I’m not an opera buff, but as a nerdy arts blogger, the New York Metropolitan Opera should be ashamed of bullying an opera blogger who reported on possible upcoming productions into shutting down his site and giving him some CDs in return. Per the New York Observer:

Since 1996 Brad Wilber, a reference librarian and crossword puzzle enthusiast, has published Met Futures, an online list of repertory and casting for upcoming seasons at the Metropolitan Opera. Drawing on information in the public domain and tips from sources, it’s a valuable, dependable, much-loved resource, providing a wide-angle view of the Met’s artistic direction and singers’ choices. [...] He received a phone call from Sharon Grubin, the company’s general counsel, who asked Mr. Wilber to take down Met Futures. [...] “She said their uppermost reason was that the site contains errors,” he said in a phone interview last week from his office at Houghton College, a small liberal arts school about 60 miles southeast of Buffalo, “and those errors, whatever percentage, create mistaken expectations on the part of the public, even with my disclaimer. And that it also sometimes muddied negotiations with artists. They said that that created difficulty for them.”

Others would disagree with the Met’s assessment of the list’s accuracy. “The accuracy of Brad’s site was quite spectacular one to two seasons in advance,” said James Jorden, the publisher of the opera gossip and discussion blog Parterre.com. “For example, six months before the Met announced their 2011-12 season in February 2011, Brad had the entire repertory and all major casting in place and, as it turned out, it was 100% correct.”

There is no legal justification for this: folks publish casting and production rumors based on reporting all the time and there’s nothing libelous or deceptive about it. And no artistic institution has a right not to be blogged about. This is exactly the kind of thing that makes opera and other high art forms seem elitist and distant from the people who love the work, much less the people who are trying to find their way in. Brad Wilber was just trying to get other people excited about opera, and says he plans to keep going to show his support for the institution that’s bullying him. The Met should be apologize to him — and maybe offer him free season tickets as thanks for his work promoting their art and bringing it to new audiences.

I’ve written before that I tried Mad Men and just couldn’t get into it, turned off, I think, by the characters themselves and their distance from what have always seemed to me to be a vital part of the ’60s. I will catch up before the next season starts in deference to all you good people (Though can anyone promise me that the show feels less claustrophobic as it goes on? You can use this post as an open thread to try to buck me up.), but I’ll admit I’ve been eager for alternatives, for shows that will take the gorgeous looks and desperateness to break out of old roles of that particular moment, and do something I’m more engaged by with them.

Which may be why I’m so mad for The Hour, which premieres on BBC America at 10 tonight: it’s set in a newsroom, which I’m a total sucker for; features Dominic West back in high seducer mode and ready to throw down with Jon Hamm; and is explicitly engaged with gender and class (and sometimes race) for almost every moment of the show without being boring or pedantic about it about it. As I write in my review for The Atlantic:

The setting helps tremendously in highlighting these issues. In an early broadcast, anchor Hector Madden (The Wire’s Dominic West, in his triumphant return to television) flubs the framing of an investigative piece the up-jumped working-class reporter Freddie Lyon (Ben Whishaw) did about the difficulty West Indian immigrants have finding housing in London: He ends the segment with a depressing reaffirmation that in London “If you’re white, you’re alright.” The cast may be all-white, but they’re aware of the problems of people who don’t share their country of origin or skin tone. Later, their producer, Bel Rowley (an unexpectedly tremendous Romola Garai), kills an interview Lyon gets with a grieving Cabinet minister about a bill to abolish hanging in favor of a live interview Madden does with the Egyptian ambassador to the U.K. after Egypt seizes control of the Suez Canal, while Lyon begins an investigation into the mysterious death of an academic. The compromises Bel has to make are real, and not just because the stories have real impacts. Because the BBC operated under a Royal Charter, and because in 1956, the network was a year into its competition with the newly-created independent competitor ITV, the approval of high government officials wasn’t an immaterial concern, and Bel is doubly under pressure as a woman producer.

There’s a real virtue to the fact that the story begins with Bel in a position of power, rather than simply charting her upward trajectory. She can stumble as well as rise, at one point lecturing the show’s secretary not to do little extras for the men on the show because “do you want to be taken seriously? Or forever be some stupid little marionette forever fluttering on the arm of every good-looking man in the BBC? First rule, don’t make tea.” While she has a male mentor in the BBC director of news, Bel has decision-making authority over Hector and Freddie, an old friend with whom she’s long plotted a new kind of television show, only to beat him to the job of producer while he’s stuck covering domestic news. “They’re humoring you,” Freddie lashes out at Bel when he finds out she’s got the job. “They don’t want a woman. A woman is difficult, hysterical. And you can never really find one who’ll ever stay. Another couple of years and you’ll probably want a baby.” He doesn’t actually believe any of it, but that doesn’t mean he won’t use her insecurities to hurt her.

I think there are some problems with the show, most notably the espionage subplot, which The Hour doesn’t actually need for extra gravity. But the acting is so good, top-to-bottom, and the show’s got some of that Deadwood Shakespearean air, a sense in the dialogue that you’re in a profoundly different place. This is politics as drama done beautifully.

I just finished reading Grant Morrison’s Supergods, which strikes me as a fairly good encapsulation of some big trends in superhero comics, but not a particularly engaging or reflective memoir.

I’m obviously sympathetic to Morrison’s belief that culture in general and superhero stories in particular are important places where we work out big ideas. Or, as he puts it, “We live in the stories we tell ourselves. In a secular, scientific rational culture lacking in any convincing spiritual leadership, superhero stories speak loudly and boldly to our greatest fears, deepest longings, and highest aspirations.” And I think he’s right that as those fears and longings fluctuate, different superheroes rise and fall in popularity, for example, “Superman began as a socialist, but Batman was the ultimate capitalist hero, which may help explain his current popularity and Superman’s relative loss of significance.” I don’t necessarily agree with the idea, which Morrison spends some of the latter half of the book selling, that these fluctuations are caused by 22-year-long cycles in sunspot activities — I tend to think humanity has a little bit more control over itself than that, and that the patterns in our popular culture are too complex to be reduced to two simple alternatives.

And I think part of what makes Supergods somewhat unsatisfying is Morrison’s conviction that the highest ideal superheroes can help us to aspire to is self-actualization. He’s actively anti-political at certain points in the book, complaining at one point:

As far as I was concerned, the Anti-Life Equation was being rammed down my gullet every day in the papers and on TV, and I was sick of it; sick of being told the world was dying, and it was all because I’d forgot to turn off the bathroom light; sick of Fina(ncia)l Crisis, the War, and the teenage suicide bombers willing to die for the promise of a cheesy afterlife that sounded like a night out with the lap dance girls at Spearmint Rhino.

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Michelle Goldberg’s very interesting article about Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Christian Dominionism has a couple of interesting references to the “Seven Mountains” of society Christians are supposed to figure out how to lead in, including the arts and entertainment. It’s not remotely surprising that Christians would want to build up influence in Hollywood that would allow them to produce movies and television shows that respect and reflect their values — that’s a near-universal desire. But I am interested in the gap between the role Dominionist Christians have been able to carve out for themselves in politics and the role they’ve been able to carve out for themselves in Hollywood.

Obviously, there’s a lot of coded language in both spaces, but that seems to be more of an advantage in politics than it is in Hollywood. In political speeches, it can be to your advantage to slip in a phrase or metaphor that will go unnoticed by your larger audience but that will signal your allegiance to a smaller constituency that’s in the know. But in Hollywood, if you slip in coded language or imagery, it might make Christians feel better about watching a movie like The Matrix, but if it’s so covert that no one else notices, then your popular art’s failed as a conversion tool or as means of spreading the good news.

There’s no question that Christian moviemakers have succeeded in creating products that resonate with an alternative market. Movies like The Passion of the Christ and Fireproof have made plenty of money for what they are, but there’s no particular evidence that they drew in audiences outside their target demographics, or convinced any large number of people who wandered into them unawares to convert. Creating products that resonate only with Christians who are already on board may help folks who are worried about the influence of secular products avoid them. But that’s sort of the opposite of achieving dominion in the realm — instead, it’s an acknowledgment of defeat.

Of course the day after I wrote about the limited potential profitably of a career based on reality television, Abercrombie and Fitch ups the ante by offering Jersey Shore‘s Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino money to stop wearing their clothes. Ta-Nehisi wonders if it’s about class. And that’s potentially true — Abercrombie aspires to be sexier than J. Crew, though less trashy than American Apparel, and it’s done an inconsistent job of policing its brand. Sometimes, A&F’s sought to push buttons by engaging progressive issues, as it did with its Whitney & Beth Marriage campaign in 2000, which invited catalogue readers to a wedding between two women, though the responses included “No… I’m liberal, but not that liberal” and “Yes… I’d love to see two women get married.” More frequently, it’s in the news for, say, having a store worker with a prosthetic arm work in the stockroom rather than the store floor to avoid offending shoppers who might see having a physical disability as inconsistent with Abercrombie’s desired image of athletic sexuality, or settling class-action lawsuits filed by minority employees and job applicants.

But this case seems more like a ploy for attention and marketing buzz than anything else. Last year, the company was selling “The Fituation” t-shirts. This year, Mike’s kind of a skeeze, making a transparent play for an (at least temporarily taken) Snooki. Abercrombie’s move is a win for both of them: the company gets to position itself as America and treat Mike like he’s a creep, and Mike gets to redeem himself slightly by pointing out how ridiculous they’re being. That doesn’t mean Abercrombie’s commercial interests are any less aligned with being racist, body-conformist creeps. But I’m not sure this is a case where anybody loses out.

-My job is killing me.

-Britney v. Christina.

-Frank Miller may not have the worst 9/11 comics coming out this fall.

-Well you know I’ll be excited for an Emma Thompson-penned sex drama about a critic.

-Lady business:

As much as I really, profoundly disliked and am discomfited by the rapturous reception The Help‘s received in some critical quarters and at the box office, I’m less interested in the badness of this particular piece of art, and more interested in why we keep making Noble White Ladies Meet the Civil Rights Movement movies, and how we can get something different in production. Turns out, all it takes is Brad Pitt, who is adapting Twelve Years a Slave, the memoirs of Solomon Northup, a free black man who in 1841 was kidnapped, held in slave pens in Washington, DC, and sold into bondage in Louisiana. Chewitel Ejiofor (who I love, though I wonder if it’ll make a difference that he’s British rather than American) will play Northup.

I really hope this comes to fruition. We’ve see Martin Luther King Jr. biopics, including Paul Greengrass’s account of King’s support for the striking Memphis sanitation workers and his assassination getting pushed back repeatedly. And McQueen and Ejiofor were supposed to be working on a Fela biopic too, and it’s not clear what happened to that. But it would be so useful and powerful to tell a story like that that explains that the direction from slavery to freedom wasn’t always a one-way journey, that demonstrates the reaches of the vast jaws of the market for slaves, that situates bondage not just in a vanished, Spanish moss-draped Deep South, but on Mall in Washington, DC where we inaugurated the first black president.

There’s a white character in Northup’s story, the Canadian carpenter who smuggled Northup’s letters back to his wife so she’d know what happened to him. But if he comes into the story and departs it through Northup’s narrative, rather than having a movie that follows said white carpenter South and has him discover Northup, I think this movie can avoid a lot of The Help‘s problems. It’s not the existence of good white people in stories about black people that’s the problem. It’s the presumption that their goodness is the most important takeaway from anti-slavery and Civil Rights narratives.

Over at Tiger Beatdown, S.E. Smith thinks that we don’t treat True Blood‘s Tara Thornton like Buffy Summers because she’s black:

Look at Buffy and True Blood’s Tara. The two characters have a lot in common; they’re physically strong, they’re assertive, they’re sassy. They are also both emotionally vulnerable, are sometimes wounded, may scream and cry and pout and stomp. Buffy enjoys a huge following (with a small minority that calls her ‘whiny’) while people pour on the haterade for Tara on a regular basis. She’s too emotional, too screamy, too…much. Buffy’s a strong female character by many people’s lists, but Tara…isn’t. There’s a reason for that.

So really, what people are usually talking about when they talk about the need for ‘strong female characters’ is white cis women, specifically. Emily pointed out in an email when we were discussing this issue that ‘…you have to be assumed weak in the first place for it to be groundbreaking.’ Pop culture routinely positions white women as wilting lilies and delicate flowers, a depiction that dates back centuries, and people understandably want to push back on that.

I’m sensitive to this line of argument, and I think there are other well-made points in the post about making female characters strong by giving them masculine traits. But in the case of Tara, I’m not sure this is correct. What’s frustrating about Tara isn’t that she’s “emotionally vulnerable, are sometimes wounded, may scream and cry and pout and stomp.” It’s that the character never grows, and exhibits consistently poor judgement, sabotaging a potential relationship with a nice, stable man and taking up with a former criminal, seeking protection with and then falling under the spell of a powerful, chaos-inclined magical entity, and then when she gets therapy and rebuilds her life outside of Bon Temps, sabotages it again for no discernable reason, taking up with a genocidal witches’ coven.

I think it’s arguable that Alan Ball’s adaptation of the character is racist. In Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire novels, Tara’s character is a recovering abuse survivor who’s sometimes brittle because of it, but she’s also a small business owner, a good friend to Sookie (though they have their fallings out), a wife and mother—and she’s white. If Ball had kept that character development arc, and committed to that emotional growth, but cast Rutina Wesley in the role, I think we’d think Tara is a hero. Instead, he both made her black and an object of perpetual humiliation. If we’re not cheering Tara it’s because the character has no discernable investment in her own life and happiness. The character’s not strong and unjustly ignored: she’s just static.

The New York Times spotlights a big development for the music industry: under a provision of American copyright law, artists are about to start being able to reclaim the rights to their catalogues as long as they get their applications in on time:

“This is a life-threatening change for them, the legal equivalent of Internet technology,” said Kenneth J. Abdo, a lawyer who leads a termination rights working group for the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and has filed claims for some of his clients, who include Kool and the Gang. As a result the four major record companies — Universal, Sony BMG, EMI and Warner — have made it clear that they will not relinquish recordings they consider their property without a fight.

“We believe the termination right doesn’t apply to most sound recordings,” said Steven Marks, general counsel for the Recording Industry Association of America, a lobbying group in Washington that represents the interests of record labels. As the record companies see it, the master recordings belong to them in perpetuity, rather than to the artists who wrote and recorded the songs, because, the labels argue, the records are “works for hire,” compilations created not by independent performers but by musicians who are, in essence, their employees.

Independent copyright experts, however, find that argument unconvincing. Not only have recording artists traditionally paid for the making of their records themselves, with advances from the record companies that are then charged against royalties, they are also exempted from both the obligations and benefits an employee typically expects.

I’ve always found the argument that downloading music rather purchasing it is a form of sticking it to the man kind of specious. And I wonder how long it’ll last as artists start getting the rights to their own work back. It’ll also be interesting to see if this makes the recording industry even more conservative, willing to fund only acts that it thinks will pay off big for them for the years that they own that work, or if it’ll make them more willing to experiment on music that won’t be a death blow when it’s gone. I also don’t know if there are artists who would want to do this, but I’d be curious to see if any labels experimented with making artists actual employees, paying them salaries and benefits and taking care of their Social Security withholding, in exchange for full rights to their work. If you want to work in a genre that generates steady but not wild profits, that might actually be a good deal for some artists and some labels — I don’t think there will be a ton of folks who fall into that sweet spot, but there might be some.