I’m going. If you’ll be there and want to hang out, I imagine we could set up some kind of pop-culture happy hour thing. Or alternatively, if there are panels you’d like me to check out and report back on, holler. Regular posting may be mildly slower than usual, as I make up for lost time at the 2008 Republican National Convention and explore the great city of Minneapolis. But rest assured, there will be at least some of the usual complement of ridiculous mashups, nerd contemplation, and crankiness, with a potential extra helping of the Guthrie Theater.

-Ellie Kemper to be sprightly, adorable, in unnecessary remake.

-Not content with a Super Bowl ring, Aaron Rodgers has founded a record label.

-Journalists are the future!

-Did people really think Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark was going to get better?

-Chris Dodd and Rupert Murdoch in Shanghai.

After writing yesterday’s post about Gay Girl In Damascus and vague boundary between creating fiction that’s consumed as such and carrying out a hoax, I emailed Andrea Phillips, the pervasive media artist whose SXSW talk I mentioned, and asked her where we can draw the line and say what practices of fiction are unethical. She wrote back:

I guess if I absolutely had to draw a line between fiction and reality, it would deal with the point in a fiction where your character forms a relationship with your audience. It’s one thing to use a blog as a format for serial fiction. It’s even OK, I think, to use a blog for serial fiction and not specifically mark it out as such. But it becomes something much more questionable when the fiction becomes personalized—when the fictional character is responding to Tweets and emails, for example. That’s the danger zone.

At that point, you have to ask yourself how the people you’re relating to would feel if the truth came out. Would they feel betrayed? If the answer is yes, then you should seriously reconsider what you’re doing and how you’re going about it.

But at the same time… people often experiment with wildly different personas on the internet, and make friendships in those varying
personas, and this can be a valuable way to learn about yourself. Identity is a very fluid thing to begin with. I’m not the same person with my colleagues as I am with the other moms at school, you know? So I hate to draw any absolute lines, because every circumstance is unique.

Think about if the Gay Girl in Damascus situation was reversed: Amina was the real one but Tom was fictional, and he was her way of speaking
with the advantage of privilege, of being heard and listened to. Would we be reacting differently if the power dynamics shifted like that? I
seriously think we would.

I suggested that maybe we cross the line when a character asks readers to do something they wouldn’t do if they knew the character was a creation rather than a real person, whether it’s sending pictures or asking for help springing them from a Syrian prison. I’ve had pretty hilarious Twitter conversations with accounts set up in the voices of Game of Thrones characters, and it sure didn’t hurt me. But then, I was enjoying engaging with the fiction, rather than being deceived by it. There’s a level of safety in detachment.

At a moment when there’s a serious debate about the representation of women in the pages of major American publication, and serious efforts to spotlight the great work women journalists are already doing, there’s something…disconcerting about Edith Zimmerman’s profile of Chris Evans that’s on the cover of the latest GQ. It’s not so much this profile, which is really not so much a profile as a chronicle of hanging out with an action star, that read as odd to me. It’s that Zimmerman’s piece comes on the heels of the March issue, in which GQ published Jessica Pressler’s account of spending the night with Channing Tatum, a couple of Snuggies, and a bottle of tequila. For GQ, sending out a female reporter to get tipsy and a little frisky with an otherwise indistinguishable slab of beef appears to be their stab at creating a novel and enduring journalistic form, akin to the New Yorker’s revealing anecdote, followed by a statement of a larger problem, followed by an origin story. At this rate, I’ll be making it rain in strip clubs with Ryan Reynolds by November.

If GQ wants to get more women’s voices in the magazine, that’s a great thing, and I really hope they keep doing it! But the point of Ann Friedman’s work on Lady Journos, and of running the numbers on what magazines actually publish by women is not to convince magazines to run “girly” stories, or to get one woman in the door one time. If the relevant information the profile is supposed to deliver is anything other than Lady Writer Potentially Slept With Hottie, there are other ways to obtain that information, and other ways to frame the story — the revelation that Famous Dudes Drink is the equivalent of the newsflash that Famous Ladies Eat Truffle Fries. And women can do that reporting, and that framing. I’m pretty sure that Mac McClelland could go out, get glassed with Sean Bean, and find some way to use her experiences as a reporter in Burma to get him to tell her cool stuff about Game of Thrones.

I don’t know what the solution is here. If the way only way for women to published in certain kinds of magazines is to take these kinds of cheesecake assignments, should we say yes, and dunk them and then insist on better for the next thing in the hopes that there will be a next thing? If you’re a GQ editor trying to get more women in your magazine, and you feel like the only way you can sell that goal to your higher-ups, is it worth it?

One of the things I’ve always found fascinating about Kanye West is his ambivalence about personal responsibility and whether it actually works. The new leak of the fully produced song “Mama’s Boyfriend,” that he played on promotional tours but that didn’t make My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, is a perfect example of this:

Kanye’s clear that he thinks parenting practices have an impact on kids. It’s less that not having a father is bad for a boy, though I think there’s an undercurrent of that here, but because the unstable echoes of broken relationships create all kinds of uncertainty. “We are the voices of our parents’ bad choices / The aftermath of divorces,” he raps, “The kids of bitter splitups and babysitters / Grandparents that don’t know what to do with us.” I really love his description of himself as a child: “I was my mama’s boyfriend / I was a little husband/ I was the man of the house when there wasn’t.”

Of course, feeling this way doesn’t prevent Kanye from ending up in the same situation. I think it’s fairly obvious that Kanye, if not an actual misogynist, has some fairly profound unresolved issues around women. But it’s interesting, and kind of a relief, that in this song he reserves his anger for the men who dated his mother, rather than directing it at her or at the women he dates who are raising sons as single mothers. Obviously, Kanye’s trying to do a better job by his surrogate son than his surrogate fathers did by him, explaining “I don’t read palms / And I don’t read psalms / But I did take lil’ man to church / Took lil’ man to school.” But I don’t really read in this the expectation that he’ll actually be able to break the cycle by raising the kid up a bit. Families are going to continue to be fractured, and kids are going to keep hating the cheesy-looking people who enter and exit their lives on the grounds that they’re not flesh and blood replacements.
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I’ve been feeling frustrated by both Questionable Content and Girls With Slingshots, long my two go-to webcomics, for a while, and thus slightly vexed with the genre. But Brian Wolly’s interview with Ryan North, the creator of the wonderful strip Dinosaur Comics both served as a useful reminder that just because I’m tired of unmotivated hipsters is no reason to give up on a genre, and contained this wonderful observation:

Being online works really well for any creative work, but especially comics. You have to recognize as a creative person that not everyone’s going to be into what you’re doing. Let’s say 1 in 10 people likes my comic: that means if it’s printed in a paper, 90 percent of the audience will say, “What is this? The pictures don’t change. That’s terrible and now I am physically angry.” Anyone who publishes it is going to get letters about it. But online, that one in 10 can self-select, and when they find my site they say, “Oh man, this is great, this is unlike anything I see in the paper. I’m gonna show this to my friend who shares my sense of humor.” I’d rather have that reader, who loves it, than ten times the number of readers who don’t like it, who read it just because it’s there.

I think there’s this tendency to assume that ties formed on the internet, particularly those around culture, are weaker because they’re not in-person. But anything that lets you find a more precise expression of what you like, a community of people who feel as passionate as you do, is probably going to produce stronger ties. People who like dinosaurs who talk about rap battles — a category that wouldn’t have existed a decade ago — are my kind of people.

During last night’s Republican presidential debate, CNN’s John King asked Rep. Michele Bachmann (MN) to choose between a hip-swiveling corruptor of youth and a drug-addict who liked to pretend he was a hardened malefactor:

KING: Congresswoman Bachmann, to you, Elvis or Johnny Cash?

BACHMANN: That’s really tough. That’s really—both, both.

KING: Both?

BACHMANN: Yes.

KING: Both.

BACHMANN: I’ve “Christmas with Elvis” on my iPod.

I mention this in part because it’s funny that people who listen to Elvis’ Christmas songs think that they represent mainstream America better than people who invite Common to the White House. But also, given the latest brouhaha over Fox Business’ Eric Bolling pretending he is edgy and cool by referring to the White House as “the big crib,” it’s worth remembering that attacks on rappers are just racialized versions of the same old nonsense. This stuff is going to be hilarious and depressing in about 20 years when Common is on some white president’s Council on the Arts and Humanities and Republican candidates are telling folks they have Eric B. and Rakim on whatever the 20-years in the future equivalent of an iPod is.

There’s been a lot of buzz, rumor, and wild-speculation about a long-promised Star Wars live action television series lately: at one point, folks were reporting that there were 50 taped hours sitting in the vault adjacent to George Lucas’ Scrooge McDuck-like pool of gold. That isn’t actually the case — there are drafts of scripts that would support 50 hours of programming, but they’re not complete and haven’t been filmed. Rick McCallum, a LucasFilm producer, apparently told a Czech publication that the company plans to wait until visual effects costs come down to start actually translating those scripts into a show. He also told them that the show will be about parallel stories: the Empire’s consolidation of power while the Skywalker twins are children, and Coruscant’s crime syndicates.

Now, long-time readers know that I have a long-running interest in the Star Wars extended universe, and in fact screwed up my promise to finish reading the Yuuzhan Vong arc of the books and blog them (though I got a couple of posts done). So when it comes to the prospect of an extended universe television show? I have opinions. And this strikes me as a bad way to go about making a Star Wars television show that will capture the imaginations of people who grew up with the original trilogy but have had their tastes honed by The Sopranos and The Wire, among other things.
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We’ll never know who actually killed Osama bin Laden. But we’re about to get some actual Navy SEALs to use as hero-worship stand-ins. It turns out Kathryn Bigelow wasn’t the only person with a thematically-appropriate movie in the works — Relativity Media just announced that they’re distributing Act of Valor, a movie shot largely in secret with access to a SEAL squad brokered by the Navy. Actual SEALs star in the movie, and the events, which surround the rescue of a CIA operative.

I’ve got mixed feelings about this. It’s probably not going to be a stellar thing for our reassessment of our relationship with Pakistan if the American box office goes huge for a movie that sounds like it’s celebrating Ray Davis’s release. Also, with how The Unit worked out, I’m somewhat suspicious of movies that the military is psyched about and signed off on. I imagine the action sequences are pretty gripping, but they could also end up being in the service of some pretty rotten politics. And as much as I respect members of the U.S. military, I’m way more into their ability to carry out precision operations to take out mass murderers than their ability to act with any sort of depth or nuance.

But we’re going to get a lot of Navy SEALs movies and a lot of movies about killing major terrorists. Most of them are probably going to be bad, and to have pretty rotten geopolitics. The power of September 11 is that it created a consensus-free zone. Our entertainment about it—especially when the closest thing we have to a win is the death of one man—is no exception.

The Playboy Club doesn’t look like a very good television show. Eddie Cibrian is to Jon Hamm as Rebel Yell is to Woodford Reserve. The plot involves murder-by-tripping-in-your-stilettos-while-attempting-to-avoid-sexual-assault. And there’s a fake Ike and Tina Turner:

But sadly, none of those reasons are why KSL-TV, a Utah NBC affiliate, is refusing to air the show in the fall and working to find a station on another network to take it. They’ve said that Playboy’s brand is incompatible with their own, which, you know, sure! But the whole premise of The Playboy Club seems to be that there’s a fundamental mismatch between Playboy’s brand and the reality: that the clubs could preach an ethos of look-but-don’t-touch, could insist the girls weren’t really for sale, but they weren’t going to protect them, either. Similarly, there’s something obviously compromised about Naturi Naughton convincing herself that her breasts are going to break barriers “because you can’t discriminate against these.”

If anything, this looks like it’s going to make the Playboy Clubs sound anachronistic, and maybe even a little musty. There’s something just so…lame about a bunch of Brycleemed college boys or young executives asking if they can buy a night with a Bunny for a buck fifty, and something weird and empty about a dude whose claim to cool is that he’s the dude at his local Playboy Club. The show may be a bad bet for a local affiliate worried about its ratings, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to successfully market nostalgia for the glory days of stag magazines. There’s a reason Playboy doesn’t just keep doing the same old thing — it doesn’t sell like it used to.