-I think I might buy Portal 2.

-Playing a cheating, fake-environmentalist WASP asshole does not qualify you to play the Prince of Darkness. People need to read their Milton.

-I look forward to the adaptation of the Your Child At… series that must inevitably follow the What to Expect When You’re Expecting movie.

-Of course Sumner Redstone forced production of this show.

Now, off to Thor.

Below the jump, there be spoilers through the end of Alastair Reynolds’ Chasm City.

The last time I wrote about Chasm City, I complained that “it’s entirely unclear why we’re supposed to be emotionally invested in this society, or societies.” This time out, I have a more specific complaint: I don’t actually understand what they advantage was to Sky and his ship of beating the rest of the fleet by a couple of months. Given that the story of Sky’s crime is the crux of the novel, and that by the end of the novel, we’re supposed to sympathize, to at least a certain extent, with him, the fact that Reynolds fails to communicate the thing we’re supposed to see as his rationale through his perspective seems to me to be disastrous for the novel.


Reynolds is pretty clear about this. All the Santiago gets by beating the rest of the fleet to Journey’s End is “nascent settlements.” And those are quickly overwhelmed once the other ships arrive. It’s not clear that the folks on the Santiago have any sort of long-term advantage over their rivals in the nastily brutish societies that the novel traverses now. It’s not even clear how the initial society produced the mess that the characters operate in.


So how are we supposed to react to this? Are we supposed to sympathize with Sky because he did something terrible but great? Are we supposed to feel odd about sympathizing with Sky because he did something ambitious and terrible and turned out to be wrong? Chasm City isn’t subtle, but it doesn’t make clear how we’re supposed to feel about the characters or the events either. And at the end of the day, I didn’t really end up feeling anything at all.

I dig both altos and arcane but elegant sentence constructions, which probably explains why I’m feeling slightly geeked out for Clare Maguire right now. There’s the cosmic dinner party of “The Last Dance”:

But I think it’s “The Shield and the Sword” that particularly gets me with the “I no longer love you” line in the chorus:

So much more lovely than “I’m over you,” or “I don’t love you any more,” or any of the other alternatives.

By Alyssa Rosenberg

Roger Ebert conceded last year that he’d been wrong to say that video games can never be art. As much as Ebert’s a Wise Old Man of popular culture, his admission of defeat, or at least neutrality, isn’t as important for the artistic recognition of video games as two things that happened this week. First, the National Endowment for the Arts announced that it is turning its Arts on Radio and Television grants program into an Arts in Media program that will include digital games. If you’re a game designer, you’re eligible for $10,000-$200,000 to develop, produce, and distribute your project if you can convince a grants committee by September 1 that the game you’re working on can be considered a work of art. It’ll be interesting to see where that standard ends up being set in this process.

And second, the Smithsonian American Art Museum finished the voting to see which games will be included in its Art of Video Games exhibit that opens next year. As a Star Wars extended universe nerd, I’m glad to see one of Michael Stackpole’s projects make it in there. But I’m more glad the exhibit is happening at all. Much like with fashion, which has occupied a sort of bastard position in the art world, a museum show on video games codifies what the rest of us know, that they can be art as much as Michaelangelo’s ceilings, Kara Walker’s cutouts, or the amazing and eccentric folk art altar SAAM also has on display. Now that they’re getting a show, what will be important is not that game are displayed but how they’re displayed. As Jenna Sauers points out in a review of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Alexander McQueen exhibit, with fashion “Elaborate styling, stupid wigs, and busy show design in these kinds of exhibitions is not only unnecessary, it’s disrespectful to both the clothing and its audience — because it sends the message that a dress, unlike a painting, can only be understood with significant curatorial intervention.”

It’s not that without government support, people won’t make games, or people won’t acknowledge that they’re art. But institutional support for that consensus matters. Broadening the definition of art makes it easier for people to see that even if they’re not going to the opera or museums, art is a major part of their lives, that support for the arts is important.

By Alyssa Rosenberg

A little more than a week ago, when I was turning over some ideas about the divine in popular culture, commenter John recommended that I checked out the short-lived NBC show, Kings, that flowered and was canceled in 2009. It’s a fascinating show, in part because of how the Biblical cadences pace and deepen the emotional interactions between characters; in part because the main character is something of a void, and some of the best, most moving acting happens at the margins of the show rather than its center. But what struck me most about Kings is that it’s an illustration of how much easier it is to create pop culture with progressive policy assumptions when you remove contemporary American political alignments from the mix.

Kings is not an unambiguously progressive show. The conflict between Gilboa (where the main characters live) and Gath that is the main frame for the events of the show is ancient, intractable. It’s clearly being kept going by the interests of warmongering financier William Cross, who declares at one point “war is just the fuel of progress. Nothing gets made in peace except art,” and Gen. Linus Abner who tells King Silas “I am a warrior. You took my war,” an ancient lament in a modern uniform. But Silas makes peace not out of any theory of when conflict is just, but with attention mostly to short-term political gains, and he’s willing to sacrifice a long-term driver of the economy and the people who support it, to win those gains.

But the issues that are more on the margins, that form the background assumptions of the show, are unambiguously progressive. King Silas’s daughter, Michelle, petitions him repeatedly for health care reform, relying first on emotional arguments, then winning the debate with cost savings arguments about the impact of preventative care that would do Ezra Klein proud. When King Silas is looking for a sacrifice to a God he believes has abandoned him, he seizes on a clean energy program that includes wind power which the characters discuss as an effort to “renew the land.” These programs don’t proceed perfectly: Michelle’s health care policy overwhelms hospitals that are unprepared to deal with the increased demand for care that people suddenly have the resources to ask be satisfied. The renewal program is beset by technical difficulties. But the assumption is that these programs are in service of God’s will—and it helps, of course, that Gilboa is not a democracy, so there isn’t a partisan debate to be had over these policies, however those lines would be drawn.

The one way in which Kings feels fairly politically conventional is that it aligns strong religious belief and a distaste for homosexuality. That seems somewhat unfortunate; it would be a somewhat more progressive show if Kings managed to align faith and sexual progressivism in the way it aligns faith and environmental stewardship. But the show’s a fairly astute sketch of the cancers of the soul that result when one person tries to force another into the closet. The moment when King Silas reveals himself to be not a benevolent monarch but a spiteful, mercurial despot is also the moment that he publicly reveals himself as a homophobe, turning on his son Jack. Later, he makes an extraordinarily ugly scene when, ordering Jack to beg for his mercy, he makes his son kiss the ground he walks on, telling him “Your mouth’s been in dirtier places.” Jack’s a stunted, selfish man, but the damage that’s been done to him, both by himself and others, is in the denial of his true nature. He tries to assert himself briefly after he’s almost outed, telling his mother “Mistake of character? This is who I am.” But he can’t sustain the truth, power is the only kind of love he can accept.

Kings may have failed in the ratings, and it’s a real shame that no cable network found a way to pick it up and keep it going. But it’s a useful illustration of the drama we can make of wonkiness. Questions of health, environmental degradation, the role of religion in public life, and the family are going to persist as long as we’re human. Science fiction is important not just because it’s cool, but because it’s a tool to reset the debates around those questions by putting them in different settings.

By Alyssa Rosenberg

Sometimes, first out of the gate on a cultural phenomenon is not actually where you want to be. But perhaps a bin Laden party tune complete with Charlie Sheen references, bad production, and so few lyrics it’s really just the fragment of a song is the kind of buzz-grabbing move you make if 50 Cent is your mentor:

The only thing that’s sort of astute about this is the repeated line “The great news made me lose my mind,” which I think encapsulates the conflicted feelings a lot of people have about the celebrations on Sunday night. And I’m sure it’s unintentional. As a side note, I’d love to know what Kanye thinks about the reference to the George Condo painting in the art for the single.

(H/T the AV Club)

The strongest criticism, to my mind, of HBO’s Game of Thrones adaptation has been that the depiction of the Dothraki has been simplistic and arguably pretty racist. I think this is the part of the books that has suffered most in the transition: we’ve gotten a bit more of the characters, in the same way we’ve gotten non-book scenes in Westeros, but while characters like Jamie Lannister have been more fleshed out by those extra-scenes, the members of Khal Drogo’s khalasar haven’t really stepped off the screen as people yet. All of which is to say, given the weirdness of depicting a bunch of generically brown people as potentially noble savages, I am deeply curious to see what people end up making of Jason Momoa’s second foray into medievalish shirtlessness this year, the Conan the Barbarian remake, which strikes me as both ludicrously incoherent and unnecessary:

Are people going to care about the weird barbarianness? Will we just pay to see anyone with jacked biceps, be he Momoa, Gyllenhaal or Johnson put on vaguely old-timey clothes and whip around a sword? Do we care about the clash of civilizations and eras and Rose McGowan’s hairdresser with her hairline, or is this just amiable nonsense we will, as a country, agree to sit through in exchange for air conditioning?