Movies I Wish Someone Would Make

This piece Shaun Mullen wrote about what alien life would actually be like if we found it or it found us has been on my mind for a while, not least because I think it gets at something I would like to see more in the movies: depictions of societies where multiple kinds of sentient life forms have figured out how to live together.  It's not that I dislike first contact movies, it's just that they tend to follow fairly typical, conflict-driven arcs (with Contact being a notable and fascinating exception).  Most of those contacts occur because either humans or aliens are rapacious and violent: they try to kill us in Independence Day, our avarice and fear lead us to kill them in District 9, which I devoutly hope will get a sequel that might push the narrative further.  Men in Black was a humorous nod in the direction of coexistence, but that coexistence is maintained via a conspiracy that prevents humanity from actually having to grapple with the fact of intelligent alien life.  Star Trek, of course, has alien life, but most of it is hominid in appearance, and the conflicts between races emerge out of differing value structures, rather than a true inability to comprehend each other.  What I'm looking for is a world like Star Wars, where humans and aliens alike have essentially settled on a shared set of compromises that rule their interactions, where the society as a whole is far beyond the point of first contact, but where there are more genuinely alien main characters.  Any good recommendations?  It's possible that what I'm looking for is out there and I've just missed it.  But the craving is strong, and I can't think of something I know out there that will satisfy it.

The Long Winter

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of ann_gav.

It grieves me that I don't have a copy of Laura Ingalls Wilder's full coming-of-age series here in Washington, DC with me, because folks really need to remember that when it comes to winter, the past week or so barely rates.  I think there are a couple of things worth remembering about The Long Winter, the story of an incredibly harsh winter the Ingalls' lived through that lasted from October to May, when the train finally got through with the family's Christmas turkey.  First, they started out the year with a mediocre to bad harvest: even before the blizzard hit, Laura knew that the yield from her family's new claim would get them through the winter if the stretched it, and no one expected winter to last seven months.  These are folks who thought they knew how bad it could be, who had neighbors who walked eighty miles to get them a stick of Christmas candy, where the patriarch of the household once survived a blizzard for days by holing up in the snow and eating the treats he was supposed to bring home to his daughters.  They had no idea what they were in for.

Second, the book is really about how Almanzo Wilder, the man who would become Laura's husband, saves her and her family, but not in a damsel-in-distressy kind of way.  They meet for the first time when Laura and her sister Carrie get lost in the Big Slough trying to bring back a tooth for a hay-cutter to their father, and lose their way.  Later in the winter, when the Ingalls and many of their neighbors are quite literally starving to death, Pa Ingalls figures out that Almanzo and his brother have stockpiled wheat literally in the walls of their store: they've built hidden storage space.  Weak with hunger and unable to provide for the family, he goes to the Wilder brothers and demands that they give or sell him some of the grain, and ultimately, they do, without sacrificing his dignity.  And finally, Almanzo and Cap Garland, a younger boy, risk their lives to bring back enough wheat to get the town through the rest of the winter from a farmer with a stockpile of his own.  In a very different way from Farmer Boy, the book in the series that focuses on Almanzo's childhood, The Long Winter is about establishing Almanzo's character and fitness to marry Laura.  He's got to grow up enough to earn her, and she has to grow up enough to learn to love and trust him.

Black and White in Baltimore

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of elipousson.

I started watching Homicide: Life on the Street this weekend, and one thing that struck me immediately was how the nature of crime and Baltimore's racial mix shift, in ways that seem to me to be related, from that show to The Wire.


In Homicide (at least in the first season), crime is mostly an amateur activity, one that can be, and is, undertaken by black and white people alike.  In the initial shot of the prisoner holding tank in the show's debut episode, the suspects include two black men and a white woman.  The first three murderers to be arrested in that episode, "Gone for Goode," are all white men.  In the second episode, "Ghost of a Chance," one of the investigations focuses on the humorized murder of an older white man by his wife (also white), seen polishing silver in a knit suit; another white suspect is apprehended after the detectives in the case consult a ghost and tarot cards.  In "Son of a Gun," aired third, a white woman hires a hit man to kill a coworker in an argument over whether Spiro Agnew deserves a bust in the Capitol.  Of course, black people commit murder, or try to, on the show too, and their crimes are less likely to be portrayed in a humorous light.  A black man shoots and blinds a police officer; another is suspected of raping and murdering a young girl.  In Homicide, murder knows no limitations based on class, or race, or gender.


There are, however, hints that something's changing.  When a young African-American boy gets hauled into the station on a mistaken assumption, Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher) tells him "Son, there are a lot of black people have never been arrested."  "I wouldn't know about that," the kid replies.  That shadow of a shift in 1993 has grown into a corporeal in 2002, when The Wire premieres.

In the world of The Wire, the crime we see is professionalized, and is committed largely by black people.  That's in part because the show focuses on an investigative crime unit, and on the drug crews it targets, but when the show ventures into the Homicide division in general, it's clear that most killings can be traced in some ways to those crews, whether it's the murder of a state's witness, of a drug kingpin's obsessive girl, or of a club owner turned double agent.  The murders are rarely ever funny anymore, randomness has vanished from this category of crime, which is no longer about human passion and irrationality, but rather about money.  There are white criminals on the show, of course, but like Nick and Ziggy in the show's second season, they're incompetent posers, or like The Greek, they are conspiratorial forces more than they are human, operating far above the street and the actual hands-on commission of crime.  The vast majority of The Wire's criminals and victims are African-American.  The kid who was terrified of having tossed a library book in the fifth grade in Homicide would have been a little hopper on The Wire: I almost wonder if he grew up from one show to the next, if a Wire character has his roots in that nervous child from Homicide.

Singing for Their Supper

I suppose I understand the economic mechanisms behind charity singles.  They're an easy way to get a lot of people to spend a small amount of money that'll be donated, when they might balk at making more substantial direct donations.  That said, I think celebrities tend to sound a bit clueless when they talk about singles raising genuine awareness of international crises like the one ongoing in Haiti.  Not that I expect the Pogues' former frontman Shane MacGowan to be an avatar of coherence, whether declaring that in recording Screamin' Jay Hawkins "I Put a Spell on You,"(which sort of resurrects the deeply unfortunate debate over whether Haiti's cursed) as a charity single "Casting a spell on you doesn't mean a bad spell!" or in insisting that in releasing the single in February, he and Nick Cave will keep Haiti alive as an issue right now.  I tend to think 30 Rock's "Kidney Now" episode exposes both the good intentions and ridiculousness of such efforts:



It's like the "Title of the Song" of charity songs:

Personal Jesus

I don't know a huge amount about gospel, but Kelefa Sanneh's New Yorker profile of gospel singer Tonéx is well worth buying last week's issue of the magazine to read (and you'll have to, since only an abstract is available online).  For those not in the know, as I wasn't, Tonéx was a major new voice in gospel, someone who managed to push the form closer to pop and hip-hop, before he finally decided to acknowledge that he's sexually attracted to men, and that he doesn't feel like that's something that needed to be fixed.  That revelation, and the gospel community's reaction to it, has exposed a central contradiction of the form: gospel has historically relied on gay men to be some of its greatest innovators, but it doesn't tolerate their open presence.  Sanneh's piece is a fantastic look at the impact of social change on an artistic form.  As he writes:

It's clear that the old arrangement can't last forever.  Gospel music has offered generations of same-gender-loving singers a place to call home, in exchange for their obedience, or their silence.  This tricky and somethings hard bargain shaped the genre, guiding its transfigured love songs, its expressions of praise and sorrow, its twinning of the orthodox and the outrageous.  And there's no telling what gospel will sound like when that tacit arrangement no longer holds.

Read it, and then check out some of Tonéx's music.  "Personal Jesus" is a pretty great place to start:

 

Hip-Hop Academia

http://www.flickr.com/photos/neilhinchley/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Adam Serwer's review of Born to Use Mics, a new collection on Nas's seminal album Illmatic, is typically excellent, framing the problem as an attempt to win hip-hop the status of literature, an attempt that's driven by the fact that a lot of academics just want to prove they can flow:

The new anthology Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas's Illmatic, edited by Michael Eric Dyson and Sohail Daulatzai, is a love letter to Illmatic, a self-conscious effort to preserve the album as a classic of poetic nonfiction. There's plenty of academic work on hip-hop as a musical genre and a cultural phenomenon. But despite being the most distinct and dominant form of poetic nonfiction of the past 30 years, it has yet to be given its due as literature. Sure, your average liberal-arts college has more than its share of rap-focused classes taught by hip professors ready to act as urban-culture guides for wide-eyed private-school kids. (My class at Vassar was called "Literature from the Underground.") But these are seen as quirky electives. For the most part hip-hop is still fighting a dulled American impulse -- the same one that dismissed jazz out of hand as "noise" for so long -- that the artistic contribu-tions of urban black culture are just fodder for the groundlings. If Illmatic fails to persuade the reader of hip-hop's intrinsic value as poetic nonfiction, the editors seem to be asking, what else could?

I'm sure Adam is right, and academics both want to be MCs, and want MCing to carry it with the status that serious academia has.  But I want to interrogate the need to turn hip-hop into literature a little further, because I think it speaks to deeply internalized beliefs, across racial, gender, and age lines, that popular music is a really inferior form of art.  Film studies may privilege art film, but popular movies are very much part of the conversation.  Comic books get elevated into literature unapologetically by people like Michael Chabon.  But of the 147 music classes Yale is offering for the spring semester, including in its School of Music, only two even come close to addressing popular music: a class on music technologies, and one on Afro-Brazilian music.

This strikes me as crazy.  One of the reasons I like the (objectively not very good) Music & Lyrics is because the movie insists that pop music is important.  At one point, Hugh Grant's character tells Drew Barrymore's that it's just as much of an accomplishment to have written a good pop song as a good novel, that the emotional impact of hearing "My Girl" is as legitimate and relevant as the satisfaction you get from reading a big book.  Maybe it's that we're embarrassed by sentiment, and that's why we treat pop music as if it's a little bit silly.

All of which strikes me as too bad.  If we recognized pop music as the critically important form that it is, it would be enough of a coronation for hip-hop to be taking over the genre.  But because hip-hop is an outsider genre, to truly enshrine it in the artistic canon, it isn't enough to say it's become the dominant form of our popular music.  So folks need to find another way to demonstrate its importance, to slot it into another genre.  I understand why literature is a natural fit.  But, as someone who's been called out by John McWhorter for putting too much freight on hip-hop, I wish this wasn't necessary.

Come Together

I was pretty freaked out when Archie proposed to Veronica last spring (thank goodness for speculative fiction, even in the World of Archie), but, courtesy Racialicious, I am a huge fan of this particular plot development:

 Michael Chabon isn't, of course, wrong when he writes in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay that the rivalry between Betty and Veronica has an enduring power that's the core of the comics.  In fact, it's probably correct at this point to say that "“the deep, almost Oriental mystery of the two big-toothed, wasp-waisted goddess-girls, light and dark, entangled forever in the enmity of their friendship,” is much more about Betty and Veronica than it is about Archie.  And so I've never had problems with Archie dating outside the triangle. 

And I'm much more excited by the prospect of Archie dating Valerie, and not just for the progressive (and long overdue) racial implications.  The Archie universe is often at its most fun when it crosses cliques, when Archie hangs out with Sabrina, or the Archies and the Pussycats play a show together.  One of Riverdale's huge strengths is that while it's an avatar of suburban American normality, it's a also a slightly surreal place, where Dilton Doiley can bust scientific frontiers (and speaking of great Archie romances, bring back Danni Malloy, Dilton's one-time redheaded, science-genius girlfriend!), magic is entirely possible, and long before Hannah Montana, teenage girls could be rockstars and also completely normal.

My Favorite Super Bowl Ad Moment

Vizio includes Gary Brolsma, the Numa Numa Guy in its ad, along with Beyonce, for very large televisions.  Brolsma's celebrity, in addition to providing the single best New York Times headline of all time, has always struck me as a critical turning point in the internet's viral culture: it was the last moment you could do something like that without expecting it to have the potential to go international, the last moment when rather than embracing it, Brolsma was incredibly ashamed (though he did ultimately score an endorsement deal for headphones, and the Vizio ad suggests he's still reaping some profit from the incident).  Seriously, the video has a kind of infectious, un-self-conscious quality that I like:



And I say that as someone who may have spontaneously burst into this song when it came on the radio during a college road trip.  The Google ad was the single best ad of the game, and I thought the juxtaposition of "Ain't No Sunshine" with the visuals for Dante's Inferno, a new video game, was very smart and eyecatching.

Why I'm Rooting for the Colts

"I'll kill a snitch.  I'm not saying I have, I'm not saying I haven't.  You know what I mean.  Whatever."



That, and I think the guy is a great, great quarterback.

Now Put Your Hands Up

Just because, a Friday-afternoon mixtape for all the ladies (and of course, all the cool guys out there, too):

1.  "Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves," Annie Lennox & Aretha Franklin:



The awesomeness of this song cannot be underestimated.  It's a great reminder of how terrific Annie Lennox's pipes are.  She totally holds her own with Aretha here.  To mix both metaphors and genres in a single sentence, any pop song that includes the phrase "the conscious liberation of the female state" and does not immediately descend into ridiculousness has me at hello.  And the sexual implications of the song are not remotely subtle, which in this case, is a really good thing.

2.  "Telephone," Lady Gaga:



So, Beyonce may have expressed these themes more thoughtfully, or whatever, in "If I Were A Boy."  But you don't need to imagine switching genders to know that sometimes, you need to go out, dance, drink, and not spend all night talking things over.