-Kicking off a week-long discussion of Young Adult fiction.
-Damn right, She-Hulk is the best lawyer in comics.
-Are we still clutching our pearls over whether graffiti is art?
-The brothers Emanuel and Chicago on film.
-SCANDAL: there are liberals in Hollywood and they’re proud of being liberals and making liberal art!
Last week, former NFL star Warrick Dunn was pulled over outside Atlanta, Georgia by three police officers. Dunn has been involved in a number of charitable organizations since leaving the NFL, including founding the Warrick Dunn Family Foundation to help single parents find homes for their families. The former Atlanta Falcons running back has also received numerous accolades for his off-the-field service, including the Walter Payton Man of the Year Award, the Bart Starr Award, and former President Clinton’s Giant Steps Award. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution described Dunn as a “model citizen.”
So it was to Dunn’s surprise when he was stopped by police officers last Friday for having “the characteristic of people transporting drugs and guns.” Dunn, who is a 36-year-old black man, was also stopped for having tinted windows that were allegedly “too dark.” Dunn reported the incident on his Facebook account late last week:
Pulled over outside Atl because he said my window tint was too dark. During the stop he asked a lot of personal questions, said I had the characteristics of people transporting drugs & guns. So he searched my car and gave me a warning for my tint. Felt violated and I’ve had my car since ’08, nvr been pulled ovr for tint. Taken back bc I think the reasoning was bad. Ruined my day but not my spirit.
Despite the alleged rationale of illegally tinted windows, Dunn wrote that “my tint is not dark.” In addition, “it was cloudy and [the police were] 20 yards behind at an angle.”
Dunn was not charged in the stop, but ultimately received a warning from the officers.
The former NFL player’s ordeal is one that is already felt by many across the nation. Yet if conservatives had their way, profiling incidents like Dunn’s would not just become more commonplace, but would be legally justified as well. Indeed, racial and ethnic profiling is widely supported by Republicans. Last year, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) called profiling “common sense” and Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) justified it on the grounds that “all terrorists are Muslims or Middle Easterners.”
But the GOP’s push to profile necessarily stems from the idea that such “common sense” is not actually racist. To Republicans like former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, racism no longer exists. To him, America is inherently “colorblind” and “not a discriminate [sic] nation” because, after all, “we elected a black president.” In fact, a recent study reveals that white Americans actually view “anti-white prejudice” as the predominant race problem of the times, as opposed to “anti-black bias.” With this as the dominant view, the racism Dunn endured is too often perceived by many Americans as belonging to an era long gone and existing only in the margins of today’s society — no matter how prevalent.
Ever gracious, Dunn told TMZ after the incident, “As the son of a hard working police officer, I understand the stress that police officers are under.” He added, “The real lesson in all this is that Twitter is a powerful tool but what happened to me is the same thing that happens to a lot of people every day.”
ESPN has more information on Dunn’s life of service in the face of ordeal. When he was 18, Dunn’s mother, a Baton Rouge police officer, was killed in a robbery. Dunn helped raise his younger siblings while going on to a successful career at Florida State and the NFL.
It’s one of the trashy greatnesses of America that as long as you don’t commit a felony, you get to find yourself a new equilibrium after a scandal by making the rounds on talk shows. Having done that, disgraced minister Ted Haggard is leveling up from the ritual-humiliation rounds, joining the ranks of quasi-political figures who have made movie cameos with an appearance in an abstinence comedy:
His new fellow travelers include anti- tax crusader Howard Jarvis, who rode his role in California’s Proposition 13 to an appearance in Airplane!:
Late Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, who showed up at the titular bar in Cheers:
And Democratic James Carville in damn near everything:
Haggard’s downfall and subsequent long-running denial that he’s actually attracted to men have always struck me as a sad symptom of a larger disease. When he inched open the closet door last fall, it was mostly to say that he still can’t bring himself to identify as bisexual or gay. The Waiting Game looks like it straddles that same kind of awkward divide, acknowledging that abstinence is unrealistic while also trying to rebrand it as cool with awkward jokes and bad production values. It’s a totally untenable reach, and Ted Haggard, of all people, should know that now. It doesn’t work to say “never a religious right, hateful, anti-gay guy,” and it doesn’t postpone the inevitable to insist you’ve cured your homosexuality, then to say if you were 21 you’d say you’re bisexual.
If anything, Forgetting Sarah Marshall bridges the divide between abstinence and progressive sexual politics better: the subplot with Jack McBreyer as a harried Christian newlywed with an insatiable wife acknowledges that waiting until you’re married probably won’t make sex better, but insists that everyone deserves to have their world rocked when they do decide to get it on.
A couple of people had asked me if we were having a blog launch party. So if you’re in the DC area, let’s do it. 7:00pm on Thursday at Bourbon‘s Adams Morgan location (I promise the neighborhood doesn’t live up to the horrible stereotypes the week). Everybody’s welcome, be ye regular or lurker. But holler in comments if you think you’ll make it so I have a sense of how many tables I should try to nab. If the weather’s not this insane, we’ll meet on the back porch.
They’re apparently getting together in New York tonight. I really hope that conversation produces a new and better idea for a reality show, because I am getting awfully bored with lame competition formats and so-called dips into real life that don’t include anyone behaving badly. I should note that goes double with depictions of gooftastic presidential candidates.
I wanted to like Single Ladies, VH1′s first scripted show, a theoretical African-American Sex and the City set in Atlanta, created by Queen Latifah and Stacy Littlejohn, and starring Stacey Dash, as gorgeous as she was when she played Dionne on Clueless all those years ago:
After seeing both last night’s pilot movie and the first episode, the show has some potential as enjoyable late-night summer trash television. But there’s something truly weird about the show’s setup and, in particular, the way it sets up discussions of interracial relationships, only to run away from them as fast as possible.
It would be interesting, for example, if Dash’s Val, fresh out of a long-term relationship with a flaky basketball player, made a conscious decision to date a white guy. Instead, the show has her sleep with said white guy and get scared she’s pregnant, making her thought process about whether or not to keep the baby (Which of course she says she’s going to. God forbid any woman have an abortion on television.) than what it would be like to date a white man. Similarly, there might be a nuanced story to tell about Christina (Kassandra Clementi), a white woman married to a fairly dark-skinned African-American man who starts cheating on him with a lighter-skinned African-American man. But since the object of her infidelity is not just any other African-American man, but Common doing a turn as the mayor of Atlanta, it’s a shallow political scandal story, rather than a story about people and relationships. There’s something discomfiting about the lip service the show gives to these and other issues it hopes will serve as hooks to viewers, but that it doesn’t actually want to engage with. Read more
As I’d expect from the director of both Zodiac and Se7en, it looks like Fincher’s adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’s almost gleefully embracing the darkness, labeling it “The Feel Bad Movie of Christmas” complete with tattoo needles wielded in anger and a cover of Led Zepplin’s “Immigrant Song“:
What remains to be seen if any of Steig Larsson’s politics survive into the movie. I had a very difficult time with the first book and never read the subsequent ones. Certainly, there’s something sort of amusing that a book that explicitly links capitalism and violence against women and that lionizes an aggressively left-wing journalist became a phenomenon in America, given how crazy unpopular either of those ideas would be if they were broken out and put in a position paper on a cable news crawl. But—and I think this is a very hard line to define—I tend to think Larsson stepped over the line between dramatizing the horror of sexual assault and lingering a little too long on it. It’ll be especially interesting to see if the movie preserves the retaliatory rape of a male character as an indication of what Fincher decides he wants to put on-screen.
I know we’re supposed to give extra credit to artists who actually write their own material. But I’ve always kind of dug the people who figure out the alchemy of hit-making in any given moment in pop. Yeah, yeah, maybe Dr. Luke and Max Martin homogenize the airwaves, yes they make it easier for the corporate pop machine to march forward, but how am I supposed to complain when they deliver so consistently? So I’m probably the prime audience for Bravo’s new next-top-songwriter competition, Platinum Hit, which premiered last night.
If Platinum Hit works, it’ll be because it’s the one of Bravo’s competition shows where viewers actually get to experience the full product. There’s no imagining how the food tastes on the various iterations of Top Chef, no seeing the clothes in small dimensions on The Fashion Show. Whether you’re in the room with the judges or watching the performances on screen, you’re having essentially the same experience of a rough cut of a final product.
My sense is that the show is going to be a lot more fun to watch the closer we get to a finale. With this many teams in the early running, there’s less room to see how the groups work together, how one slightly irritating hook gets lifted by the jaunty material that ends up framing it
I know some of y’all have been disconcerted or frustrated by Facebook commenting here. I’m really sorry about that! A couple of handy tips:
-If you’re signed in to your Facebook account when you come here, and you want to comment using said account, congratulations, you’re basically good to go. Comment away!
-If you’re signed in to your Facebook account when you come here, but don’t want to comment using it, click the “Not you” hypertext in the comments field to sign out and sign in with something different: the options are Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail logins. You’ll be prompted to pick which account you want to use when you click “add a comment” by the button that says “Comment using…” that will then present you with your login options.
-The best thing in the world is having commenters who are willing to beta test things for you. Regular Greg at Yglesias writes:
It appears that fictional Facebook accounts are, well, not showing up. Jason’s case mirrors my own in that neither of us can view even our own comments when we’re not concurrently logged on to facebook. By contrast, David (Shor) is using his own real profile, as are you, and this is working without a hitch.
If one wants to maintain anonymity, I would like to point out that using a yahoo/hotmail/aol handle has been completely successful for Myles, and now me.
If you’re encountering any other tech issues, please don’t be shy about using the feedback form or emailing me at AlyssaObserves (at) gmail (dot) com. We appreciate your sharp eyes.
Starting this week, progressive leaders from all parts of the movement, from the blogosphere to the Hill, take a break out of their schedules to tell us what they’re watching, reading, and listening to. Suggestions or requests? Email AlyssaObserves (at) gmail (dot) com.
Up this week, Kate Harding: Co-author of Lessons From the Fat-O-Sphere, and the upcoming Book of Jezebel; founder of the influential body acceptance blog Shapely Prose; and teacher of both fiction and non-fiction writing classes, Kate is one of the sharpest, funniest voices in the feminist blogosphere. She chronicles a week of her cultural consumption, from the New York Review of Books to In Plain Sight.
Monday, May 23
I wake up and start getting ready right after my husband, Al, does, and when I get into the bathroom, Alison Krause and Gillian Welch’s version of “I’ll Fly Away” is playing on his iPad. Al almost always has music on in the background; I almost never do, except in the car. In my teens and early twenties, I couldn’t have imagined a time when I wouldn’t care deeply about current music, but my interest in it wore off around the same time I started feeling too old to really enjoy myself at shows—which, sadly, was when I was about 25.
After making coffee, I go to my computer and immediately check Twitter, which is basically my favorite news source at this point. I follow a ton of other feminists, progressives, and writers, so my feed is always full of links to things I’ll find fascinating or funny or lovely or infuriating. For instance, this post by Debbie Ridpath Ohi, which Claire Mysko (@ClaireMysko) linked to this morning, is so right on, it hurts a little. I love reading and writing fiction more than all but a very few things in this world, yet I’ve come to the point where I have to trick myself into devoting uninterrupted time to either.
At the end of the day, I drop Al off at the train station for a business trip that will last all week, then meet up with Wendy McClure, M. Molly Backes, Claire Zulkey and Kat Falls for drinks at a bar near Story Studio Chicago, where I think we’ve all taught at some point. Claire, Kat and Molly all write young adult fiction, and Wendy is about to start working on a YA imprint at the children’s publisher she works for, so I spend 3/4 of a glass of sauvignon blanc quietly convincing myself I should try writing novels for the teen girl market—as if that would be as simple and straightforward as buying a cute pair of shoes several of my friends happen to own. (I was a teen girl! I know how to make sentences! What could possibly go wrong?)
Eventually, I remember that I have not read a single young adult book in the last twenty years that wasn’t written by J.K. Rowling, Suzanne Collins or Claire Zulkey (I met Kat tonight, and Molly’s first novel won’t be out until 2012), so I’m just being an asshole. I head home early, since I’ll need to be back out the door by 5:30 AM at the absolute latest.
Read more
A couple weeks back, I noted that a number of Republican governors were looking to entirely eliminate their states’ spending on the arts and public broadcasting. Over the long weekend, a number of them made good on those threats.
Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback vetoed the state legislature’s appropriations for the Kansas Arts Commission, enforcing an executive order he signed in February eliminating the commission—and all five commission members’ jobs. Brownback plans to replace the commission with a private foundation, but his actions, taken over the legislature’s objections, make Kansas the only state without an arts agency. As the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies noted, that $689,000 targeted in the veto was a whopping 0.005 percent of the state’s budget, and it’s not as if it’s trading off with other programs. The budget the legislature approved would have created a $50 million budget surplus next year before Brownback’s additional cuts.
What the veto does do is let Brownback say he’s leading the charge against state funding for the arts, something he intends to keep alive in the next budget cycle. He spared Kansas public broadcasters, stopping short of line-item vetoing their appropriations this year, while telling them to make alternative plans so they’ll be ready when he comes for their funding next year.
Florida Gov. Rick Scott didn’t wait until the next budget cycle. He vetoed the state’s $4.8 million appropriation for public broadcasting as part of $615 million he excised from the budget before signing it. The New York Times reports that at least one Florida public broadcaster has already sold itself, and another’s staying alive through a partnership.
I don’t think that arts and public broadcasting funding is going to be a top-level political issue in the 2012 cycle. But it does seem like it’s a way for Republican politicians on the make, like Brownback, Scott, and Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, to shore up their credentials as they cast their eyes towards the next level.
As usual, spoilers in the post, but if you’re spoiling beyond the episode in comments, give a holler to warn folks who are experiencing this all for the first time.
One of the most common criticisms of HBO’s adaptation of Game of Thronesis that the first couple of episodes were slow, packed with exposition rather than with action. “You Win or You Die” makes clear just why all that exposition was necessary: Westeros is a house of rotten cards, and the rot’s become untenable in a dozen areas at once. And if anything, HBO’s moved more swiftly than George R. R. Martin to make some of that rot clear, whether it’s Tywin Lannister entering the stage a book early to berate his son Jamie and to brood over the greatness his House can have if his children dare to reach for treachery, complaining, “Clean? You spend too much time worrying on what other people think of you,” or Jorah Mormont finding the limits of his willingness to betray the pregnant queen he’s been reporting on since she married Khal Drogo.
This is also the episode where certain changes in characterization begin to pay off. While we get to know more of Cersei Lannister’s mind in A Feast for Crows, the show’s done more to show her as a person earlier, to suggest that she might once have been a loyal Queen to Robert, a capable asset to his kingdom. Of course, he was always incapable of knowing how to use her for anything loving or productive. But knowing that she cared for the idea of him, at least, makes it more plausible when she explains how that potential love turned to hatred. “I worshipped him,” she told Ned. “That night he crawled on me, stinking of wine, and did what he did, what little he could do. And he whispered in my ear, ‘Lyanna.’ Your sister was a corpse and I was a living girl and he loved her more than me.” If Cersei had been indifferent to Robert, she probably never would have grown to hate him that much. But she cared, and so she’s capable of being bitterly, poisonously disappointed, and actually tracing that whole arc this early on is a wise decision. Read more
Nothing Mitt Romney said about his pop culture habits on Morning Joe was particularly shocking. Of course he’s going to prove he’s a Cool Mormon by being able to laugh at South Park and saying he’ll catch the Book of Mormon at some point. Of course he listens to a lot of uncontroversial oldies (it would have really blown my mind had he gone in on a defense of the Beach Boys over the Beatles). And unsurprisingly for someone who will be pursuing the lady-vote, dude’s read the Twilight series on recommendation of his granddaughter. But I still reserve the right to be dismayed over his taste in young adult fiction. Seriously? Be a cool grandpa and hook the young lady in your life up with some Tamora Pierce or Jane Yolen or whatnot. And if you want to burnish your Mormon and your geek cred in one blow, at least say you read The Host, the sci-fi novel Stephenie Meyer wrote before turning to Sparkly Vamiredom, instead of Twilight.
Also, now someone has to ask him on the campaign trail how he talked to his granddaughter about the deeply horrifying way Bella gives birth in Breaking Dawn.
Image used under a creative commons license courtesy Beige Alert.
If you’re stumbling across this blog for the first time, I can imagine you might wonder what a culture critic is doing at ThinkProgress. At the end of Stranger than Fiction, Emma Thompson’s character, Karen Eiffel, reflects back on the book she’s just finished. “Sometimes,” she muses, “when we lose ourselves in fear and despair, in routine and constancy, in hopelessness and tragedy, we can thank God for Bavarian sugar cookies. And…Fender Stratocasters, and maybe the occasional piece of fiction. And we must remember that all these things, the nuances, the anomalies, the subtleties, which we assume only accessorize our days, are effective for a much larger and nobler cause. They are here to save our lives.”
In a world where the average American watches more than 150 hours of television every month; where we’ve already purchased 438,113,677 tickets to the movies, adding up to a billion-odd hours in theaters; where in three months, people hit play almost 55 million times on a pop-science fiction liberation odyssey, these things that our lives consume an awful lot of them. Art might not always be here to save us (though it can), but our movies, books, television shows, music, and video games say a lot about how we want to spend our lives, what we’re willing to accept to escape from them for a while, and what we dream they might be like in the future. If we are what we love, to paraphrase Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins, figuring out our pop culture—from action blockbusters to indie gems and from billboard-dominating hits to mixtapes—is an important part of figuring out who we are and what we value.
Public opinion may fluctuate on everything from American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan to offshore drilling, but two of the top-grossing movies of 2010 were an explicitly environmentalist science fiction epic and a movie about government regulation of military technology. The top scripted show on television may be a banal procedural where the government always saves the day—but it’s also an ongoing exploration of America’s relationship with Israel. And the poor in America are as absent from our pop culture as they are from the political agenda. Americans’ political opinions may seem frustratingly impenetrable to pollsters and politicians, but our contradictory views on everything from gender equality to police brutality are front and center in the things we use to entertain ourselves.
And just as pop culture’s a bellwether for our attitudes, it’s also a great way to sell ideas, whether it’s Michael Bay’s love letters to the American military or James Cameron’s fierce heroines who see more clearly and shoot straighter than the men around them. Whether it’s getting romantic comedy heroines to work in industries other than fashion and PR; imagining science-fictional universes where environmentalism is a key value; or simply getting our movies and television shows to have demographics that match America’s, good culture can help sell good politics.
So that’s what I’ll be doing here: asking questions about what pop culture means and how it can work harder and better for a progressive future, as well as taking a look at cultural politics and policy from the National Endowment for the Arts “Our Town” program to Gov. Sam Brownback’s decision to dismantle the Kansas Arts Commission. Questions, comments, or requests? Just email AlyssaObserves (at) gmail (dot) com. I’m excited to be here.
Alyssa Rosenberg is a culture blogger for ThinkProgress.org. She is a correspondent for TheAtlantic.com and The Washington Monthly. Read more.
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