an appropriate level.

There's a Law of Diminishing Returns joke in here, somewhere

I don't think I'm prone to hyperbole, so don't think I'm being rash when I say that Ultimates 3 #1 was the worst comic I've read all year. It's maybe even the worst I've read in the last couple years.

It takes a particularly awful comic to activate my continuity-geekism. (For those non-comic, theory-friendly friends of mine, continuity geeks are my abject.) For instance: Thor's hammer uses the mainstream universe design, not the Ultimate universe one; Thor's dialect is similarly wrong; the Wasp has changed races (!?). As well, the military-style uniforms have been abandoned for superhero costumes without explanation, which signals a far more troubling shift - Millar's Ultimates might have lacked subtlety, but he aimed for a certain verisimilitude that is lacking in the mainstream Marvel world and his stories were driven by their political texts and subtexts. In failing to ground Ultimates 3 in this way, Loeb has somehow managed to entirely miss what made the Ultimates something other than the Avengers.

Need more examples of its awfulness? Well, we're introduced to a villain (Venom) who lacks any character or motivation, and who spends most of his screen-time battling a new Ultimate (Black Panther) who isn't even given a line of dialogue. Why is he even there? Don't know. Sensing that the story is just awful, I guess, the Wasp delivers a particularly painful recap of what's happened between Ultimates 2 and 3, which serves only to remind us why the 'Previously in...' pages that usually appear at the beginning of these books were such a good idea. Madureira's art is, I suspect, quite spectacular - but it's hard to find under a ridiculously dense wash of digital-paint that muddies his lines. Why Marvel would want to obscure Madureira's strengths like this, I don't know - I can't think of anyone in their right mind who would try so hard to ruin the one thing this comic has going for it.

But I don't know why they let such an unrepentant piece of shit like this go to print in the first place, either. If anyone recommends this thing to you, never ask them for reading advice again. In fact, you should probably stop talking to them altogether.

The hysterical Joker: Batman is a hobo?

Wow. I shouldn't be surprised any more, but it seems that every Joker picture for this new movie is worse than the pictures that preceded it. The same complaints apply, so I won't aim to repeat myself: if you want to read my old objections, you can find them here.

What's funny, though, is that I was only just complaining about where they've gone wrong with this interpretation of the Joker to someone last night. I noted that one of my favorite interpretations of the Joker is as a sort of hyper-hysteric - sort of what Morrison attempted in Arkham Asylum, though perhaps not so literally. Think of it this way: The Joker's personality is less a declaration - "I'm really crazy!" - and more a question in the form of a demand - "I'm really crazy: tell me who I am!" That he's presented in the comics as a flamboyant, arbitrarily homicidal, and fantastically neurotic crime boss is meant to say more about Batman than the Joker, as such - that hysterical demand is made of Batman, in particular, and so the Joker reflects (and inverts) the crime-fighting Batman's own neuroses, disciplined violence, and repression.

Given that Heath Ledger's Joker looks like something of a tramp or an out-of-work clown, I can only guess that Christian Bale's Batman will be a hobo-detective. Maybe he'll trade in his utility belt for a bindle?

Fyi, for people studying comics in and around the Toronto area...

Two notes on 'Lars and the Real Girl'

1.
I always appreciate it when a film that loosely models itself on the familiar structures of the rom-com or family melodrama genres. Convention suggests that there should be a scene where someone decides to embarrass or humiliate Lars by pointing out that he's crazy/perverted for thinking that Bianca, his real doll, is a real human being, and Lars should deny that it's true, but suffer a breakdown of some sort because he knows that it is. (Similar to any one of those movies premised on the main character having a secret that is revealed by the antagonist before the protagonist can reveal it/come to terms with it himself.) Thankfully, Lars and the Real Girl teases at this potential swerve on very briefly - and in a totally convincing way - and never revisits the cliché again.

2.
The film also has an atypical take on Lars' "delusions", though I'm less certain of how that take makes me feel. While it's suggested that Lars' creation of Bianca is connected to his father's recent death and his sister-in-law's pregnancy, there is no simple and obvious causation - the moments in which his delusion start and stop don't correspond in any direct fashion. It's also never presented as a pathological condition, aside from it being labeled a delusion; it's simply how Lars' mind has chosen to deal with its depression. Conversely, I'm sure that it'll earn the ire of certain mental health profession: Lars' delusions are presented as something that can be overcome with love and patience, and the condition is one that Lars himself can overcome if he so chooses. It's not that simple, of course, but it appears impossible to undertake the one - presenting the delusions as part of a normal process of coping - without eliding the other - that is, medicalizing and medicating the ostensible illness. But this is a debate for people who are far more versed in the nuances of the discussion to undertake.

Brief responses to LOST's "Missing Pieces" web season...

I'd like to say that "Missing Pieces" has been hit-or-miss, but that would imply that they're hitting with the same frequency that they're missing. The overriding theme through the first 3 mobisodes, at least, seems rather bland - seemingly self-satisfied Losties don't know just how badly things are about to go. It's dramatic irony played to cheap effect, mostly, though the latest mobisode has a bit more going for it than the others.

1: The Watch
Christian gives Jack the watch this his dad gave him as a wedding gift, though Christian's dad meant it as a sort of curse. Beyond being something of an ambiguous character-moment for Christian - is he sincere when he says he thinks it'll work out for Jack? - not much is happening here. Geoff objected to the attention paid to the watch when we already have an important watch on the island, but I'm fine with it. The show is certainly obsessed with time, counting, and numbers, so it's consistent, at least.

2: Hurley and Frogurt
Frogurt threatens to make a move on Libby if Hurley doesn't first. Aside from the irony, I can't tell why this is necessary at all.

3: King of the Castle
Jack and Ben play chess while chatting about their deal to set Jack free. This is the first really interesting mobisode. The dialogue is painful in letting us in on the main joke - there are references to blowing up the sub, which happens, and to Jack wanting to return, which happens - but the chess game provides some additional interest. It's not immediately obvious - a number of websites, I've noticed, have mistakenly said that Ben wins the game - but Jack puts Ben in check and Ben 'castles' in order to escape. The comment, then, is not on Jack's attempt to escape and Ben foiling it, but rather on Jack seemingly defeating Ben (in the season finale?) and Ben slipping through his fingers (which has yet to happen?). Finally - and this is something I learned through lostpedia - the castling move that Ben uses is actually illegal, since Ben's king has already been moved. I can't imagine that this would be a mistake, but it would seem to imply that, if we can take the symbolism at face-value, Ben will continue to manipulate the rules of the game.

Comic book round-up...

I have two weeks of comics worth to blog about - and an unusually busy two weeks, for me at least - but I've put off making any comment at all until now. (Too busy, and so on and so forth.) So I'll make some brief comments here, which I'll eventually get around to expanding into longer reviews on comicboards.com. (Which is, incidentally, where every blog I write about a comic ends up anyway.)

Astonishing X-Men #23 - I've pointed out a number of times that Whedon's individual arcs have largely the same structure. I won't belabor the similarities that I've drawn out in other posts, but there are some more worth mentioning: Cyclops' resurrection after last issue's suicide marks the second time that the Breakworlders have brought an X-Man back to life; more to the point, this is the fourth time in four arcs that Cyclops has either been killed or recovered from being near death, which seems a bit excessive; as well, his break-out and bad-ass pose on the final page bears much familiarity both narratively and visually to the similar "you've taken your best shot, bub..." poses at the end of AXM #10 (Xavier) and AXM #15 (Kitty). Whedon also continues with his habit of borrowing tropes from old X-Men comics, though the "Cyclops actually can access his powers" swerve is less obscure than those he made in the last couple issues. (Jason Powell notes that this turning point is also featured in Uncanny X-Men #134, #150, and #272, to which I also must add also add X-Factor #39.)

Whedon does manage one repetition with a much subtler and cleverer variation to it, though. In the opening scenes of the issue, two of the rebel Breakworlders discuss the likelihood of an X-Men victory against Kruun. One expresses optimism and Aghanne, their leader, suggests that she has been driven mad by the "hope" that the X-Men have brought with them. It's an interesting choice of words - the mutant cure in the first arc was, we should recall, also called "Hope".

The Order #4 - There's something very Lost-ish, I think, about the frame narrative 'interviews' (job interviews? or therapy sessions? we're not entirely sure) that are probably the most distinctive feature of this comic. New books written in total sincerity and full of characters we don't know are a tough sell, and this quirk shoot straight for the heart every time in trying to compel us to like these people. It's probably not working quite as well for me as I would hope: the first issue's interview was able to integrate Apollo seamlessly into the Marvel Universe and cleverly critique Tony Stark at the same time, making the entire notion of the Order feel somewhat discomforting. The subsequent interviews just haven't cut that close to the bone.

I'm also ambivalent about Barry Kitson's art. He's ideal for the interview panels, where his raised eyebrows or smirks are perfectly expressive without ever being too explicit. But his entirely generic face designs are often confusing, making it difficult to tell one character from another, and there's very little dynamism to their movements. (This is my same complaint of Jim Lee, whose characters similarly seem to be posing when they are ostensibly fighting.)

All-Star Superman #9 - All of the comments I've seen from other fans of this series - I tend to not bother reading actual 'reviews' - seem to agree that something is missing from this issue. Perhaps its the heart. Superman seems weak and whiny in this issue, (and the reason for the weakness, which actually leads to his victory in the end, comes from out of nowhere) and the villains' motivations are cliché but without serving any redeeming metatextual purpose. We certainly don't learn anything about these villains as we did about Lex or Zibarro in their issues, nor do we learn anything particularly interesting about Superman.

Even the political commentary (or what passes for a criticism of Superman's seeming apoliticism, anyway) is rather confused and superficial: the Kryptonians criticize Superman for being at the beck and call of the humans while refusing to release the miniaturized inhabitants of Kandor into the sunlight, but nothing more comes of this potential exploration of Superman's alienness. He meets their complaints with some empty-sounding platitudes and we hear nothing more of it.

Scott Pilgrim #4 - Of all these books, I've read the latest Scott Pilgrim most recently and so given it the least thought. It's easily the most melodramatic of the four books, which doesn't immediately strike me as a good thing. One of the pleasures of the early books is that the heavily stylized art, often esoteric (or, rather, geeky) allusions, and ironic tone have affected a comfortable distance for the readers from the characters: the stories have a kind of magical realism (as opposed to superhero stories which, while featuring fantastical elements, are typically aimed at approximating realism) that borders on the absurd, with dialogue that's too self-conscious and, accordingly, characters that are hilariously adept at meeting our expectations of their type. O'Malley seems to have made a habit of delivering more of everything with each new volume, and this one takes a misstep by turning up teen angst (which is particularly bothersome, for me at least, because these characters are very nearly my age): discussions about the 'L-word', the introduction of new-old love interests just for the sake of complicating things, misunderstandings that could easily be cleared up if the characters weren't sometimes idiots...

Perhaps worst of all, I suddenly realized that Ramona is entirely out of Scott's league and I have no idea what she would see in him. (Which is to say that the consequence of humanizing your characters and giving them real emotional problems is that we begin to regard them as real people and question their decisions accordingly. And there's no question in my mind that their relationship makes no sense.) A recurring exchange perhaps illustrates this best of all - Scott makes repeated mentions of how Ramona's age is "unknown", as if she's some sort of villainous 80s wrestler. And despite this being a cute quirk of the book's style, O'Malley turns it into some sign of their communication problems before finally revealing her age at the book's end as a way of patching things up. (Spoiler: She's 24.)

All this said, O'Malley also continues to widen his range of always entertaining geeky references: that Scott's dreamscape resembles a Legend of Zelda game, complete with a "forest elf", is priceless. It's a wonderful escapist moment in a book that, despite its previous successes in eliding flirtations with the mundaneness of too much realism, seems aimed at demystifying precisely what's made it so interesting.

Because i know some LOST fans lurk around my blog...

ABC is going to be posting 2-3 minute 'mobisodes' - which feature individual character flashbacks - over the weeks leading up to the season premiere. The first episode is going on their site this next Monday, but it's already been leaked. You can check it out by clicking here.

Minor Spoilers: I don't have a tremendous amount to say - I suspect that the watch has made an appearance and I just don't recall. I might edit in some more thoughts upon further reflection.

Dallaire! The Musical: On Canada's conflation of Rwanda and Afghanistan

When the Toronto International Film Festival opened this past September, the dramatization of UN force commander Romeo Dallaire's spectacularly failed* peacekeeping mission in Rwanda - titled Shake Hands with the Devil, as it's based on Dallaire's book of the same name - garnered plenty of attention, in Canada at least. Not all of it was good. NOW Toronto gave it a middling review, the critic noting that this was "the third kick at the can" for Dallaire's story, including the original memoirs and a Dallaire-guided documentary - though not including the incorporation of a character based on Dallaire in Hotel Rwanda, nor an earlier documentary that features interviews with him - and closes the the festival guide blurb by sarcastically suggesting next year we'll see Dallaire! The Musical.

The closing comment might be in bad taste, but the joke nonetheless identifies a baffling eagerness to fill Canadian bookshelves, television screens, and movie theatres with the story of this now-iconic hero. It is not a coincidence, I think, that each version seems more successful than the last and that Dallaire has turned into something of a mini-industry as Canada's participation in ostensible 'peacekeeping' missions in Afghanistan lose public support. There's no comparable hero in Afghanistan - General Rick Hillier seems to make more news butting heads with the governing Conservative party than he does through Canadian military action - so Dallaire has been marched out as some symbol of selfless Canadian sacrifice in the name of keeping peace.

I suggested during a class discussion that Dallaire failed in his mission, but quickly came to realize that it was actually something of a success. Not with respect to the estimated 20,000 people that he managed to save, but in a much more ideological sense - his failure to avert disaster but to simultaneously secure some small victory in spite of the odds is itself very consistent with a hegemonically Canadian sense of the nation's self. Appropriating Dallaire for Afghanistan - even if it's never done explicitly - allows Canada to again deny its complicity in neocolonial wars abroad (even if only to its own citizens), to race to innocence where Americans struggle to avoid being saddled with the guilt of a neoimperialist agenda. Dallaire's failure - illustrative as it is about the costs of being a peacekeeper, rather than a conqueror, in a country of 'devils' - allows the government to paint Afghanistan with the same brush - if Canada is failing to maintain order, it's because the 'devils' in Afghanistan are similarly beyond the reason of peace. One would imagine that Dallaire's underdog story can only be milked for so much sympathy - though the incredulous letters that the Dallaire! The Musical joke earned would indicate that it still has some mileage left.


* Granted, his peacekeeping force was reduced to something like 250 soldiers at one point, so he's hardly to blame for failing to stop a civil war in a country with a population numbering in the millions.

The NHL and destructive masculinities

A brief primer for the non-hockey fan: Back in the 2003-04 NHL season, Todd Bertuzzi sucker punched Steve Moore and pushed him to the ice, knocking him unconscious and breaking his back. People were outraged, but swore that it was an isolated incident - most players who are punched (which is nearly every hockey player) aren't rendered immediately unconscious, and most players who are driven from behind into the ice (again, probably most of them at some point in their careers) aren't paralyzed. Problematically, of course, the emphasis was placed on the severity and freakishness of the injury, rather than on the hypermasculine and uberaggressive game that encourages players to attack with intent to injure - so long as there's some small chance that he can defend himself.

In this NHL season, which is not even one month old, there have been three similarly vicious attacks - and all of them by players on the same team, (the Philadelphia Flyers) no less. The NHL has penalized the players severely - a 20 game suspension for the first and 25 games the second, (Bertuzzi also got 20) with nothing yet determined in the latest case - but it seems that no one is getting the point. Explains Philadelphia's general manager, Paul Holmgren, after the second suspension: "I do think it was an isolated incident."

The first problem, of course, is that Holmgren mistakenly used the singular form of incident - even when there were only two, it was incidents. The larger problem, though, is that these people continue to think that severe injuries in a game that permits shoulder checks to the head and punches to the face - provided that your opponent can see you coming, as if that should someone ensure your safety - could possibly be considered 'isolated incidents'. They may be uncommon, but it seems like they're a natural consequence of the sort of hockey game that NHLers are told to play. I don't know why none of the people who have a vested interest in seeing the players stay healthy and, y'know, play have so much trouble seeing that.

She was just seventeen/And you know what I mean...

One of the great things about Fraction's Casanova is that it is at once wholly accessible and utterly obscure. (To quote Fraction: "I'm fine alienating the stupid.") I could cite any number of instances, but I'll focus on one particularly silly one: the scene in which Zephyr watches a tape of her next target and remarks that "I want to shoot this guy so bad my dick is hard." It's a hilarious line, but it's made all the better when Fraction's notes at the back explain that it's a paraphrase of a line from New Jack City, as spoken by Ice-T's character. (Ice-T, of course, is famous for recording "Cop Killer" and feuding with the LAPD's chief - and now he plays a cop on TV. Zephyr, on the other hand, is famous for feuding with her dad, who's in charge of the SHIELD-like organization EMPIRE - and her parallel self was an EMPIRE agent.)

For the as-yet-unconverted: I feel it necessary to wax ecstatic just a bit about what Fraction (and, to a lesser extent, Moon) does with the final few pages of each issue of Casanova. See, each comic is only 16 pages - 6 fewer than the standard. Fraction fills up the remaining few pages with the equivalent of a director's commentary - sketches, biographical details that are pertinent to the plot, (and sometimes not pertinent whatsoever) and various other stuff about the visual and textual allusions that might otherwise go unnoticed. And after several of these notes - about a film collection, one about the first issue of The Order, a random Rolling Stones line... - he also admits that one of them is a total lie.

He doesn't explain everything, though. Take the title of the issue: "Seventeen". It's vague enough that it could be referring to pretty well anything. Two good possibilities spring to mind immediately, both of them speaking to the focus of this issue - Zephyr Quinn's unpredictability, desirability, and maniacal evilness (err, evilability?). The first is Seventeen, the Booth Tarkington novel, which is also a film. (And Fraction has made his love of old films quite clear.) Long-story-short, it's about a teen-aged small-town boy who alienates everyone in his attempt to seduce a big-city girl, only to fail when she leaves at the end of the summer. The second is The Beatles' "I Saw Her Standing There", the song which features the memorable opening line, "Well she was just seventeen/And you know what I mean". The Beatles would subsequently explain that there's just something ambiguous and wonderful about the age of seventeen - no longer totally naive, but not yet world-weary - and seventeen year-old girls are a mystery to both the boys and themselves. It's not a stretch to suggest that we should have Zephyr Quinn in mind here.

Update: Fraction notes that the phrase 'asa nisi masa', which appears quite often in this issue, is from Fellini's 8 1/2. Double that number and you get 17. Also, the number of bodies (including Zephyr and Kubark) in the final panel of the comic? 34 - which is 17 doubled. I realize that I'm flirting with the Law of Truly Large Numbers here, but maybe that's part of the point?

In Rainbows

I don't quite know how to describe my reaction to the newest Radiohead album, "In Rainbows". Vaguely disappointed, I suppose - "In Rainbows" is getting a lot of favorable comparisons to "Hail to the Thief", their previous album, but I actually quite liked the strong narrative/thematic line running through the latter's lyrics. There's something much more romantic and even ethereal about "In Rainbows", which perhaps makes it appropriate that I find myself having difficulty in pinning it down.

From "Nude": "Now that you've found it, it's gone/ Now that you feel it, you don't". Radiohead's sound was all over the place with the last album, but their anger and words were very deliberately pointed. But a line like the one from "Nude"? I don't know what to do with that - a distinct political project has given way to something vaguely philosophical and more than a little out of focus.

Evaluating Whedon and re-evaluating Morrison

(It seems silly of me to try and summarize a run that hasn't yet concluded. But my recent renewal of appreciation for Whedon's Astonishing X-Men - coupled with the increasingly annoyed and/or dismissive responses from a large number of folks in X-Men fandom - prompted me to produce a version of the follow comments on the X-Universe Message Board a couple weeks ago. Exchanges with Jason Powell allowed me to refine and add nuance to those arguments, so I'll try to capture some of that, too.)

First things first: If nothing else, Joss Whedon is responding to Morrison's persuasive, if ultimately nihilistic, appraisal of the X-Men canon with an appraisal of his own. Morrison, of course, set out to rejuvenate the X-Men, make them sexy and overtly political - to approach the other without returning to the norm. (Indeed, I recall hearing Morrison theorize his New X-Men as a dialectical process, where JLA was thesis and the Invisibles were antithesis.) When he failed - and it is unclear whether failure was always already immanent - Morrison resorted simply to a vicious mockery of those same X-Men tropes that he had claimed to have abandoned.

The major difference, then, between Whedon and Morrison is that the latter saw the tropes and canonical stories of the X-Men as a restriction - Morrison says that every writer must do the obligatory Phoenix, Magneto, Sentinel, etc. stories - while Whedon seems to regard them more narratologically as guidelines that are fundamental to the telling of an X-Men story. Which is not to say that Whedon isn't ambivalent about the way that those tropes and narratives are deployed, and I think this is made clear in the very first issue:

1. Kitty sees apparitions from some of Claremont's best-loved stories, so we know the past isn't just in play but will be actively haunting this run. And indeed: Colossus returns from the dead, as do the Sentinel that killed the Genoshans, Cassandra Nova, and the White Queen. Though you can argue that certain exercises are less successful than others, it's an excavation of their history - in peeling back the layers, Whedon's trying to get at an understanding of who they are and the compromises that each of his cast has made along the way. (And, in turn, how they have been compromised by those decisions.)

2. The costume/no-costume discussion establishes that this isn't simply a reversion to an old status quo - Cyclops says that they have to look like superheroes, not that they are superheroes. Mutant politics and ethics take something of a backseat, but we'd be mistaken if we thought they were absent and they'll come roaring to the fore soon enough. In this point, I'm not even talking about the Cure or the irony in imprisoning a mutant computer program. The most poignant political moment is when the team, in costume, fights the Mole Man's monster but fails to be convincing in their act. They don't make the news and they don't make things better for mutants; dressing - performing - as superheroes didn't hide the fact that they were still mutants. (And, in fact, I think that this realization allows for Cyclops subsequent growth.) This is certainly a critique of writers who portray the X-Men as Just Another Superteam, and perhaps even critical of Morrison for trying to situate the X-Men as post-human. Cyclops' ambivalent relationship to mutanity and humanity allows us to recognize that mutants cannot extricate themselves from their humanness and find an 'outside' that places them exterior to humanity as post-humans. But likewise, having been marked as mutant they cannot ever be entirely 'inside' humanity, either.

Where Morrison left us with a dead-end - a critique with no obvious direction forward - Whedon seems to be trying to resolve what the X-Men can be if they cannot be like superheroes. The alternative, it seems, is to shift genres entirely: Whedon's latest arc (which heavily alludes to Dune) seems to take heavy inspiration from the early- and mid-80s X-Men stories that often found the team in space and otherwise battling science-fiction tropes, the sorts of stories and characters that have receded from interest in the past decade or two like the Brood (Aliens), Nimrod (Terminator), and the Reavers (Mad Max). To steal a line that I heard elsewhere, it seems Whedon is saying that 'everything you forgot was pretty cool'.

My least developed thought is on the structural aspects of the four arcs, each of which seems to mirror the various parts of the Phoenix Saga more or less closely. What I wonder is if it's fair to suggest that Whedon is elevating this story to a sort of 'master narrative', the "totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience" within the X-Men mythos, the control mechanism though which multiplicity is engaged and difference is recognized, registered, and regulated. Certainly, it seems fair to argue that the Phoenix Saga - both its narrative form and tropes of corruption, forgiveness, rebirth - has established the parameters that allow us to makes sense of difference and what it can be "about" within the context of the X-Men.

It might be silly and/or hyperbolic of me to liken the canon of the X-Men to a phallic economy, but I'll go there and claim that the same caveats apply: that Morrison failed to successfully possess and redirect the X-Men precisely because mastery of a 'master narrative' is always delusional. And, sure enough, in the end Morrison seems consumed by an sort of hysterical anxiety - he is able to say what his X-Men are not, but what they are remains ill-defined or even only negatively-defined, demanding recognition from the canon that it has made great lengths to otherize.

Like a turd covered in tasty chocolate

This is quite possibly the most fantastically devastating and amusing simile that I've ever read. It appears in Devin Faraci's review of 30 Days of Night - a new vampire movie which, from the trailers, appears to be Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later (note the similarity in the names, even), only with vampires instead of pseudo-zombies. But I digress:

"30 Days of Night" is a stupid, stupid film, a disaster at the script and casting stages. It's like a turd covered in tasty Ghirardelli chocolate - as soon as you sink your teeth in you know you've got mouthful of sweetened shit."

An Ontario provincial election follow-up...

One interesting note from the Ontario provincial elections that happened last week: it was probably the first and only time that a political commentator will accuse the electorate of racism for not voting Conservative. The Conservatives lost to the Liberals by a huge margin, largely because the former pledged partial funding for private religious schools and then rescinded the offer when it proved unpopular.

The commentator (Mike Duffy, I think) was surely right to suggest that the Liberals and NDP were playing a race/anti-Islam card in saying that they wanted to allow kids of all types to grow up together, (especially disingenuous, since they both support the continued existence of a public Catholic school board) though it's ridiculous to reduce the entire race to this one factor. More likely, given the emphasis that past North American elections have put on the decisiveness* of political leaders, the major factor was Conservative leader John Tory's inability to inspire confidence when he backed away from the most widely-known element of his party platform.

Me? I'd do away with the Catholic board as well. The problem is that only the Green party was making that offer and they weren't going to win any seats in the legislature; I voted NDP, despite the subtly racist implications that this choice implies. But when the choice is between a subtly racist education platform and the less subtly racist, sexist, and classist assumptions underlying the Conservative party's entire platform? Not so hard a decision.

* I've chosen 'decisiveness' not because it's necessarily accurate or even a word that commentators use in describing a leader - it could, after all, just as easily be called 'stubbornness'. The difficulty here is that decisiveness is always described negatively by pundits: a "bad" politician is a 'flip-flopper', a 'ditherer', unsure, lacking. A "good" politician is usually only defined as not one of these things - presumably because he or she could flip-flop at any moment. (Of course, this logic fails to perceive that it's often better to change your mind when your plan is failing or that staying the course may be a disastrous proposition.)

Morrison's Batman: All irony, no heart

My mostly ambivalent observations about the rest of this story seem to hold true for its ending: I get what Williams' is doing in imping other artists but I still feel that it's more of a distraction than it is clever, and the murder mystery plot is a decent hook but turns out to be wholly unsurprising. Convention implied that the murderer (or murderers) would come from within and, predictably, the Agatha Christie model suggested that it would be masterminded by the patriarch. The Black Glove remains unrevealed, sure, but he seems almost incidental.

If the story fails, though - and I think it does - it fails for reasons having more to do with an aesthetic than Morrison's near-exact faithfulness to the genre. And its this aesthetic, actually, that makes Morrison's ostensible faithfulness seems disingenuous - in fact, a show of bad faith. Visually, Batman and Robin were never really a part of this 'Batmen of the World'. Though each of the various Batmen differ from one another, all of the others are nonetheless dated; Batman and Robin, on the other hand, are painted with a neo-noir brush that could only appear in a contemporary comic. Morrison echoes Williams (Or does Williams echo Morrison? Whichever.) by writing a quietly confident, if not smug, Batman who is almost never as concerned as the heroes around him, and certainly never as panicked. And while we're fairly certain that any of the other Batmen could die at any moment, we know with equal certainty that the title character can't.

Which is to say that, for all its seeming genre-playfulness, the story is impossible to actually submerge yourself within. As Batman remains critically, even patronizingly, distanced from the exercise of the story, it becomes difficult for us as readers to feel anything for - as Robin described them last issue - the 'league of Batman imposters'. It's an ironic revision of a terribly lame concept that supplies us with equally lame motivations for the villains and does little more than convince us that, yes, clichés and Batman imposters are, as I said, terribly lame. Didn't we already know that?

On comics and the church of Continuity...

So I allowed myself to get dragged into (another) one of those internet comic arguments where the crux of the discussion is Continuity*. Run quickly from these fights, because they're never fun. (Even when you're right!)

[*Comic book Continuity (n.) - to paraphrase Wikipedia, a consistency
in the characteristics of character and a contiguity of plot]

Case in point: Emma Frost explained some issues ago in Astonishing X-Men that Cyclops' inability to control his powers related to a mental block, not brain damage from a childhood fall (as it had always been explained). Ardent anti-Whedon X-Men fans complained that Whedon is just making stuff up as he goes along, ignoring tons of precedent that would render such a development an impossibility. I suggest that, in fact, there is precedent and am told, basically, to put up or shut up and produce the evidence. And after 10 minutes on Google, I find it: Cyclops hits his head on a rock in Uncanny X-Men 332, and the accompanying caption implies that the brain damage is somehow undone. It's a stupid explanation, but it's there. So I win, I guess.

After all that trouble, though, I'm not sure that I even care. The fact that Whedon may have had some other comic in mind - and this is worse because it was written by a hack writer (Scott Lobdell) as part of a massively awful crossover (Onslaught) - actually does something to diminish the experience for me. Sure, Whedon's story isn't entirely self-contained, but its references have been pointed and meaningful; they add something thematically, and there's often a knowing reflexivity to them. If Whedon is referencing Lobdell, though, it's purely to satisfy the utilitarian demands of plot. And for that reason, I'd almost prefer that Whedon didn't know about this scene, or that he never had any precedent in mind whatsoever.

Continuity be damned. I prefer that writers take whatever liberties they feel necessary in order to tell an individual story, one that's coherent and intelligible in relation to its own parts. What's the alternative, really? Attempting to maintain some sort of narrative unity in relation to thousands of issues of comics is a fool's errand, if ever there was one. If the options are loyalty to 1) a confused, contradictory, and notoriously disloyal tradition or 2) loyalty to your own storytelling, why is there even an argument?