And I thought it was some goofy-lookin’ nonsense about Daniel Craig and a very expensive piece of jewelry. Jon Favreau tells io9:

We’re not revisionist historians here. There is a lot of talk about people killing people and the Apaches and the scalps. We started off with images from the Blood Meridian right off the top. It’s a dark world. Harrison Ford’s story about what he witnessed as a child with the atrocities committed upon the settlers and the Indians are saying all these terrible things have come from the white people … and they’re [both] right.

Instead of making it like they’re all playing nice together and they happen to be friends right off the bat … even Harrison Ford and Adam Beach — who clearly have a very strong bond, stronger in many ways than he does with his own son — he’s conflicted about that feeling. But yet, in his heart, he still looked after him like a son and is seen as such.

Who knew? After a summer where race is left out of a movie about the struggles of the ’60s, and Captain America blithely ignores the unintegrated realities of the American Army in World War II, it’s refreshing to hear a director call revisionism by its name and express hopes of avoiding it. I don’t think this movie, or every movie, has to be about aggressively forcing viewers to confront the difficult truths in America’s past, but accepting the truth for what it is and building your fictional world in response to it and in acknowledgement of it is good practice, and good storytelling. Conflict is generally more interesting than whitewash.

On the NAACP Convention agenda this year? The lack of roles for black actors and the odd lack of space for stories about black characters in the vast sea of the media market. I don’t think anyone particularly disagrees that it would be a good thing for people of color if they were more accurately represented in our popular culture, and that it’s a good thing for people of all backgrounds to have more original stories in the mix. So the question, I think, is less, should we do this? and more how do we convince people to do this?

The threshhold that had to be crossed to get a lot of projects by, and about, funny women in development for film and television appears to have been the $164 million domestic gross for Bridesmaids. Why it wasn’t, say, the $153 million domestic gross for Sex and the City, is one of the secrets of the dark art of box office alchemy that’s probably better left unexamined lest Nikki Finke and Harvey Weinstein end up examining one’s entrails on a sound stage covered with pentagrams and candles. But whatever it was, there was a clear and repeated demonstration that women had money and would spend it on movies that depicted characters that they either identified with or saw as aspirational figures, and at some point, the studios were confident that this was a thing that they could do that would consistently make enough money to allow them to swim, Scrooge McDuck-like, in vast swimming pools of lady-riches.

So what’s the tipping point for movies about and starring people of color? Clearly, the streak Will Smith had between 2004 and 2008, when Shark Tale, Hitch, The Pursuit of Happyness, I Am Legend, and Hancock all made more than $150 million domestically and more than $350 million abroad, doesn’t seem to have done it. Or maybe it’s just that if an individual African-American actor generates enough revenue, rather than taking that as proof of the ability of African-American actors to be broadly appealing to audiences, studios instead start to see those individual actors as black rather than green. Tyler Perry’s movies have done fine — $50 million for Diary of a Mad Black Woman, $55 million for Why Did I Get Married? and $60 million for Why Did I Get Married Too?, $31 million for Daddy’s Little Girls — but either Perry isn’t that interested in moving beyond his core audience, as is his right, or even though he has his own studio, he’d have trouble finding distribution for a movie that’s meant to go beyond that core audience. I’d like to think the $603,625,827 that Fast Five‘s made so far worldwide would be enough money to make studios think about every aspect of it, rather than simply the fact that it’s the next installment in a successful franchise, and we’ll have to see.

If you don’t control an industry, it’s not surprising that you might have to work harder to succeed in it, however unfair that seems. But I’d love to know what counts as success for people of color? And at what profit point does the industry count black audiences, Latino audiences, Asian audiences, and white audiences who don’t only want to see white faces on screen as mainstream?

In the midst of the delightfully distracting debate over whether the Treasury Department could solve the debt ceiling crisis by minting a couple of trillion-dollar coins, Jon Chait suggests that such a scenario lends itself to a whole bunch of wacky movie ideas:

I actually feel like this plan could, in addition to rescuing the economy, provide the spark our film industry requires. I could sit here for ten minutes and rattle off a half-dozen great film concepts based on this story.

Bank caper: a dashing Clooney-esque figure assembles a team to steal the trillion dollar coin.

Comedy: a bumbling assistant Treasury Secretary played by Jack Black accidentally picks up the trillion dollar coin and spends it on a Mountain Dew, sending the entire government into a mad scramble for the coin before the world economy collapses.

Noir: Regular person somehow acquires the coin, and is slowly twisted.

Action: Super-villain plots to destroy the coin and bring the economy to its knees, from which he stands to profit due to a nefariously brilliant hedge he has prepared. Maybe we’ll call him “Eric Cantor.”

I like these, but I have some doubts about the first idea. A lot of what makes heist movies fun is the brilliant solutions to the logistical challenges of moving the loot. We’d never have the sheer joy of the Mini Cooper chase scene in The Italian Job if all we had to move was a couple of little coins:

On the other hand, you could do a gorgeous, high-level three card monte, like the climax of the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, one of my favorite movie sequences for pure fun and style (the clip spoils the end of the movie):

In addition to the misery of the debt ceiling showdown, this week brought the unfortunate news that I, as a Patriots fan, am apparently supposed to root for Chad Ochocinco and Albert Haynesworth. Ochocinco’s really mostly a harmless diva, and I can live with him, especially if the team lets Aaron Hernandez keep jersey number 85. But Albert Haynesworth is an unprofessional brat — and worse, his trial for misdemeanor sexual assault charges starts on Tuesday. For those unfamiliar with the details behind the case, Haynesworth stands accused of asking a waitress if he could put his credit card in her blouse when he settled his check, and interpreting her consent to that as permission to fondle her breasts. When interviewed by the police, he told a detective that “I know what this is about, she is just upset that I have a white girlfriend. I couldn’t tell you the last time I dated a black girl. She was trying to get with me.” Charming.

Obviously Haynesworth is innocent until proven guilty. And because I believe in reintegrating people into society after they serve the penalties meted out to them by the justice system, Haynesworth will have every right in the world to keep playing football if he’s convicted and serves out whatever fine or community service he’s sentenced to, just as Michael Vick has every right in the world to continue to earn a living as a quarterback now that he’s served his jail sentence. But there’s a lot of ground between not blocking someone from getting a job or a place to live after they’re found guilty in a court of law, and cheering for them on a national stage, between the neutrality of acceptance and the affirmation of respect.

And I don’t want to cheer for Albert Haynesworth. I didn’t want to cheer for Julio Lugo, either, during his time with the Red Sox, even though his wife recanted her original version of events in a 2003 domestic violence case and he was acquitted. Haynesworth didn’t grope me in public, Lugo didn’t beat me up while trying to throw me out of our mutual house, and I am obviously not the Texas cheerleader who was kicked off her squad for refusing to cheer for the player who raped her and plead out to lesser charges, lost her case in court, and was ordered to pay her school district’s legal fees. But I can’t ignore these things just because they didn’t happen to me. The cognitive dissonance is just too jarring.

Teams take character into consideration to a limited extent in considering who they hire, because at the end of the day, being the kind of jerk who blames assault charges on black women being upset that he dates white women has nothing to do with how hard you hit quarterbacks. But tickets and television rights to games are only part of what sports franchises sell. They want us to buy all manner of merchandise, to wear these men’s names across our backs. Their profit depends on our level of identification and emotional involvement with the team as an entity and the players as individuals. There’s a reason almost every single athlete in the country has some sort of charitable foundation, and it’s not entirely out of the goodness of their hearts. I’d really love to see a day where assaulting a woman, be she wife or cocktail waitress, will be as commercially damaging to a team and to a player’s individual brand as, say, declaring that you hate the Jimmy Fund and all those kids with cancer can shove it. But until we get there, female fans are going to be stuck with uncomfortable decisions about when to rise with the crowd, and when a great play can only be greeted with the sound of one and a half hands clapping.

This post contains spoilers through the July 28 episode of Louie.

One of the things I find really interesting about Louie, and Louis C.K. in general, is the question of how much judging yourself absolutely without mercy earns you the right to judge other people and be up front about your discomfort with other people. I know I would be uncomfortable if a homeless man took off a lot of his clothes in a subway station and prepared to rinse himself from a bottle of spring water, and I know I would be struck by the juxtaposition of a very gifted violinist playing in the space between me and that homeless man, but I’m not sure how comfortable I am watching Louis put that discomfort on display.

Societal rules tend to dictate that when we witness behavior that makes us uncomfortable, but that doesn’t threaten us, and that we’re powerless to change, whether because someone is mentally ill, or because it’s inappropriate because we aren’t their parents, is generally to sit tight. If you’re caught judging, you’re an asshole, a racist, potentially classist, or whatever the relevant -ism is. And you can’t really solve any of the things that make you uncomfortable, which is precisely why Louis’ fantasy of becoming a subway Sir Walter Raleigh and cleaning up the mysterious brown liquid on the seat is so compelling and so impossible. Cleaning it up wouldn’t win him the admiration of middle-aged African-American women and the desire of sexy young blonde ladies. It would make everyone else uncomfortable because it would force them to acknowledge it was there in the first place.

And this episode feels both artistically interesting to me as a critic and uncomfortable to me as an invested viewer because Louis’ affections for Pamela, who I don’t think much of, make me feel less good about Louis. Pamela may be some people’s ideal of a tough-talking, honest female friend, but I always feel awful and awkward when she’s on screen, mostly because of how terrible she is to Louis, whether she’s cooking an omelette for a guy who is occupying an apartment Louis’ thinking about buying, or calling her son a “little bitch” because he’s scared of amusement park rides. “Why did you want to come here? Did you want to take me here because it’s Frenchy and cool-looking?” she asks him, in a scene that feels like decency and friendship malpractice to me. “You picked it out because you thought I would think you would cool, which you’re not. You’re very, very uncool, Louie, and you’re very boring…You think I’m awesome, and I think you’re okay.” And yet, Louis confesses his love to her in a flea market, telling her “You’re fun, and you shit all over me, and you make fun of me, and you’re real. I don’t have enough time in any day to think about you enough…I’m crazy about you, Pamela. I don’t want to be with anybody else.”

And I think maybe this is the genius of Louie, that it convinces us to have an affinity with this guy, and that he’s kind of great despite his bad luck. And then it smacks us, hard, with the insecurities that make a woman like Pamela his ideal, or the passivity that leads him to stick around to spank an obviously damaged parent of a kid in his daughter’s elementary school class. And then it asks you to keep going because this damaged person is our main character, in fact, our only constant character, and there’s no way he can switch jobs and cities, or get beheaded, or move to Los Angeles and disappear. Louie asks us to attach to a character who is one of the closest things we have to an actual person. And while that’s almost always entertaining, it’s not always fun.

-New Frank Ocean is always a cause for celebration.

-Ah, the days when computers were young and Cosmopolitan spent time convincing readers that programming was just like planning a dinner party.

-Attack the Block promises it’s The Wire with aliens, if you needed convincing to watch it.

-I would absolutely take a political science class taught by Martin Starr.

-I love how whoever cut the teaser trailer for The Avengers can’t resist lingering on Chris Hemsworth’s ripped Thor arms:

This post contains spoilers through the first four chapters of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. If you want to spoil beyond that, feel free, just label your comment as such. For next week, let’s read through the end of Part I (up to, but not beyond, chapter 9. I should note, by the way, that I’m reading the original rather than the re-released author’s preferred text.

One of the things I love about American Gods, and that I think is true of the best of Neil Gaiman’s work, is the way he establishes the human tendency towards myth, and the Gods’ tendencies towards mundanity. And while American Gods is not precisely a social problem novel, I appreciate that he starts laying that groundwork in a story about prison culture and the way it makes it harder for ex-cons to re-acclimate:

The upshot of it all was that Johnnie Larch never actually made it to Seattle, and he spent the next couple of days in town in bars, and when his one hundred dollars was gone he held up a gas station with a toy gun for money to keep drinking, and the police finally picked him up for pissing in the street. Pretty soon he was back inside serving the rest of his sentence and a little extra for the gas station job. And the moral of this story, according to Johnnie Larch, was this: don’t piss off people who work in airports.

‘Are you sure it’s not something like ‘The kind of behavior that works in a specialized environment, such as prison, can fail to work and in fact ecome harmful when used outside such an environment’?” said Shadow, when Johnnie Larch told him the story.

But even though we have a tendency to make myths out of our lives, that doesn’t mean we can accept the extraordinary. What lets Bilquis get away with her seductions is the fact that her clients can’t believe what’s happening to them. And Mr. Wednesday’s pose as a two-bit con artist not only lets him support himself, but it disguises his extraordinariness. Gods don’t turn tricks or scams, because why would they? In the world of American Gods, Americans can’t quite conceive of the Gods as small, but that doesn’t mean they can appreciate them in all their profound strangeness and power either, as Shadow begins to find out in a series of disturbing dreams:
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It’s grimly hilarious and depressing that, just as House Republicans are using the debt ceiling fight to go after Pell Grants, the need-based college assistance program, they also decided to use this moment of national tension to try to cut $10.6 million out of the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts. This is rearranging deck chairs on the Titantic, but with extreme malice. Fortunately, 55 Republicans stood up and voted with all of their Democratic colleagues to preserve the funding. I’m obviously supportive of public funding for the arts. But I’m also just depressed by these public displays of unseriousness and pettiness. $10.6 million in cuts will not save the nation, but it would halt a lot of revenue- and salary-generating projects.

This post contains spoilers through the July 28 episode of Burn Notice.

Confession: like in Bones, I find myself at a point in Burn Notice where I find it almost impossible to pay attention to the case of the week because I’m so vastly more interested in the larger narrative, and because frankly, the faux-louchness of Michael Westen’s Miami is starting to feel a little contrived. At the rate Michael and company burn through drug dealers, arms dealers, flesh peddlers, and assorted lower-level ne’er-do-wells, the larger Miami area’s going to end up with a desperate surplus of white suits and a seriously depressed underground economy. More than that, I worry about the way that the show’s handling the larger arc of the season.

It’s not so much that I worry about Michael being back to square three or four with the people who burned him and his tense relationship with the CIA. I just worry that it’s getting cliche rather than prickly and interesting. “It’s been personal since Max bled out in my arms, since he told me to say goodbye to his wife,” Michael declares at the beginning of the episode, when his cohorts point out how hard whoever framed him worked to make the setup plausible. It’s a dreadfully cliche line, and delivered without any particular sense of conviction, and of course it’s false, because the burning was always personal.

And it’s not just that we’re stuck in retreads. Last week, Pearce, Michael’s new CIA liaison, was talking about what a tough bitch she was. Now, she’s dissolving into tears at the thought of blowing an asset because “They do that, and my asset gets killed…The guy coaches soccer and he’s got a life…This happened to me before…he was more than an asset. We were getting married when it was over. The brass got impatient…I buried him a month before our wedding day.” All of which serves as a setup for Michael to shout at a couple of squeaky, patently fake CIA functionaries that he’s not flip because “I put my friend in the field,” by which he means he had Fiona scrape up Sam’s face with a zester so he’ll look like he got grazed with a bullet and let him be taken into the uncertain custody of a volatile Miami drug dealer. Which…whatever, we’re back in the haze of Miami corruption.

But I think the show needs to figure out what it thinks about the CIA. Is it a desirable, competent, admirable organization to belong to, or is it just the only thing Michael can visualize as a goal, so he, and we, are expected to overlook the expendable handlers and squeaky bureaucrats who are totally out of keeping with the styling and presentation of the show? Is being loyal to Michael worth it? As Fiona notes about Michael’s decision-making tonight “He knew it was dangerous. He knew it. And now Sam is in real trouble.” If the show wants us to believe that there are serious consequences for Michael’s singlemindedness, it might be worth it to start demonstrating that, rather than playing another round of Michael’s-loyal-to-Sam-and-Fiona-but-the-CIA-couldn’t-care-less-but-Michael-wants-to-rejoin-the-CIA. Michael doesn’t need a lecture from his mother on why not to play with fire. He needs to get burned, but in a whole different way. Burn Notice has succeeded by being fizzy and sunny and not exceptionally substantive. But it’s time for the show to actually start laying down some value judgements and using them to drive characterization.

DC Women Kicking Ass has an extended interview with a comics reader who goes by the handle Kyrax2, and who spent her time at Comic Con with her daughter, both of them dressed up as characters, going to panels and asking the top figures in the DC Comics universe about representation of women in character lineups, on covers, and among the creative staff of the label. It sounds like it was not a fun experience for her:

I started to mention the panels I’d previously attended. There was immediate hostility from the audience, with someone shouting, “We know!” as I began. Then I asked the question that had been bothering me since the night before, ever since I’d started thinking about the all-male composition of almost every panel I’d attended: “Are you committed to hiring more women?”

Didio responded, “I’m committed to hiring the absolute best writers and artists.”

I looked at the all-male panel and said, “Are you saying you can’t find any great women writers or artists?”

There was a furious reaction from the audience. People yelled at me to ‘sit down!’ and shouted out Gail Simone’s name over and over again. I said, “Yes, I met Gail Simone yesterday. I like her very much. But I’ve attended all these other panels, and with the exception of her and one female editor, they’ve all been male.”

I was again surprised by the audience’s reaction. If people liked Gail so much, didn’t they want to see more female writers and artists like her? It also felt very much like Gail was being used as a token female that everyone could point to and say, “Look! We have Gail! What’s wrong with you?” I didn’t hear any other name being called out.

I’m trying to decide if I think this sounds like it was a productive enterprise. I tend to prefer cajoling, jollying, and gentle shaming to confrontation, but then, the nice people at CAP have seen fit to give me this awesome platform from which to beat my favorite horses, dead or living. And I think media representation is one area where it can be productive to forcefully make people aware of their biases and blind spots even if it makes them uncomfortable. Watching or reading things with only white people, or only men, as stars may not be an active act of racism or sexism, but that doesn’t mean that passivity doesn’t have real impacts on the diversity of our stories and of our entertainment industry workforce, and it’s an act, intentional or no, of self-denial, locking yourself out of things that could illuminate your world.

So was this an effective way of waking people up? It certainly sounds like the most verbal people in the crowds were the ones who wanted to shut up Kyrax2, the panel attendance equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and singing nonsense, though I imagine that also served as a fairly indelible image for some of the more thoughtful people in the crowds who saw her. And given the venue, I’m not really shocked. I’m planning my first trip to Comic Con next year, so I don’t have first-hand experience of this, but it sounds like the event’s gotten so big that from a thematic and mission sense, it’s hard for it to maintain a coherent identity. I’m sure there are people for whom the presence of Twilight at Comic Con is a desecration, and people for whom anything that interrupts their opportunity to have contact with creators and actors in a really positive way is deeply upsetting. I respect that — though I don’t really think folks on panels should ever have a tough pass from difficult but fair questions. That said, next year it would be great to see this as a movement, a lot of women, and men who are their allies, and folks of color, and white folks, getting together to brainstorm questions in advance to elicit a lot of detailed information and reactions from artists, and to demonstrate widespread support for the idea that comics and geek culture get more interesting as they get more diverse. (And if someone is out there doing that, loop me in. I promise I’ll go as Jennifer Walters!) Lone heroes can accomplish a lot deploying the same power — or asking the same questions — over and over. But sometimes, it take the X-Men or the Avengers to win one of the bigger fights.

I had some skepticism about The Ides of March and how it would handle the campaign staff, rather than the politicians, which is, of course, the key to making a movie that’s actually about Washington as opposed to a movie that thinks it’s about Washington. It looks like it’s got at least that focus right:

And that scene with the tie’s got a little snap to it, reminiscent as it is of the famous coffee scene in Brassed Off.

I suppose my concern is that it’s going to be a naive movie dressed up in handsome and skeptical clothes. Ryan Gosling’s character, it seems, starts out as a fixer, develops what Primary Colors would call a “galloping case of TB” (or true believerism), loses faith in his specific candidate, but continues to believe in a pure ideal. Primary Colors, on the other hand, has a character who starts out as a fixer, develops a similar case of TB, but essentially gets inoculated and accepts that a flawed vehicle for progress is better than none — while another character literally can’t survive the disappointment of her idealism. I don’t think politics is an inherently corrupt business, because there are clearly candidates who manage to make it into office without breaking campaign finance laws or accepting bribes. But I think that in our current state of affairs, it’s almost impossible to be politically effective by behaving in an entirely attractive fashion.

Does that mean that to create change you have to work for someone who solicits prostitutes, or is accused of sexual assault, or even if they don’t do anything illegal, is manifestly icky in his personal life? Of course not. But I do think our politics could probably benefit from an acknowledgement that there’s an unviable gap between how we want politicians to behave on the campaign trail and in office. The noble candidate who will bind up our wounds, love his wife and children, behave with perfect dignity on all occasions except those where he’s forced by circumstance to display a rapier wit, and usher in a new age of peace and prosperity, is an insufferable fiction.

A reader who has worked in video game design for more than a decade but who has asked to remain anonymous writes in with some more context on profit pools and how they fit into video game salaries overall:

I am well compensated, but I think Mr. Pachter is way off in describing future earnings from profit pools. For starters, in all the places I’ve worked, there’s rarely anything in writing about them, and, if there is, it can be amended as often as the wind blows. If the company has profits to share from a game and it’s feeling benevolent, it shares them with those that produced it. We have no contracts to guarantee such profit sharing. Additionally, while the market is crowded by huge hits, I don’t believe the majority of titles are exceptionally profitable, though I don’t have data to back this up. I don’t think “You may get a carrot if you work hard” is an excuse for extended crunch time.

There’s a major lawsuit under way against the company Activision, which the plaintiffs allege withheld $54 million in promised bonuses from the designers who did Modern Warfare 2 to keep them working on Modern Warfare 3. That suit is moving forward, and it’ll be interesting to see, if the plaintiffs win, how that affects profit pools in the future — whether they’ll get formalized, or disappear altogether to be replaced by somewhat — though probably not equivalently — higher salaries.

The same reader who sent along those observations about profit pools was also kind enough to point me in the direction of the seminal post by EA Spouse, now unmasked as Erin Hoffman, about the impact of extended crunch time. Since that post came out in 2004, lots of folks have argued that crunch time is unproductive (I’d be interested to see industry-specific, quality studies on the impact of crunch time on productivity and error rates). Edge is running a week-long conversation on whether crunch is necessary — the consensus, unsurprisingly, is that some is inevitable, but much could be avoided. So as I’m thinking about this, I’d be curious to learn if there are companies that have successfully managed to cut down on crunch by implementing protocols or planning strategies that are portable from project to project, and if they’ve seen employee retention and productivity improve and error rates fall? I’d like to believe doing the right thing pays off for companies, but I want to know if it’s actually true.

Mr. Pachter and I are going to talk all about this further — he emailed that he thinks game developers have every right to try to form unions, but that it’s likely, given the structure of the industry and the availability of labor, that they’ll be unsuccessful. So if you’ve got questions for him, toss ‘em in comments and I’ll use them to inform my own thinking.

Bill Nye is good at a lot of things, among them teaching children about science, killing it on Fox News

In our conversation about non-white manic pixie dream girls, a couple of commenters recommended that I give Issa Rae’s web series, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, a try. It’s a suggestion for which I’m deeply grateful (and as a thank-you, if you’ve got questions for Rae, toss ‘em in comments: I’ll be interviewing her later this week) — I would love to see this expanded as a network show. Part of what’s great about the series is that the main character, J, is allowed to be less than completely pleasant all the time (she vents her considerable spleen by writing really, really angry rhymes), and though there are guys in her life, she has concerns other than landing her cute coworker.

But I think the central genius of Awkward Black Girl is in the title. As Rae writes on a Kickstarter proposal to keep the show going, “at its core, it’s about being ‘awkward,’ which is a unifying and universal thing that we all have experienced in some capacity.” That’s absolutely true, and Rae’s great at getting at the little things, like whether you talk to a coworker you don’t know well when you get stuck walking down the same endless hallway multiple times a day, or how to feel when you learn that a party invitation doesn’t mean what you think it means. But I appreciate that the show isn’t neutral about the awkwardnesses of conversations and interactions across race. How do you handle an expansively racist coworker of whose ethnicity you’re uncertain? What happens when an otherwise close friend starts talking like a Hollywoodized slave at a party, claiming “black guys love it when I talk this way”? In one of my favorite scenes in the series, J, the main character, meets a cute white guy with the same name at a party in the fifth episode. Riffing on the JJ coincidence, he attempts a Good Times joke — but rather than dismissing him as an ignorant racist white dude, the series lets him walk it back, acknowledges that the moment is awkward for both participants, but from very different places.

We’ve had conversations in this space about the kind of female comedian who could, if given the opportunity, replicate Louie, handling everything from script to edits. The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl is a gentler show, but I think Issa Rae might be the woman who could do it. FX, or somebody, should get her some of that Louis C.K. money.

-My friend Alejandra O’Leary has a couple of songs from her new album available for listening. What are you waiting for?

-The saddest movie scene of all time, as determined by psychological testing.

-Online distribution concerns might hold up the NBCUniversal-Comcast merger.

-Chewie and Han Solo have some unresolved issues.

-We would solve a lot of problems if we could prevent giant alien robots from hiding lots of equipment in the ocean in the first place:

If that video isn’t working, this one should be.

Writing about Captain Planet made me want to revisit one of the few television shows I watched on a regular basis as a kid after we got a television. Ghostwriter isn’t widely available: until recently, you couldn’t buy DVDs of the show commercially, though you could find a few of the story arcs on used VHS. So I spent a bunch of yesterday piecing together the mysteries of who was stealing backpacks from the kids at Zora Neale Hurston Middle School, who’s dumping toxic waste in the Fort Greene community garden, and, of course, who burned down Mr. Brinker’s store:

The show’s premise, that a ghost (in accounts from the show’s creators and writers, alternatively meant to be a great writer like Shakespeare or an ancestor of the main character, Jamal, who escaped slavery and educated himself ) who can only communicate in writing and who expresses a lot of confusion about elements of modern life ranging from cornflakes to copyright infringement helps a diverse group of Fort Greene kids solve mysteries, may have been a little goofy. But in spite of that, Ghostwriter works remarkably well.

The show makes effective use of the fact that it’s set in a dense urban neighborhood to create a believably diverse cast. Jamal’s the grandson of a postwoman (and the son of Samuel L. Jackson, who only appears in the show occasionally); Alex and Gaby are Salvadorian immigrants whose parents run a convenience store; Lenni and her musician father live in a loft above that same store; Tina, the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants who run a tailoring business, is Gaby’s best friend; Rob comes to Hurston when his father gets a military posting to New York. The kids’ parents have believable professions and incomes — where Lenni’s father might be a rock star in our Gossip Girl-ified world, but in Ghostwriter, he’s just a working musician with a regular series of gigs. Jamal’s sister is on scholarship at college. When Lenni’s father and Gaby and Alex’s father get into a car accident, it’s a big deal, enough so that the tension between them trickles down to their children.

Though the plots got more baroque as the series progressed, most of the problems the Ghostwriter team addressed were about on that scale: serious, but plausible. The kids aren’t immune from the consequences of things that happen in their community: Gaby gets sick when a cleaning company dumps toxic waste in the Fort Greene community garden, Victor’s brother is paralyzed by gang violence and Victor is suspected of vandalism, Jamal’s accused of setting a fire at a corner video store, Alex is offered marijuana. But they also take responsibility for trying to solve problems around them, and the adult characters in their lives tend to take them seriously. Whether it’s Rob staying stubbornly on the phone as he’s transferred through every environmental agency in the city until he finds a civil servant who will help him out in “Over a Barrel,” or Lenni insisting that Hurston move ahead with a community concert even as there’s a flare of gang violence in the neighborhood, Ghostwriter treats the team’s efforts to be good citizens with respect.

To a certain extent, it’s the inverse of a lot of today’s young adult fiction, which posit apocalyptic circumstances that can only be combatted by one or two unusually gifted young people. That may be an attractive fantasy, but it’s also a discouraging one. Katniss Everdeen might be admirable, but her feats are out of reach — she’s not really a role model. Ghostwriter might have extraordinary events as a catalyst, but the hard work — and it is hard: there are queues for toxic waste removal, FBI suspicion is not easily dispelled — is done by fairly average kids with fairly average resources.

Tim Gunn’s description of Hillary Clinton as someone who dresses like “she’s confused about her gender!” is disappointing not just because Tim Gunn is someone who has been able to achieve great fame and wealth because society’s become more accepting of men who are more interested in things that are traditionally feminine than masculine, but because Tim Gunn has achieved that great fame and wealth by purporting to know something about fashion. And I’ve always thought one of the most important things about fashion is that it’s situational. Gunn doesn’t appear to have considered that playing up her femininity and sex appeal might not always be strategic for Hillary as one of the first women to serve as Secretary of State. It’s not like Clinton doesn’t know how to dress in accordance with normative conceptions of American femininity, as she did when her daughter Chelsea got married last year. I particularly liked this number she wore to the rehearsal dinner, which was a terrific color and cut for her:

But if you’re meeting with, say, the Saudi foreign minister, it wouldn’t necessarily be respectful to wear something so low-cut. And if you’re sitting down at the table with Hu Jintao, it might actually be strategic to dress as if you’re dowdy or less formidable so people will underestimate you. Fashion choices that are diplomatically appropriate and strategic may have nothing to do with current conventions of style. Gunn said, after insulting Clinton’s clothing choices, that “I have great respect for her intellect, and her tenacity, and for what she does for our country, and for our governmental role, I just wish she could send a stronger message about American fashion.” It’s disappointing that a man who thinks so much time thinking about what will make women’s bodies look good apparently hasn’t considered very carefully how style can accentuate or detract from the other parts of themselves that women might care about presenting, too.

I really can’t believe that Nevermind is 20 years old. I’ve mentioned that I grew up fairly oblivious about pop culture, but my cousin Eliza, bless her, hooked me up with a lot of Nirvana, Beck, and Hole, and Kurt Cobain was definitely the first rock star I ever admired, even if I didn’t really get the depth of what made him magnetic and tragic. But there’s no question that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” really informs how I consume culture, and who I am as a critic:

I always loved the juxtaposition of the way Cobain turns “I feel stupid and contagious / Here we are now, entertain us” into a reject’s rallying cry, and then the mumbling backing off of “Oh well, whatever, nevermind.” This isn’t straightforward revenge of the nerds stuff: there are steps forward and steps back, and defeats just when you need victories. I’m the worst at irony: too invested, and excited, and vulnerable.

GamePolitics points out this interesting discussion about whether video game designers should unionize, a question prompted by disputes over how the folks who helped develop L.A. Noire were treated during the six years the game was under development. Michael Pachter says they shouldn’t:

It’s a thoughtful analysis, but also one that I disagree with. I think Pachter is right that game development is not a punch-in, punch-out kind of job, that gamer developers and designers have more autonomy than people on assembly lines, that their workplaces are not necessarily places where you’re in danger of being maimed, and that if you’re in game development, you are almost certainly paid a solidly middle-class wage, and have the potential for future earnings from profit pools. And I think those facts lead Pachter (who describes himself as a Democrat) to a fairly common conclusion about the proper and limited role of unions:

I think unions are in business to protect workers from, I think, dangerous working conditions and unfair and predatory labor practices. So dangerous, yeah, if you work in a factory and you can lose a finger, then the union has to make sure you have steel-toed shoes and the right kind of gloves…if you work in a sweatshop where they’re hiring children and not paying a minimum wage, absolutely you need a union to make sure there are fair labor practices. We’re talking about a games industry where the average compensation is well above $60,000…I just don’t think people who make $100,000 need a lot of protection because they might have to work overtime…I think sports unions like the NBA and the NFL make no sense at all…Once you get up to a certain wage level, you’re charged with being able to take care of yourself, and if you can’t handle it, don’t work there.

A couple of thoughts. First, the idea that just because you’re well-paid for doing a job you like means you can’t be abused isn’t really true. The reason that players in the National Football League need a union is that even though average player salaries are higher than the average game developer’s salary, they’re not necessarily high enough to pay for long-term care if you get a traumatic brain injury and leave money behind for your family if you die young. You’re probably not going to get a traumatic brain injury working in game development, but you can get treated badly and pressured by your boss, you can get sick from working too many hours. Taking a good salary doesn’t mean trading in your right to dignity.

Second, I actually think issues like being included in credits (one of the issues Team Bondi developers had with the L.A. Noire project) are, for folks working in the artistic industry, worth going to the wall for in the same way wages, benefits, and workplace salaries. Having your name on your work is absolutely critical to your ability to secure future work. The Visual Effects Society has raised similar issues about the crediting (as well as taking on common problems like extended crunch times) of folks who do visual effects work for movies. This is the kind of thing that I think often is treated as if it’s not a core union issue, or that it’s lower-level, the kind of thing that can be dealt with by a guild, or an informal complaint.

This is a huge challenge for unions, right? If you’re fighting a rearguard action for your survival, it’s really easy to justify your existence by pointing to the hugely vulnerable people you protect from the most abusive employees. But that can be easily turned against unions to narrow the public’s sense of the appropriate space for unions to operate in: if Don Blankenship isn’t burying you in a collapsed coal mine while laughing maniacally, you don’t really need a union (and maybe not even then). If game developers (and I’d love to hear from those of you in comments who are among that number) don’t want union representation, that’s one thing. But that seems like it’s an issue for them to decide, rather than a category for analysts to suggest they don’t belong in.