-Barney Frank is right about Seinfeld.

-I’m watching the original Planet of the Apes this weekend, but the sequel/reboot continues to look awesome.

-Art-deco Princess Leia.

-Is Pawn Stars the Antiques Roadshow for a new generation?

-The Kansas arts community tries to turn disaster into an opportunity for innovation.

Thanks for an awesome first week, everyone. I can’t say how much I appreciate your emails, kind words, etc. If anyone’s got special requests for next week, throw ‘em in comments or email me at AlyssaObserves [at] gmail.

Long-time readers know that I have a particular interest in fathers and daughters in pop culture; it was the reason that, despite formidable other objections, I really sort of loved Kick-Ass and am excited to see Hanna when I get a chance. So when I interviewed Tamora Pierce for the series on young adult fiction I put together for The Atlantic this week, one of the things I zeroed in on was the relationships her female characters have with their fathers and father figures:

Lots of your female heroines have wonderful father figures.

My dad was the one who got me started writing, and encouraged me to write. He shared a lot of his books with me when I was a kid and we were growing up. I still think my dad walks on water. My interest in military history is due to him, my interest in the American past is due to him. He was just very influential in my life…Especially if you’re going to have a daughter who is going to push her way forward, there’s nothing more important than a father.

That last sentence in particular crystallized some things I’ve been mulling for a while about a new book by Dr. Peggy Drexler, Our Fathers, Ourselves. The book isn’t, as Drexler puts it, “a process based on impersonal science…using statistical analyses to extract facts and figures and draw conclusions based on numbers.” Instead, Drexler presents the patterns she saw in interviews with 75 highly successful women about their relationships with their fathers, setting the table for a conversation about a dynamic that’s hugely ignored in a world that focuses much more on the impact fathers have on their sons.
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If, propelled by the expanding magical world on True Blood and the new adaptation of Melissa Marr’s Wicked Lovely (produced by, of all people, Vince Vaughn), faeries are about to become the next vampires, it’s worth considering that stories about the fey traditionally involve borders. And used intelligently, that’s really fertile territory for all sorts of questions of identity and citizenship.

The experience of faeries in the human world is an interesting reversal of the challenges faced by human immigrants in the U.S., particularly those who don’t come here through legal means: faeries are much more powerful than your standard-issue human of any nationality, giving them significant advantages in conflicts with authority, and they threaten to take people back over the border with them rather than worrying that they’ll be deported. And of course, the prospect of discovering you’re a changeling is a useful metaphor for grappling with all kinds of difference, whether sexual orientation, gender identity, Asperger syndrome (Michael Chabon’s Summerland does a nice job with this in particular), or broader cultural and political alienation from wherever you’re stuck.

I’d love to see someone do some work, whether it’s adaptive or original, along those lines. If people are looking for works to adapt, they might consider the Borderlands series, which I’ve always found interesting for reasons of process as well as content. The series is written collaboratively by a bunch of different authors, usually in short story collections, and they deal with what it would be like if you had a rough-and-tumble, Old-West-but-steampunk-and-magic city at the dividing line between the human and faery realms. The answer, apparently, is that you get fantastic bookstores and pizza, as well as a lot of class conflict. I’m especially fond of Will Shetterly’s two novels, Elsewhere and Nevernever, which deal beautifully with everything from suicide, to disability, to drug addiction, to the challenges of losing your virginity after a vengeful faerie turns you into a werewolf (turns out you get to sing in a band called Sargent Furry and His Howling Commandos, though, so there are compensations).

I’m worried, though, that this new trend (as well as the mini-boom in angels and fallen angels stories) will follow the path of much of the vampire culture of recent years: all surface, no substance. It’s one of my biggest pet peeves, the fact that given the opportunity to work with cool concepts, that people will forfeit the opportunity and get entranced by shiny fangs and glittery wings.

I think there’s yet to be a definitive candidate for this yet, but if the sound mix was such that the lyrics were a bit clearer on Coldplay’s latest, it might be a nice, languid contender. “Super Bass” and “Edge of Glory” are also legit candidates. The task of intelligently engineering stupid pop that sounds at its best blasted out of car windows is a real challenge, and I’m worried we’re going to have a summer song deficit this year. Clearly we need a Max Martin and Dr. Luke-designed stimulus.

The somewhat surprising news that John Edwards couldn’t work out a plea deal and has been indicted on charges that he violated campaign finance law by using donations to cover up his affair is sort of vexing for Democrats in that it will be public, messy, and oxygen-depriving heading into an election year. It’s also a pretty awful thing for Edwards’ kids to have to deal with, too, at a time when they’re still grieving their mother. But one person it’s probably going to be pretty great for is Aaron Sorkin, who last year optioned Andrew Young’s Edwards tell-all The Politician and chose it as the project he’ll use to make his directorial debut.

It’s been fascinating to watch Sorkin’s love affair with politics and with politicians curdle, particularly given what a Valentine The American President is to the idea that our highest elected officials get to be people, particularly ones with sex lives:

Obviously, cheating on your dying wife and using donors’ money to cover it up is hugely different than a dashing widower Commander in Chief taking up with a kicky lobbyist, though it’s interesting to see how that storyline might play today. But between The Politician and his Keith Olbermann-tastic project for HBO, Sorkin’s clearly repositioned himself as an angry outsider, a spurned lover of the process.

As veteran readers know, I love doing book clubs on the blog. So let’s get one started for the summer. Normally I take requests and we vote, but I actually wanted to propose a book myself this time. I’d love to revisit Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars since it will, somewhat unbelievably, be 20 years old this summer, and explores everything from the relationship between Islam and the West to futurist architecture. Let me know over the weekend if you’re interested, and if we’ve got enough people, we’ll kick off next week and I’ll post the first set of chapters we’ll tackle on Monday.

I’d known that a movie adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s agonizing novel about the family of a school shooter, We Need to Talk About Kevin was in the works. But I hadn’t known that there were two prestige movies on the subject coming out this summer. In addition to Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly in the former, we’re getting Maria Bello and Michael Sheen as parents of a boy who kills his fellow college students and then himself in Beautiful Boy. In a way, I think it’s useful that they’re coming out together. We Need to Talk About Kevin is about the leadup to a spree killing, and about the questions of nature and nurture:

And it looks like Beautiful Boy will be focused more on the aftermath of the shooting and how the killer’s families come to terms both with what he’s done and with their memories of him:

While I think both of these movies may be psychologically useful for audiences, but I’m not sure what their use is—or really any attempt to understand why someone does something like this—in trying to make sure that spree killings happen with less frequency. There are obvious and valuable policy lessons we can take away from these shootings, whether they happen in an Arizona parking lot or rural Virginia campus, about the availability of automatic weapons and ammunition and about how hard it is to get quality and sustained mental health care at a reasonable cost. But we’re not ever going to unlock a motivational key that will keep anyone from ever wanting to commit murder on this scale again.

Since I wrote my complaint about the value of cable, a couple of people have sent along articles, among them James Surowiecki’s classic on bundled pricing in general, and written thoughtful responses to the idea that cable can or should be unbundled. I should say as a preface that obviously if we moved to a system of unbundled rather than bundled cable, the available offerings would be very different. And it’s possible that what seems like a rising tide of consumer complaint about bundled cable won’t actually translate into a wave of people dropping their subscription that would force the industry to rethink its models and all this speculation might not be necessary. But I’m a fan of spitballing, so onward!

In my conversation with Tim Lee (who passed along this post) and Megan McArdle‘s post, there seem to be several core objections to the prospect of unbundling: 1) It loses consumers valuable choice by eliminating the option of indulging random cravings, 2) It won’t actually save consumers money, 3) an objection raised by some readers, the loss of bundled cable income will kill off some channels, reducing choice further.
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First, a personal note for context. As a child, I was perhaps unusually unaware of popular culture. We didn’t have a television in the house for a long time, and while that meant I was an absolute beast at reading challenges during Turn Off the TV Week, and I did catch the occasional episode of Sesame Street at a friend’s or babysitter’s house, I had no more than a mild awareness of everything from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, to Bart Simpson, to My So-Called Life. And I didn’t really develop the habits of a television watcher until after I graduated from college and had both a television set and cable for the first time. I was a little pokey about popular music, too, though I did emerge from the narcotic haze of my early love of the Beatles and Beach Boys to discover the KISS-FM station in my area and make mix tapes of stuff I recorded off Top 40 countdowns. So a lot of my pop culture blogging, and the reason I’m wide-eyed and excited about a huge number of things, is that I’m seeing them for the first time, or seeing people use tropes for the first time.

Among those things is Cheers, which I just entirely missed through a combination of being born after it started airing and not being a casual television watcher who might have caught it in re-runs. But now it’s on Netflix Instant, so I’m going to try to watch the entire run and blog it this summer. I’m already well into the third season, and while I definitely won’t be blogging every episode, I’ll try to check in periodically.

The thing that’s striking me about the third season of Cheers, and Frasier’s addition to the cast, is how his presence is affecting the way the show deals with class. While in the first couple of seasons, it seemed like there was a cross-class cultural exchange going on, especially as Sam and Diane tried to figure out how to relate to each other and later to impress each other, Frasier’s appearance on the show hasn’t really brought the balance that I thought it might. Instead of expanding that kind of conversation, it’s as if Diane and Fraiser’s relationship sort of forecloses it. That’s sort of the point, of course: after Diane and Sam break up, she’s looking for someone who she isn’t constantly trying to improve or be disappointed by. But as a couple, they feel more like a collective oddity who hang around the bar than actual regulars.

Similarly, it was interesting to see Carla date Fraiser’s mentor, get pregnant with his child, and turn down his marriage proposal. I have mixed feelings about that storyline. I appreciate Carla’s general unapologetic approach to her life and the way the show leavens it with a fairly unsentimental approach to the difficulties she faces as a single, unwed mother. And I appreciated the idea that Carla, despite her lack of education or life experience, has a lot to offer an educated, highly-regarded professional. But would it have been too much to suggest that he had something to offer her as well, to continue that plot for more than one episode? I felt the same way about the Coach’s infatuation, another story of a stupidly quick engagement that ended when the person with more money or advantages (or who got more money in the course of the episode) proved to be not particularly worth-while. It’s not as interesting to tell a story about the rough saintliness of working-class people as it is to look at what working- and middle- or upper-class people get from each other when they interact. The show did that quite well for the first two seasons, and I’m feeling its absence now.