So, Mr. & Mrs. Smith was on FX last night, and I definitely didn’t notice this when I saw it in 2005, but Angelina Jolie’s team of spies in the movie is made up of some pretty amazing female actors. Among them, Kerry Washington, former Law & Order: Special Victims Unit ADA Alex Cabot (aka Stephanie March), and House M.D. vet (and Kirk’s mom!) Jennifer Morrison. I’ve always had genial feelings for that particular piece of trash, and I feel even better about it noticing they gave some actresses a little work in roles that could have been filled by nobodies.
This Is Why I Love Pop Culture
Washington, D.C. is about to get deluged by what is apparently an actual phenomenon: extremely heavy snow and thunder, known as thundersnow. And of course, someone’s written a song about thundersnow. Pop culture encompasses all things!
New Robyn!
Okay, there’s a bit of false advertising in the title of this post. Yes, there’s new Robyn here, but she’s just singing the chorus on a pretty sweet song by I Blame Coco, also known as Sting’s daughter:
I’m kind of digging that “It’s the Milgram device all over again” line.
But really, the song is making me wonder when we’re going to get a new Robyn album. She’s had a great run of guest appearances, whether mixing it up with Snoop Dogg or absolutely killing the vocals on “The Girl and the Robot” (which has one of my favorite videos of the year). But it’s been 2005 since she released Robyn on her own label, Konichiwa Records. That record is one of the defining CDs of my early twenties. The bravado on “Curriculum Vitae” is a fairly precise match for my sense of humor, and for the kind of self-presentation I wanted to have when I was graduating from college. ”Bum Like You” and “Be Mine” were the opposite heads of a coin that encapsulated my feelings during a tough transition period. And “Handle Me” is a great, slightly overaggressive anthem to independence of all kinds. But we’re coming up on five years now. I want more from her–and I want it to be entirely her creative vision, not in collaboration with anyone else. Robyn is too unique, and too fascinating, to deny us herself for this long.
The Angkor Temples and the Problems of Conservation
I loved visiting the Angkor temples around Siem Reap–the two days I spent hiking there were wonderful and revelatory. But I’ll admit that, as amazing as it is to climb all over and get up close with some astonishing works of art, the varying states of conservation at the temples left me fairly anxious. First, for Angkor, tourism is clearly both a blessing and a significant challenge. Admission to the temples is run by a hotel chain, and is magnitudes more expensive than any other entry fee I paid anywhere in Cambodia: $20 for a day, $40 for three days, etc. Some of that funding goes to the hotel chain that runs the admissions process, but it’s more money than the Authority for the Protection and Management of Angkor and the Region of Siem Reap would be getting charging smaller piecemeal rates. But tourism is also clearly overwhelming to the sites themselves. When I climbed one temple to watch the sun set on my first day, the structure was literally packed. That’s not a problem in and of itself, but a thousand-plus people clambering up and around a stone structure every day of the year takes its toll. And it’s not merely getting there: my guide, and other guides I saw, actively encouraged visitors to touch certain reliefs, despite the fact that, like the monkey warrior in the slide show, they’re becoming shiny from contact with human hands. Oils and contact ultimately lead to deterioration. It’s an odd lapse in what otherwise seems like a reasonably rigorous guide training program.
And the reconstruction efforts themselves raised all kinds of questions for me. For example, in Ta Prohm, the overgrown temple made famous by Tomb Raider, and Preah Khan, there are huge piles of stones that were part of the original structures simply heaped in courtyards. They aren’t being protected from deterioration by wind and rain, and the fact that they’re piled up like rubble can’t be great: that weight’s got to produce a fair amount of friction. At Banteay Srei, a beautifully preserved sandstone temple far from the core Angkor Wat complex, the stones are at least sorted and set out in order behind chain link, but they’re still outside, on the grass and open to the sun and rain.
I even wondered about the wisdom of letting trees grow up in the temples. Obviously at this point, some trees are so intertwined with the temples that to remove them would threaten the structural integrity of the buildings (like the tree that’s essentially holding together a small stone building in the picture of Preah Khan), something that’s already a threat to the entire area because as new hotels break ground, the Siem Reap water table is dropping, and the ground under the temples is shifting. But it doesn’t seem like new trees should be allowed to grow just because Ta Prohm’s gotten popular because it’s gotten jungly.
Among all these natural problems, there are severe human ones as well. Because smuggling has become such a significant threat to Angkor artifacts, almost none of the statues that appeared in chambers in the temples are in their original locations. Big bas-reliefs, balustrades and pediments are in place because they’re exceedingly hard to move. But statues are gone, to museums, academic institutions, or legitimate private collectors unless they’re too damaged or disfigured (when the temples changed hands between Hindus and Buddhists in antiquity, adherents of the new faith often chiseled out representations of gods or Buddha–the Khmer Rouge left Angkor alone because it was a representation of what the Cambodian people could accomplish), or they’re more contemporary representations that are part of ongoing worship. I found myself inexplicably depressed by seeing a group of statues literally padlocked behind bars in one of the temples. I suppose it’s better to have some of the statues in place, but those are grim conditions in which to see them.
These are complicated decisions all, and they’re being made by a complicated network of organizations–almost every temple restoration I saw seemed to be under the authority of a collaborating group of organizations, whether APSARA, UNESCO, or various international governments. I don’t know how those groups make decisions among themselves, or what body of conservation laws guides them. They have different base material to work with at each site, so of course the results are different. But if tourists are going to continue to flood Angkor, and if the temples are going to be around to awe them, it seems likely that all the teams in all their permutations will have to raise their conservation standards.
Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting
Quite literally, in fact! Shaolin is set for a $137-million initial public offering that will enable the site–and the head monk there–to promote tourism in the region and to enhance Shaolin’s cultural brand. I recognize that this is a serious issue for Zen Buddhism, and indeed, having beauty contests at the temple seems pretty inappropriate. But really, all I want to do is make Carl Douglas jokes. I am a bad person.
Update: PostBourgie’s Jamelle and coworker and buddy Gautham Nagesh have pointed out, via Twitter, that I really should be posting Wu-Tang videos on this post. They’re probably right, but I was a nerdy little suburban white girl when I acquired my goofy Carl Douglas references, and I stand by ‘em. But to appease them:
Soaring
Emily Nussbaum’s New York piece about how television became art in this decade is, predictably wonderful. But I wish she’d spent a little bit more time on the structural issues that allowed shows ranging from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to The Sopranos to The Wire to Dexter to Mad Men to survive and thrive. One point she makes that I think is critically important is that technology both allowed audiences to exist beyond the rigid time slot when shows originally aired and the time they were released on DVD, and provided supportive communities that deepened fans’ analysis of and attachment to complex shows. She writes:
In fact, a series like The Wire might not have found that audience were it not for galloping advances in technology: DVDs that allowed viewers to watch a whole season in a gulp and, later, DVRs that let viewers curate, pause, and reflect. By opening up TV to deeper analysis, these technologies emboldened a community of TV-philes, fans and academics who defended the medium as worthy of critical respect. Online, writers were forced to reckon with their most passionate viewers (and some loopy new critical forms: the recap, fan fiction, “filk”). A show like Lost, with its recursive symbol-games, couldn’t exist without the Internet’s mob-think. But this was true as well for The Sopranos and Mad Men, allusive dramas that rewarded rumination, causing nationwide waves of appreciation and backlash for months after each new episode.
But I would be particularly interested to learn more about the financing issues that allowed shows like this to survive. Did premium cable subscriptions rise in price such that smaller audiences could finance shows than they had previously? How much of a role did alternative distribution systems like iTunes help finance shows that might have done poorly at attracting advertiser revenue or drawing large audiences? Nussbaum said the WB’s obscurity saved Buffy–was that because the network had more limited expectations for audiences, allowing Buffy to clear a threshold that Dollhouse clearly missed on FOX years later?
And some more questions. She also points out that Matthew Weiner was trained by David Chase–The Sopranos spawning, to a certain extent, Mad Men. And The Corner made The Wire possible. Is it possible that the aughts were simply a time when a small group of auters accumulated enough clout to get done what they wanted? And I’m curious as to what happened that said crew of auters is so male-dominated. The only woman who Nussbaum namechecks is Ilene Chaiken, and The L Word, in my humble opinion, simply isn’t in a class with the great shows that are at the heart of this piece. And I wish she’d discussed a little bit more the extent to which the success of cable and premium-access shows is encouraging the networks to up their game. But it’s a very interesting piece and a good point. Like Nussbaum, I’m curious where web-only models will go, and as of this moment, optimistic.
