Setting the baseball blogosphere on fire

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

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

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

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

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

Dark and brooding redux

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

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

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

This, after all, is the essence of Superman:

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

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

The absolute nuttiest Olympic sport: an introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beijing 2008's phantom protests

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

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

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

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

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

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

Custom board-gaming

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

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

Guilty displeasure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Lost" projects: Get Back's first mix

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


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

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

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

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.