Because I love the game but the blogosphere would never know it...

It should surprise no one that I'm an incredible big geek. What might be surprising is that I'm also a bit of a sports nut - especially baseball, and especially when it comes to making sense of statistics and talking strategy.

I last played baseball proper when I was 20 years old - in part to win a scholarship (based on academic merit and not athletic ability - yes!) but also because I missed playing the game. That season reminded me that baseball didn't exactly miss me back: in representing my home town in the all-too-appropriately named Northern Elite League, I helped (?) my team win 2 of 17 games, and my batting average was embarrassingly low. (I won't tell you how low, except to say that it was nearer the current average of Andruw Jones than Adam Jones.) And though it's no real consolation, there were about as many players on my team with a worse average as there were with a better one. Oh yes, we were awful.

Over the past four years, I've played softball at the University of Toronto with the English grad students' team. (I was only enrolled in the department for one of those years, but they've been kind enough to keep inviting me back.) For two summers in row, I've also played in a softball "beer league" (which is a misnomer - we can't actually consume alcohol on city property) with my older brother and some friends (one of whom blogs) on a team that I named The Blitzkrieg Boppers. (It's a pun, but at least it's halfway clever, right?) I've also joined another University of Toronto intramural team, this time to play on a team that represents a program that I have never been a part of - Pharmacy. (For reasons that I'll eventually get to on the blog, I'll never be able to play games this often again, so three teams seems an appropriate degree of overkill. I just hope that my ailing ankles and Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde-esque throwing elbow forgive me.)

There are at least two things that make softball a marked improvement over baseball: First, it allows someone like me, who is not particularly fast on my feet, to play shortstop and center field because the fields are smaller and the players are similarly out of shape, where in baseball I was relegated to the corner infield positions. Second, and simply put, I like hitting home runs, and that's a) nearly impossible in real baseball, but b) seems to happen for me a couple times a week in softball.

One final note: I organize the batting music for the Boppers, editing songs into 9-12 second clips and burning them on to CDs that we play as our team members walk to the plate to hit. (Just like the professionals, of course.) It's absolutely silly, but it offers a perfect source of levity (for those who like to laugh and relax before an at bat) and excitement (for those who need to feel pumped up). Or, for me at least, a little bit of both, since my personal favorite tracks tend to hit hard but not without irony. My top 3:

The Stooges' "Search and Destroy" where Iggy sings "I'm a street-walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm" (because, naturally, I am)



The opening to "Pour Some Sugar on Me" (the emphasis on "bomb" serving as inspiration and striking fear into the opposition)



And most recently, Gowan's "Strange Animal", the iteration of the chorus - at about the 1:43 mark of the video - that begins with Gowan screaming "How can I get enough?" (because, uh, I'm a strange animal who can't get enough? really, this one is just here because its an awesome song that makes for perfect batting music)

Celebrating "The Golden Girls"

Twice in the past week, I've made reference to the Golden Girls; both times, the 20ish year old guys that I was talking to seemed utterly confused. The first time, in tutorial, I mentioned that I thought the Golden Girls was probably the funniest program ever shown on TV - the student that I was talking to had never heard of it. (And, additionally, was stunned that it was about a group of old women.) The second, at a Future Shop of all places, I approached one of the guys standing among the media aisles to ask if they had any seasons in stock (there were none in the appropriate section), to which he responded - "It's a TV show?"

So in honor of Estelle Getty's recent passing and because the world clearly needs to be reminded just how alternately (and simultaneously) clever, absurd, and vulgar a show starring four middle-aged and elderly white women could be, I'm tossing in some clips with minimal commentary. The show had a certain formula to its humor - Dorothy's comedy was dry and cynical, Rose was dopey and naive, Blanche was pompous and risque (even now - no, especially now), and Sophia was, to quote the paperboy, "just a mean old lady" - albeit a hilarious one. They also their standard bits: Sophia's related to childhood stories of Sicily, which would often end with a revelation about someone famous. Like in this clip:



It's tough to find a clip that's only a couple minutes long and yet captures a little bit of everything. But maybe this one will work:

Miley Cyrus, teen sexuality (gasp!), and 'growing sideways'

I've been meaning to write something about this for weeks and just never got around to it: the career-threatening scandal (say what?) surrounding Miley Cyrus and various pictures that she's taken which suggest she may not be the ideally asexual teen that her TV and stage representations make her out to be.

(In case you're in need of catching-up: Cyrus is 15, a pop music and TV megastar among her child and tween audience. Two examples of her alarming popularity among young girls should suffice: with the help of this relatively small (but, evidently, disproportionately powerful) demographic group she's managed to debut both her albums at #1 on the American Billboard charts and the concert film that Disney released in movie theatres posted a record opening weekend for a film on fewer than 1000 screens - over $8 million.)

And the controversy? The accusations that she was less than an apt role-model started with an Annie Leibovitz shot:
That some people would be made uncomfortable by a teenaged girl wrapped in a bedsheet is, I suppose, predictable. But I don't think it's the bare skin or sheet that actually freaks them out - I think it's the hair and the smirk. She doesn't look vacant, innocent, or wholly ignorant in the way that most overtly-sexualized starlets are made to appear - she looks too aware of what she's projecting. And what's worse, she looks like she's enjoying it.

And more fuel was added when (apparently) her cellphone was hacked and pictures were stolen from it. There are a lot of them, but this is about as bad as it gets:

The controversy here baffles me even more. They're ostensibly pictures taken of herself, for herself or her friends, not the sort of thing that strangers - us - were ever supposed to see. They're also almost exclusively pictures of only Cyrus herself. And if people can't handle a teenaged girl flashing her abs for her camera, god only knows what they would do if they learned that teenagers masturbate - and even have sex.

Kathryn Bond Stockton has written of the way in which children's sexuality is denied to them - they are assumed to be 'not-yet-straight', that is presently asexual but presumptively straight - and suggests that when they can't "grow up", they instead "grow sideways". But this is not to say that growing sideways is necessarily a bad thing. On the contrary, it seems to me that growing sideways is actually a fairer representation of how people (like Miley Cyrus?) actually grow - not from presumptively heteronormative innocence to straight adulthood, but with hiccups, leaps, and sidesteps toward an uncertain endgame. That is, if there's actually an end.

"Pedagogy of the Superhero"

Last week, I had the opportunity to do my very first guest lecture - a 95 minute piece that I titled "Pedagogy of the Superhero", after a book that the class spent 3 weeks reading, Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It was basically, as you might have guessed from the title, about the values that superheroes in American pop culture impart on to kids.

Given that the course is 'Worlds of Childhood', the lecture was structured largely around 1) an analysis of the childhood ideologies into which Superman and Spider-man (though mostly the Lee-Ditko era Spidey), respectively, interpellate their readers, and 2) a look at child superheroes and kid sidekicks; the narrative functions that they are purported to serve and the normalizing functions that they actually serve. In retrospect, I was probably too anxious about justifying my lecture, and while I don't think that I should've abandoned this aspect altogether - I can remember, as an undergrad, appreciating it when literary analysis was given a larger socio-cultural context and didn't seem hopelessly insular and inapplicable to anything outside the classroom - it also distracted from the far more enjoyable stuff, like discussing Superman and nostalgia or parsing the very systematic way in which Supes is constructed through the opening credits to the 50s Adventures of Superman show.

I've found out, though, that I'll have an opportunity to refine it and re-present it when this class is taught during the Fall-Winter session - albeit it at only half the length. This is where I need some help, though. I've been asked to come up with a couple superhero stories to add to the course's reader, and I'm thinking that I'll run with the Superman/Spider-man comparison again. Which means that I need to find an exemplary - and probably old - 'big blue boyscout' Superman story and a Lee-Ditko Spider-man story where both Peter Parker and Spidey get a chance to be misunderstood. And they need to be widely available in black-and-white reprints. (The latter shouldn't be hard to find, but I don't know anything about the availability of old Superman stuff.) A little help?

That Watchman trailer that's gone mostly unnoticed...

The first Watchmen trailer aired before The Dark Knight, and I was more excited than I was apprehensive. (This might have something to do with the rather good Smashing Pumpkins song it was paired with - “The Beginning is the End is the Beginning” - which was both lyrically appropriate and had the added bonus - and liability - of being used in a previous superhero movie. But I think that was the point - more on that later.) From what I can see, there are at least four obvious aesthetic touchstones in play: the source material itself (Zack Snyder has lifted several of the trailer shots directly from Dave Gibbons), Frank Miller film adaptations (both Snyder's own 300 and Sin City), the Burton-Schumacher Batman films (though the color and contrast, and the Pumpkins song, are more suggestive of the latter than the former), and Dark City (the Rorschach scenes and comparatively drab and washed-out urban backdrops seem to suggest this source). Drawing these connections seems doubly important because Snyder has apparently claimed that just as Watchmen consciously draws on the history of the superhero tradition in order to revise and reimagine it, he plans on reappraising the superhero film genre.

All that said, it's difficult to judge whether the film is actually any good based on the trailer. Rorschach looks exactly like he does in the comic and Jackie Earle Haley seems like a good choice, just as Jeffrey Dean Morgan strikes me as perfect for the Comedian; Billy Crudup and Matthew Goode I'm not so keen on, especially the latter, though I'm willing to wait and see. (Were budget not an issue, Ozymandias would seem like the perfect role for an aging pretty-boy star - like Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt - or perhaps a former star on a career downturn, preferably someone who's played a superhero before like Michael Keaton or Val Kilmer.) The importance of Dr. Manhattan's visual presentation to the success of the adaptation probably can't be overstated - if it doesn't look 'right' (and who's to know what will look 'right' until we see it?), it'll be nothing but a distraction. Though I think, for instance, that this one looks pretty cool:


One last thing: apparently, there was some sort of youtube contest connected to the film where people were encouraged to make their own in-story commercials for a Veidt (Ozymandias' company) corporate product. I haven't looked at many, but this one is hilarious in its perfect reproduction of 80s toy ads:

So the National Post's readers think that academics want to destroy their civilization...

First: full admission that there's a certain amount of self-satisfying wankery involved in any organized academic discussion. We use inaccessible language (which is often doubly ironic when we write about issues of social justice) and usually speak/write specifically for people who are already onside - meaning that we risk marginalizing the only-mildly curious and fail to give the apathetic any immediate or apparent reasons to care. We also nitpick at the mostly rhetorical differences that separate, say, a Marxist anti-racist from a Foucauldian anti-racist, or imagine that the divide between someone who feels that gender is the most foundational social variable as opposed to someone who feels that the social is actually organized around class is deserving of the sorts of arguments that result in anger and alienation - despite the fact that both would still agree that gender and class inequality are each really important topics that require our attention.

None of which is a good reason for the sort of reactionary bullshit that the (Toronto) National Post's readers are heaping on a call for papers by the Researchers and Academics of Colour for Equality (RACE), an academic organization for anti-racist scholars in Canada. There are the usual complaints that ask why the white tax-paying majority is funding a conference that is ostensibly opposed to their interests - though I could just as easily complain about the tax money that's funneled into the military, as 'economic relief' for big business, etc. - and responses that react with incredulity to the suggestion that racism is actually a problem. (Though at least one of the comments actually made me laugh: "why are they calling for new papers and abstracts? [...] Speaking as a white hegemonist capitalist, i can assure them I'm not trying any new tricks, just same old stuff.")

And then it's the commenters' turn to supply the irony. Y'see, the responses actually manage to provide proof of the need to continue the production of anti-racist discourse and dialogue:

• a commenter unflatteringly compares the "bad English" of the CFP to that of "the same Nigerian princes who are always trying to make me a rich man" (the "bad English" crack could have escaped notice as a shot at academic language, if not for its being inappropriately linked to an African bank scam - the poor grammar and spelling of those bank scams is nothing like the inaccessability of a CFP, and so the disdain appears to be aimed at their ostensible authors)
  
• another asks to the see the CV of the professor who's serving as the contact person (to which one would be within their rights to ask whether the same mocking request would be made of, say, me if my name were the one attached to the CFP)
• one explicitly reduces anti-racist activists to "immigrants" wanting to "destroy Western civilization" and "change [Canada] to a third world country"
• another argues that "Saudi money" is now being paid to Canadian Universities to fund "dangerous agendas" like Israeli Apartheid Week (and, presumably, this conference), making the same covert accusation as the above, but with just a smidgeon of subtlety
  
• and then the reactionaries kick in with mocking calls to form groups like SPERM (Society for the Protection of Equal Rights for Men) and SPEW (Society for the Protection of Equal rights for Whites) - oblivious, I suppose, to the existence of such groups and the continued socio-economic dominance of white men and the institutions that maintain their dominance (or, for that matter, the thinly-veiled hate groups that already exist for precisely those purposes)

Ultimately, the way in which these people manage to inadvertently provide evidence for the continuation of anti-racist and feminist political projects almost certainly escapes them. And, once again, I'm mostly just poking fun at them for the benefit of people who already agree with me and can see this without my having to point it out. But sometimes you just need to laugh at it, right?

A brief explanation/apology

I realize that I'm normally an incredibly snarky writer, but some of my responses to comments this past week - Dark Knight comments, in particular - have been downright mean. So this is just a quick explanation why.

I've been posting to discussion boards and participating in internet arguments for over a decade, so my tolerance for trolls is virtually nil and has been for a long time. This isn't normally a problem here, though, because my personal blog tends to attract comments from relatively small groups of people - people I know personally, professionally, or through other blogs and forums in which I participate and actually care enough to leave that space and follow me here. But discussion of The Dark Knight seems to have attracted a new crowd - I went from about 50 comments in the first 6 months of 2008 (and about half of those comments are my own, too) to 30 or so in the past 4 or 5 days (fewer than half of which are mine; and most of which, strangely, were in response to old posts about the film's promotional shots, rather than my actual movie review). You can see them if you click on the 'batman' tag and read older posts, though I haven't made all of the comments public. Some of them are so needlessly nasty - it is, apparently, an Internet Thought-Crime to say anything critical about the film - that I've actually dreaded having to review the comments over the last few days. And with those comments in the back of my mind, I then start responding to the genuinely well-meaning comments, which is not a fantastic idea.

So if I've seemed a little quick to snap at people or otherwise like a pompous ass, (more so than usual, that is) please forgive me. Once the movie hype washes over and the flood of anonymous people telling me I'm an idiot/douche-bag/pussy subsides, I'll revert to my more benevolent forms of snarkiness.

On "The Dark Knight"

I just saw The Dark Knight, (spoiler alert!) so my thoughts might be a bit scattered. But I think I can sum them up thusly: it's a very good superhero movie, but it's not a very good movie. As Geoff Klock notes on his list of favorite films, the best of the genre have yet to earn their spot on an undifferentiated list of great movies. Two fundamental problems kept the material from elevating the production to something more:

1) Its seriousness. Most of the characters in this film talk like incredibly earnest philosophy majors, and the closing sequence is actually the most egregious part in the way that it allows Batman to pontificate ('Harvey wasn't what Gotham deserved but it's what they needed. Batman isn't what they need but it's what they deserve.' Uh, come again?) over a steadily building score in the most melodramatic way possible. Relatedly, the Nolans seem discontent to allow us to figure out what the various characters symbolize: half the script seems to be devoted to discussions of heroes, villains, and the politics of representation. This is the stuff of academic papers - whose authors are notorious for their over-seriousness, naturally - not of action films.

2) Its pessimism. The scene with the boats aside, this movie seems to regard everyone with doubt and suspicion - Batman doesn't even trust himself. In a clever-if depressing-rewrite of The Killing Joke's conceit - where the Joker tortures Jim Gordon in order to prove that even the best of people can be broken - we end up realizing near the end that the Joker's goal has always been to turn Harvey, to show that even Gotham's 'white knight' could be corrupted. In The Killing Joke, the Joker is proven wrong; in The Dark Knight, he's proven right. And not only is he proven right, but Batman takes the fall and Gotham is left with its white knight crazy and dead and its dark knight a pariah. Super.

There's some redemption, though, in Heath Ledger - he's what makes this a very good superhero movie, if not a very good movie. I didn't initially think this would be the case - I disliked his look, especially the scars on the face and the make-up. But given the rave reviews, an anonymous commenter asked me just yesterday whether I was prepared to eat my words. And while I'm not sure that I necessarily have any to eat, since I was only commenting on his appearance rather than the performance that I could not have seen, I can say that I was surprised by the complexity of the character for at least three reasons:

1) He's actually exactly the character that I had described in those old posts as the one that I wanted to see. In one, I note that the Joker should be the ultimate hysteric, who makes a demand upon his foes to tell him who he is and, in so doing, becomes exactly the villain that they want him to be. The writing is particularly strong when we see the Joker go through the process of rewriting himself, as when he tells a different origin stories for his scars. This could easily lead to the same long-winded pseudo-philosophizing that I criticize above, but...

2) His counter-philosophy actually undercuts the rest of the film. When the Joker explains that he's the anarchy to the good guy's reliance on planning and order, he risks falling into their categories and neat little cosmology. Except that it's a lie - the Joker, true to his excessively Rube Goldbergian nature - explains this just as we're realizing that his every action has been directly or indirectly aimed toward driving Harvey Dent totally fucking nuts. The Joker isn't scary because he operates without rules, but rather he's scary because his obviously pathological dependence on rules reveals how every rule is arbitrary and our dependence on them equally pathological. (This is also why Dent's arbitrariness as Two Face is a nice addition, though it's far less developed.)

3) Lastly, he's funny, and a film like that needed more of him. He cross-dresses, cackles, and channels an evil Woody Allen in casual conversations. All of which seems fantastically appropriate.

Some videos worth watching...

#1 - The Sesame Street version of Feist's "1234"

A poster on PerezHilton remarked that anyone who doesn't smile while watching this must have had a horrible childhood. I'm inclined to agree.



#2 - Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, from Joss Whedon and Neil Patrick Harris

I have to admit that I found the first 3 and a half minutes almost unbearable. Whedon and Harris are satirizing bad blogs, but don't seem to get that an entertaining bad blog - much like entertaining camp - is one where the blogger is entirely oblivious to how much of a loser he or she is. Dr. Horrible, on the other hand, seems acutely aware, and so it's just uncomfortable.

But then the singing starts around the 4 minute mark and the love ballad about freeze rays and the girl at the laundromat is endearingly and unknowingly pathetic in exactly the way that a bad vlog (even if, at this point, we've abandoned the format) from a D-list super-villain should be.

No embedding - Act I of III can be found here.

Morgentaler and the de-politicization of a feminist legacy

Dr. Henry Morgentaler was recently awarded the Order of Canada, which is the highest honour that the Canadian government can award to those who "desire a better country." It was a warranted, if controversial, choice - Morgentaler is largely credited with the decriminalization of abortion in Canada, given that it was his legal battles as an abortion doctor that eventually led to the prohibition ending. (The law was deemed to be in violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and so was removed from the books but never replaced.)

Naturally, there's been some resistance to his selection - some other members of the Order have returned their metals, and critics are also getting an inordinate amount of airtime. They argue, as one site puts it, that "his years of advocacy for legalizing abortion and for the thousands of abortions that he personally has performed" are not grounds for the award. Of course, it's not that simple - but you wouldn't know it, to watch Canadian TV.

Morgentaler himself, speaking of the day the Supreme Court deemed the law unconstitutional, provides the actual justification for the recognition: "For the first time, it gave women the status of full human beings able to make decisions about their own lives." Too bad that this angle, which seems rather key, gets so little mention. How sadly ironic that these discussions are silencing living women and removing them for the debate all over again.

Astonishing X-Men 25

I'm tempted to simply call this CSI: X-Men - though maybe this is only the first 2o minutes of the pilot episode. But something about this book escapes an easy encapsulation. Or maybe it just seems that way because I want to like it. Because I like Ellis and I like Bianchi, but I don't particularly like (or, I suppose, dislike) what they're doing here.

For his part, Warren Ellis admits that there's a certain element of self-indulgence to this project, and that he's planning to have fun with it. Fair enough - I don't particularly like my super heroes to be bland and too, too serious. It's also clear that the only other writers he really cares to converse with are Grant Morrison and Joss Whedon. There's a rather unsubtle moment where Ellis becomes the third in that line to feature a discussion of costumes and social coding - it's also, unfortunately, the least convincing of the bunch. Compare, if you will:

Morrison (New X-Men 114)
Beast: "I was never sure why you had us dress up like superheroes anyway, Professor."
Cyclops: "The Professor thought people would understand the X-Men if we looked like something they understood."

Whedon (Astonishing X-Men 1)
Cyclops: "We need to get in to the world. Saving lives, helping with disaster relief...we need to present ourselves as a team like any other. Avengers, Fantastic Four-- They don't get chased through the streets with torches."
Wolverine: "Here come the tights."
Cyclops: "Sorry, Logan. Super heroes wear costumes."

Ellis (Astonishing X-Men 25)
Cyclops: "We're all things to all people, Ororo. Today, we're consulting to the police, and there's no police officer in the world who's happy when he or she sees a super hero costume. Costuem says vigilante, and, these days, costume can also either say government flunkie or illegal combatant, which is one step away from being a flying terrorist. So when we do something like this, we dress in a way they understand, and we jump past all the crap that comes with a costume right now."

There's a sort of law of diminishing returns in effect here - with each iteration of the costume speech, the explanation grows longer and the meta-level becomes shallower. Sure, Ellis throws in that "we're all things to all people" as a way of bridging the "we're not super heroes/we are super heroes" divide of Morrison and Whedon - speeches that are clearly aimed at the reader - but the Morrison/Whedon disagreement was a largely superficial one in the first place. Their 'disagreement' was over how the X-Men should perform their role in public, and so already a tacit acknowledgment that the characters can mean 'all things to all people'.

A note on the visuals - While I like to look at Bianchi's art, I also have a number of reservations: the coloring is too muddy, the layouts are sometimes too crowded, but mostly his storytelling is confusing. He avoids conventional establishing shots and transitions in time and space, which means that I'm often playing catch-up when the location has changed and it wasn't made obvious - as examples, take the image of the murder victim on the second page (it's totally unclear how or where it's fitting - or, really, why we're seeing it) or the transition from the crime scene to the room where they're reviewing the evidence (how much time has passed? where exactly are they, anyway?). But maybe this is something that I'll get used to.

Sometimes the title makes the movie

I saw The Visitor a few days ago, an incredibly bleak film about a middle-aged economics professor - Walter - who arrives at his long-abandoned NYC apartment to discover that it's being occupied by two strangers - Tarek and Zainab. (They're squatters, legally speaking, but only because someone fooled them into thinking that he owned it. These sorts of misunderstandings, sometimes comical and sometimes serious, feature heavily in the film.) They have no place else to go, so he let's them stay - and, eventually, they also allow him to realize that he hasn't actually been living.

It would be very easily to dismiss the plot of the film as cliché: the passive and kind brown guy introduces the stuffy white guy to non-Western music and gets him to "stop thinking" and start feeling; the white guy studies globalization and the economies of developing nations, while the brown guy provides him with the lived experience from which the white guy's been totally alienated; the white guy realizes that he hasn't been living only when the brown guy finds out that he's no longer allowed to live here.

What rescues it, though, is the title: The Visitor. We'd be tempted to think that Tarek and Zainab, and later Tarek's mother, are the titular visitors: they're in the USA illegally, squatting at Walter's apartment and later invited to stay. But the title is singular: Walter is the visitor, and so, relationally, the others must already be home. Sure, we're tempted to see the film, as I have in the paragraph above, with Walter as its center and the action revolving around him. (The film is even structure in this way.) But Walter's only passing through - somehow, the film seems to say, we were taught to misrecognize who's visiting and who belongs.

Music as oh-so-fleeting defamiliarization

Some music was playing as I walked into the room just a moment ago, and despite my familiarity with it (fyi, it was Hawksley Workman's "Old Bloody Orange") it took me a good 3 seconds to recognize it. In those 3 seconds, it was completely foreign to me - I must have wandered in part-way through a bar of music because I didn't recognize the melody or the chord progressions. This seems to happen every so often, most often when I turn my iPod on without looking at the screen: a piece of music that I've heard dozens of times is totally unrecognizable by virtue of an unorthodox starting point, and in that moment it could become absolutely anything.

There's always a brief moment of delight in recognizing the song, followed immediately by the disappointment of having been alienated from the original mystery that so completely captured my attention for those 3 seconds. I can't remember what it was that I first heard when I entered the room - I only remember that it was "Old Bloody Orange" that was playing.

This has actually been bothering me for a long time...

I saw a bit on the news today where the designer of WALL-E claimed that he was inspired by a pair of binoculars. But I can't be the only person who immediately sees Johnny 5 of Short Circuit fame, right? Aren't these designs unbelievably similar?

Juno and the making cool of teen pregnancy

From an article in the Toronto Star:

"After 'Juno,' an Oscar-winning 2007 movie about a regular high-school student who becomes pregnant, came out, Weston received lots of letters from teens who wanted to have babies, she said."

In light of the many stories about the 17 Massachusetts teenaged friends who decided to all have babies together, Juno's been getting crucified for making pregnancy look 'cool' - this quote being yet another example. My question, though - have any of these writers or experts actually watched the movie or did we just see different movies? Because unless this teen pregnancy crisis is paired with an explosion in closed adoptions arranged with wealthy, childless women or couples, I don't see the connection. Juno may be a 'cool' movie and Ellen Page may herself be cool, but the film does nothing to make teen parenthood seem desirable. Juno may give birth, but she doesn't actually become a parent, nor does she want to become a parent. But that distinction appears to have been lost on a lot of people.

Neil = Reality TV star?

I've been too busy to find the time for some good, thoughtful blogging - so instead I'll post a mysterious and too brief report about my ever so short experience on reality tv. (Which will air on a particular cable channel in the fall - but which i can only name closer to the date. It's killing you, I know.)

The set-up: I was recruited on the street some time ago to participate in what sounded like a rather serious reality tv show, asked to invite a friend, etc. But it was a scam - I was actually recruited for a different show, the name and format of which they wanted to keep a secret so that we (I brought my friend Arthur) would be a) unprepared and b) they could record our shocked reactions. (Note: No, it wasn't porn. But I know that's the first thing that occurred to you.)

The pay-off: So without revealing anything about the show at all, I'll simply say, without reservation, that we pulled it off beautifully. How we'll look to an audience is beyond me, as I don't know that even the host knew exactly what to do with us: we're grad students but we're not stereotypically nerdy or aloof; we're straight guys who wore coordinating, brightly-colored outfits and almost certainly act in an ambiguously gay way; we high-five and boast like dudes but scream in falsetto and slap each other when we get excited. Naturally, we were also afraid that we sounded far stupider than we intended. Though we'll forgive ourselves for that if we're entertaining, since we had determined earlier that we had to avoid being boring at all costs.

And that's all you'll get out of me, internets. For now, at least.

Indie rock and TV commercials: The weird continues

I'm a month or so late in getting to this, but I have a new entry to my earlier post about bizarre/inappropriate/disappointing marriages of indie rock and TV advertising. This latest features the Moldy Peaches' "Anyone Else But You", the song that most people probably know from Ellen Page and Michael Cera's duet at the end of Juno. And which we will now know as that-song-on-the-Atlantis-commercial. I can't find it on Youtube and so I can't embed it, but you can see the commercial in this Rolling Stone article.

What likely makes this song the most egregious misappropriation of any of the four songs that i've collected is that it's the first to actually change the lyrics. Silly but affecting lines like "You're a part-time lover and a full-time friend/The monkey on your back is the latest trend" is changed to "Let’s go ride a couple of dolphins/Or maybe play tennis or do some golfing", which is naturally accompanied by images of these attractions at the resort. It's been drained of its cute homey-ness, made painfully unclever, and so is entirely awful.

On another note, is the use of this song by Atlantis and the Weezer song by Beaches signaling some marketing shift by major resorts? Those early Weezer fans are now pushing or into their 30s, and the Moldy Peaches have new capital due to their association with Juno, which appeals to largely the same people. Is this a deliberate attempt to target the aging (and now working) hipster demographic, or is it just a coincidence that these two songs have popped up in very similar contexts and nearly the same time?

Giant Sized Astonishing X-Men and the completion of Whedon's X-Men

I suppose that Whedon's goal was to write a moving, tragic close to his run. Kitty appears to be gone for good, Colossus is sad and also gets a great angry moment, and it was e/affective in that way. There's a lyrical quality to the art, especially in these final pages. And, at least on the first read-through, it works.

And then you reach the end and realize that it barely holds together. Virtually everything else ranges from mildly to massively disappointing. We don't know how it is that the bullet Kitty's in is magic and disrupts her power (it just is; it just does); we still aren't totally clear on how the prophecy that Colossus would destroy Breakworld was planted; we don't know what happened to the Cure that Beast had, we don't know whether Cassandra Nova actually managed to implant herself in Armor in the previous arc; we don't know what's going to happen to Danger. (I could also list flaws in the storytelling as it pertains to this issue alone. I'll let Omar Karindu do that instead.)

These aren't inconsequential details. Each arc left us with questions, and what passes for closure in this final issue is incredibly wanting. Unless I missed something, we don't even know what the status of the Breakworld is after Colossus kills the rebel leader and Wolverine slices the arm off of the big angry dude. (I'd go back and check his name, but honestly... I just don't care.) Geoff Klock notes in his audio-review that it isn't enough to say that he's given subsequent writers options to play with. This has been a self-contained vanity project from the start (that Cyclops' blasts return inexplicably at the end of this issue would seem to indicate that Whedon knows that he has to put some things back in the sandbox) and it's very nearly unforgivable that he can't follow-through on what he started.

I imagine that I'll keep a certain fondness for this run. The pacing was a mess - like Battlestar Galactica, it's better consumed all at once so that you aren't conscious of how little content there is to each individual episode - and Whedon either forgets or inadequately explains a dozen or so plot-points from throughout the series, (Thanks to skullfire for this list!) but Whedon has made his name on his character work, not his plots. I suppose I could resent him for doing such a great job with Kitty only to kill her off (well, not really, but you know...), but he also gave me a reason to like Cyclops, made Emma sympathetic, and tried to make Colossus likable too.

So is the whole project a failure, in the end? I think I'd have to qualify my answer: a "yes" with a "but".

"Italian Spider-man"

This is really neither here nor there, but I don't want to get in the habit of leaving long periods between posts. It's a ridiculous and incredibly kitschy Spider-man send up featuring someone who looks vaguely like Ron Jeremy as the titular hero and a villain in a luchador mask. Which makes it surprisingly awesome.

Politics, prayer, and disingenuous posturing

It took far too long, but the Ontario Legislature finally moved to remove the recital of the Lord's Prayer from the opening of each daily session a couple months ago. I'm late to the party in commenting on this, I know, but that's because it's getting more popular attention now than it did back in February. (One question, though: it's easy to find petitions to keep the prayer, but where are the petitions to sign if you support getting rid of the damn thing?)

Largely, this is because there's a huge opposition to its removal from people who a) are Christian, b) are probably white, c) are probably not young, and d) have probably never set foot in the provincial legislature. And the logic they're using, if the blogosphere and various online petitions are any indication, is both absurd, inappropriate, often wrong, and very enlightening. I'll avoid adding my own commentary - although I'm tempted to say something about the person who invokes the "guilty white man", which is a tremendously interesting figure to me - and let the defenders of the prayer hang themselves.

(Okay, so at least two comments: I'd like to say that the racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia contained in these messages is subtle, but that would be an outright lie. I'd also like to say that I had to search hard for these comments and that these are the most extreme examples of opposition to the move. That would also be a lie - a good one-third to one-half are engaged in something at least implicitly racist.)


"I can't believe [Ontario Premier] Mr. D. McGuinty not taking his mother's advice. What kind of role model is he for the children of Ontario? "The premier doesn't listen to his mother so I won't either.""

"Is nothing sacred anymore ?? Dalton, stop being a guilty white man. If those that come to Canada do not like it and it offends them, tell them to go back to their country, if it was so great."

"I would like it known that we are the country in which the imigrants chose, We are becoming a minority, in our own country. Land of Opporunity."Right" I'm not suppose to say Merry Christmas. I was born here and proud to be Canadian.Now we are not allowed to have the Lords Prayer. Will we loose all of our hynms as well? We do not interfere in their religon. They came here for what we stood for a land of opportunity and OUR WAYS OF LIFE."

"In trying to bend ourselves into pretzels to make other peoples feel welcome we have alienated ourselves. We have lost the "ownership" of our own country."

"Canada was founded on Christianity and it should stay like this. I am from the Netherlands, where there they are changing everything as well. The Dutch hate it. They are loosing their Country to Muslims. Don't let this happen to Canada!"

"History needs to be presereved, regardless of country, changing social attitudes or the form of content in question - if you begin to remove the foundation, as small as each part seems, you'll be left with nothing in the end,"

"I am CANADIAN and this matters to me."

"If we attempt to take God(Jesus) out of Canada, we may experience the same types of tragedies the U.S. experienced from 9/11 until now."

"If we were to go to their country, do you think they would change their ways for us? No way. I know someone from Iran, he said Canada is a fool-his country would not change anything for us if we were entering his country."

Kids and/in commercials

Continuing on my TV spots riff... I had wanted to embed a bunch of videos to write about really briefly, all of them incorporating kids, but I'm having a hell of a time finding some. So I'll assume that others have seen the Ikea commercial showing the excited parents and the young daughter that's barking orders as if they're kids, or have seen the Burger King commercial where the parents beg and plead and whine with their very young son to let them go get some fast food.

They're part of a weird trend in commercials that appears to invert parent-child power relations and it's already been beaten to death - the commercials are somewhat amusing the first time but grate the second or third time before you realize that they're simply insulting - for parents and their children. There's something almost cute about the way that they ostensibly empower kids on the first viewing, but it is, of course, a patronizing sort of empowerment (the commercials are just ridiculous enough that adults will recognize these could not be real children) that they ostensibly hope kids will misrecognize as entitlement. (And if you know any children who have a tendency to act with unearned or undeserved entitlement, this is no pleasant thing.)

What's interesting, of course, is that even the non-profits use this strategy, albeit more subtly:



It's a far less patronizing commercial - as a friend pointed out to me, the "Please, David" is a surprisingly respectful touch - but I wonder if it's fair to reduce it to the same endgame: like Burger King, in the end they just want kids to badger their parents to buy stuff. Enviro-friendly stuff, of course, but... or maybe I'm just asking for too much from the format.

Of course, we can always count on anti-drug campaigns to come up with the most fantastically over-wrought, unsubtle, and totally thoughtless crap. This gem features kids exclusively but makes no effort to actually communicate a message to them, aiming the spiel explicitly at the parents. (So rather than talk to children, we're expecting their parents to write down or remember the website, visit it, read the stuff, and then retransmit it? Wha?) What makes it particularly entertaining and disturbing, though, is the palpable horror aesthetic. Truly bizarre:

Lex Luthor and Tony Stark

Geoff Klock wrote here about Lex Luthor's desk in JLA: Earth 2, and about all of the things that it manages to express about Lex in a single panel: "you look at that image...the empty desk carved from an endangered redwood tree (we must assume) and you know EVERYTHING you need to know about this character: he is rich, wasteful, arrogant, powerful, has very good taste, and doesn't love anything (nothing personal is in the room or on that desk)."

It left me wondering whether Jon Favreau (or Avi Arad or any of the other Marvel people involved in the production) had this comic in mind when making the new Iron Man movie. Y'see, Tony Stark has a smaller but otherwise identical table in his living room, and Stark's vanity and alienation are similarly central to his character. I think that there's something meaningful about the table being in Stark's home, though, rather than in his office, as is Luthor's - and this is what signals their difference. As he expresses throughout the film, Stark may not have anyone to love, but one gets the sense that the table itself is substituting for those absent people - given that it's in his home, it's framed more intimately than Luthor's piece of decorative furniture, a lonely and endangered rarity kept close to home and which expresses something about Stark's sense of himself.

The commercial break in a commercial break...

I can't find a clip of it anywhere, but the Canadian hardware chain Rona has started doing something strange and bizarrely meta-televisual (though in only the most superficial sense) with its TV spots.

They split the commercials into two 15 second bits, though this isn't all that strange in and of itself. But in the first bit they ask a home-repair question, saying that the answer will follow after 'the break'. 'The break', of course, is another commercial, after which the second bit provides an answer to the question. It's a clever gimmick, though like all gimmicks one that I would surely despise if I saw it used more often than this.

Where these commercials actually become unintentionally interesting, though? In one instance, I noticed that the first half of one of these pairings aired as the last commercial before the actual TV show resumed - and so the second bit didn't air until after the program went to break. The commercial's 'after the break' line amusingly appears to invert, if ever so temporarily and weakly, the relationship between the program and its ads.

(Not that these line separating them was ever that clear to begin with, but its usually the programming itself that tries to seem more like a glorified advertisement than the commercial working the same angle from the other end.)

The general's wife as the nation?

As I continue to work through issues surrounding Roméo Dallaire, the 'anti-conquest mean' peacekeeper role, and Canadian nationalism, a professor made an interesting comment about the departing Canadian commander in Afghanistan, Rick Hillier, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Dallaire. (Both are unabashed Liberal party supporters, are credited with having a certain folksy and conversational charm, and are perhaps too outspoken about the government's lack of support for their troops - though, to Hillier's detriment, he lacked the unassailable moral-authority that Dallaire acquired as the commander of the Rwandan mission. Hence, his recent resignation after taking a lot of criticism from the Conservative government.)

That interesting comment pertained to the way in which Hillier first hinted at his resignation, as the CBC notes that "speculation had already begun that Hillier was set to retire. For one, the general had brought his wife, Joyce, to the war zone for the first time, raising speculation that this was a farewell tour." The aforementioned professor likened Joyce Hillier to a maternal national figure, which would provide an interesting contrast to the masculinized national figure in Dallaire that I've been thinking about endlessly for many months. It also caused me to recall that Roméo Dallaire's wife, Elizabeth, likewise accompanied her husband when he returned to Rwanda ten years after the genocide that he witnessed.

Clearly, there's something here about these women functioning as witnesses and representatives of the people 'back home', but I'm wondering whether there's a much older convention at work here with which I'm not familiar. If journalists were picking up on Hillier inviting his wife to Afghanistan as a sign that his resignation was imminent, then there must be something there, right?

Indie music + useless consumer crap = gold

Far be it from me to deny artists the chance to earn a living, but it seems that the number of formerly indie music acts cashing in on wildly ironic (in the woefully inappropriate sense) corporate deals has exploded in the past few years. My top 3 corporate rock commercials of the moment:

#3 The Flaming Lips and Kraft
On the plus side, the commercial seems to indicate that these salad dressings are, like, healthy and natural. More negatively, they've taken a song about responsibility and the abuse of power by leaders - "The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song" - and allowed Kraft to apply it to the aforementioned salad dressing. But at least they've effectively castrated the song by deleting every lyric but the 'yeah yeah yeah' portion - it's less the song that they've sold than the beat and melody. More generally, this just the latest in a long string of songs that the Flaming Lips have licensed since they finally broke free of their long career of relative obscurity 6 years ago. This being the case, it's hard to hold such a carefully managed sale like this against them - at least in comparison to the other two artists on this list.

#2 Weezer and Beaches
Weezer almost manages to kinda salvage some dignity by selling the song - and not their recording from 'The Green Album' - of "Island in the Sun" to a tropical resort company in this commercial. To their detriment, the cover version also reveals how painfully banal the song and its lyrics are. In Rob Mitchum's review of Weezer's dreadful Make Believe album, he asks if "Rivers Cuomo [lyrics were] always on the notebook-scrawl level of 'I don't feel the joy/ I don't feel the pain,' and did we not notice because scrawling in notebooks was the depth of our emotional knowledge at the time?" Mitchum eventually lets the early Weezer stuff off the hook, and while this song is not early Weezer, the pairing is offensive enough that the answer to his question doesn't even matter to me anymore.

#1 Le Tigre and Nivea
A feminist art-rock band that name-drops people like Yoko Ono, Vaginal Davis, and James Baldwin in their songs, Le Tigre gave the rough-edged but undeniably dancy "Deceptacon" to Nivea (among others - but cell phone companies and jewelers, while strange choices, are not nearly so ironic) in 2006. Despite my best efforts, I can't locate this commercial, but suffice to say that a band that I can't be the only one who finds it unconsciencable that a group of feminists would sell out to the cosmetics industry, or that artists who count so many anti-racism figures among their influences would peddle their music to a company that sells skin-whitening cream. Few corporate pairings can destroy a band's worth for me as wholly as this one has.

Graphic novel v. comic book

Marjane Satrapi, on the term 'graphic novel': "It's a word that publishers created for the bourgeois to read comics without feeling bad."

I do, of course, sometimes wonder if my interest in pop culture - and comics, in particular - is (in part or largely) aimed at allowing me, and by extension those that read or listen to things that I may write or say, to read some admittedly silly comics or watch some unapologetically bad TV without feeling bad. That said, I'm totally with Satrapi on this one - I detest 'graphic novel', especially when it's deployed as a way of delineating good/bad or high/low art comic books. Which is how it's used more often than not, I think.

But maybe some people see a value in the distinction - thoughts?

"Finding Lost, getting lost"

A paper that I wrote about LOST for a conference a couple years ago was recently published through the online Society for the Study of Lost. Just click that first link if you're interested.

About the paper itself: I'm not totally happy with it. (Though these things tends to happen after enough time passes.) For one, I use a lot of Harold Bloom in it, a literary critic whose terms I like, but whose ends I find somewhat detestable - and so my use of Bloom ends up leading me to a very unBloomian place, and I don't really discuss that. I'm currently reworking and expanding it for publication in print, (hopefully I'll have some more details/good news about this in the next few months) and in the new version I'm adding some Baudrillard (drawing from Seduction, in particular) as a foil to Bloom. There are two reasons for this: 1) Baudrillard's conception of 'seduction' is actually much closer to what I was getting at then is Bloom's notion of 'misprision'; 2) the opposition of Baudrillard's decidedly anti-truth, anti-authority philosophy with Bloom's almost spiritual notions of genius and canon also reproduces, I think, Lost's own numerous binary conflicts between rationality and spirituality, seduction and truth, etc.

Of Rock Band and rock bands

Actual conversation I had last night at Central, a Toronto bar that has a semi-weekly Xbox 'Rock Band' night every Sunday.

Doorman: It's a $5 cover.
Neil: Oh? What's going on?
D: We have a band from Scandinavia, and a band--
N: Oh, I was checking to see if they were playing Rock Band tonight. (mimes hitting the buttons)
D: (somewhat confused) Well, there's still one more band.
N: (sheepishly) Uh, no, I meant, uh, the game.
D: Oh, the... right, the game. (smirks)
N: Yeah...

Did it ever occur to the developers of Rock Band that these kind of things might happen? Awkward.

Michael Cera's Precious Little Life

Rarely do I blog about anything that is breaking or could properly be called 'news'; this is an exception. Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) appears to finally be moving forward with his adaptation of Brian Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim comic book series, and we know this because he's cast his Scott - the always so awkward and adorable Michael Cera (Arrested Development, Superbad... if i honestly have to describe who he is, then you probably don't like the same things i do and are wasting your time reading this).


The film will apparently be called Scott Pilgrim's Little Life, which is a slight modification of the title of the first book in the series. (Why excise 'Precious', though? Scott's preciousness, like Michael Cera's, is probably the most likable thing about him.) All we really know to this point is that the title role has been cast and I have to say that, while I love (George) Michael (Bluth) Cera, the casting choice is too obvious. Cera is perfect - beloved by the same sorts of indie hipster doofuses that Scott represents and, to top it off, from the same hometown - and I suppose that they can't really go wrong with a match that looks this right.

But casting the perfect match can be both right and boring. I'm hard pressed to figure out how, having read the books and followed Michael Cera in everything he's done for the last 5 years or so, this film could possibly surprise me. Or, for that matter, why Michael Cera would want to a slightly dimmer, slightly super-powered version of the same character he's been doing for years.

Matt Fraction on the X-Men!

It's been a long time since I've made any comics-related posts, but this'll be a short one. From Comic Book Resources:

"Ed Brubaker will co-write 'Uncanny X-Men' with [Matt] Fraction starting on issue #500. Greg Land and new Marvel exclusive Terry Dodson will rotate art chores. 'Stuff explodes, everybody has lots of sex, and then everybody dies. And the team moves to San Francisco,' Fraction said. That may have been a joke."

Fraction doing the X-Men? If it's half as good as his work on this, then it'll still be the best reading on Uncanny X-Men since Pierre Trudeau was last in Parliament*. And if you've never read Fraction's Casanova, you can find a free (and legal) copy of it online here.

*1984, for those of you who aren't Canadian. Or who are, but don't particularly know or care about who has been PM and when.

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.