Adam Serwer and Conor Friedersdorf talk about why Louis C.K. can get away with the kind of humor he often does:

I think Adam is right that C.K. can get away with things that, as Conor puts it, Rush Limbaugh would be pilloried for because people trust him and feel like they have a clear sense of his worldview. And that, of course, because of all the work C.K. put in before he had a critically raved-about television show to build up his credibility as a white guy who is sensitive and intelligent about race in a way that lets him say somewhat raw things. He wrote for Chris Rock’s show and wrote the scripts for Down to Earth and I Think I Love My Wife (the latter of which I think might have been a better-acted movie if C.K. had the lead role, but wouldn’t have been as significant without the reverse race-bending), and later wrote and directed Pootie Tang. The point, though, is that it takes years of work to build up the kind of trust and leeway that C.K. has, and it’s not something you can simply assert or claim.

I also hadn’t realized this until recently, but apparently C.K.’s father is Mexican, Spanish is his first language, and he retains his Mexican citizenship. I’d be curious to know what, if any, role that’s played in his interactions with non-white comedians. Obviously being African-American and having Mexican ancestry aren’t the same thing. But I find it intriguing that C.K. presents himself as a fairly straightforward white American when, in a substantive procedural way, he’s held on to some things that reaffirm a more complicated ethnic background and one that he could presumably try to lean on as an indicator of credibility but doesn’t.

OK, here it is. We’ll meet starting at 6:30 on Wednesday, Aug. 31 on the roof deck at Jack Rose (if there is rain or other nasty weather, we’ll meet downstairs in the bar). I’ll tweet out a description of what I’m wearing day of, since I don’t actually look a ton like my cartoon. And if anyone’s motivated enough or is willing to bring an iPad, we can can live up to our title and set up a Google Plus hangout. I’m looking forward to it!

When you’re building a new society from the muck and outside of established law, it turns out you don’t just need to make rules and appoint officials: you have to establish some norms as well. And it turns out in a world where women are a scarce commodity, where a Chinese settler plays a key role in a certain kind of trade, some of the rules are going to suspended, even as some characters cling to outmoded conceptions of honor.

In these couple of episodes my favorite interactions were those between respectable men and the whores who have caught their attention. Sol’s set apart from the rest of the camp by his Jewishness, though not necessarily in an aggressive way. “Centuries of fucking inbreeding attune him to the necessities of the times,” Al declares, embracing a positive stereotype to praise Sol and Seth. “You did a fucking good job here.” So perhaps that’s what draws him to Trixie, insisting in an earlier episode that she be allowed to visit the store whenever she pleases in the face of E.B. Farnum’s snobbery, and finally stating his intentions to Seth and then seeking her out. “I don’t want what I can’t have, Mr. Starr,” Trixie demurs, having recently experienced the stress of rising above what she believes is her station in helping Alma. “If I did come, I’d buy an ax, a hammer, and a saw.” But Sol isn’t letting her go that easy. “All fully stocked,” he promises her, ceding the conversation but not the campaign. “And we never ask the purpose of a customer’s purchase.”
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As preparation for the new television season (in particular, Once Upon A Time), I recently read the first two story arc of Bill Willingham’s Fables, “Legends in Exile” and “Animal Farm.” Willingham’s story of fairy-tale characters living their eternal lives in the modern world an interesting example of at least somewhat conservative storytelling, but it’s not as compelling a thought experiment as it could be, mostly because of what feel like weaknesses in the world-building.

The initial stories give us a sense of how at least two Fables interact with the modern world, Prince Charming by conning the women he lives off of, Rose Red by living the life of an indolent, spoiled party girl. The assumption seems to be that the rest of the world would be considerably hostile to the Fables, and that mainstreaming might be difficult, but we don’t actually see a lot of evidence of this. I don’t know if it would be more conservative to argue that society wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) be accepting of differences, especially when they’re miraculous, or if it would be rebuttal to liberalism to argue that the Fables could successfully be assimilated, but Willingham and his collaborators don’t really seem to be making that case in either direction. Either that, or the Fables are in some way going Galt from the Mundane world, but if that’s Willingham’s argument, it’s nigh-invisible.

And that’s a problem for some later stories. In “Animal Farm,” if the Mundanes had been established as an active threat to Fabletown as a whole, Snow White and her allies in Fabletown administration would have a much stronger case for cracking down not just on the residents of the Farm, and keeping tight control over the denizens of Fabletown in New York City. And as a result, the satire of wannabe revolutionaries, like Goldilocks, who is sleeping with Little Bear essentially to prove that she’s a rebel, would be a lot funnier if their cause was proved ridiculous and self-destructive in advance. Instead, the book sort of seems like it’s condescending to and about characters with legitimate grievances, and setting the supposed heroes up to be a bit brittle, which is a bit odd given how flexible they must have to had to be to survive for so long. “We haven’t yet been corrupted by the Mundys’ modern social philosophy concerning such things,” as Snow White declares after the executions that end the rebellion at the Farm. “The responsibility lies entirely with the perpetrators and not their victims.” But if you’re going to survive for millenia, and after a devastating war, the things you carry forward and the things you leave behind matter.

The Decemberists have achieved geekvana with their latest video, a recreation of a scene from Infinite Jest:

It’s odd to see Colin Meloy and company old enough to credibly be the middle-aged parents on the sidelines at a school event, when just five years ago the members of the band were young enough to play high school kids at the bleeding edge of that range where people in their 20s are allowed to play high school students in exchange for our willingness to pretend it’s not ridiculous. I think I might like the video for “Sixteen Military Wives” a bit more, if only because I’m susceptible to Rushmore allusions, and because there’s something useful in the pointedness of the blame the song assigns, even if it is a little heavy-handed:

Certainly, its humor is more direct that the Vogue-photoshoot mock-battle the band staged earlier in the year with the video for “This Is Why We Fight,” which, unusually for the Decemberists, cut away from the bloodshed:

But then, the band’s always been more direct about intimate violence than geopolitical conflict:

The bridge is yours.

-Are cloud music lockers in legal trouble?

-Unless there are huge hidden costs or they have major cash flow issues, it is odd that the networks that created Hulu are selling it.

-Surely there are more ways to illustrate that humanity has warring impulses.

-Simulating Iraq.

-Might be sacrilege to the memory of Clarence Clemons, but I would LOVE to see Lisa sit in for him on “Edge of Glory” when Lady Gaga visits Springfield.

A bit late of me, I know, but I finally saw Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which I quite liked despite the fact that there really isn’t a distinguished human performance in the movie with the possible exception of John Lithgow, who isn’t required to do much but does it handily. Rather, it struck me both as a smart and ultimately circumvented fantasy of cures for the memory diseases that are going to be an increasing part of our society and concurrently our popular culture, and of a piece with a larger trend these past few months.

It doesn’t feel accidental to me that the two best (which is not to say highest-earning) blockbusters of the summer trace the rising militancy of their main characters, Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and Magneto in X-Men: First Class. While the curtain falls on young Magneto as Sebastian Shaw begins his awful work on his newly-acquired test subject and rises again on a fully radicalized young man, exploring a moment when he might have rejected that radicalism and decides against it, we witness the full range of degradations Caesar is subject to.

The movie starts with James Franco’s scientist character, Will, assuming after some initial hesitation that because he’s juiced Caesar’s intelligence, he’ll be able to integrate Caesar into his life. That works as long as Caesar’s life is placid, and as long as Will doesn’t have to work too hard or give too much up in order to keep the third member of his family with him. The moment Caesar sees Will snuggling up to cutie veterinarian Caroline (an entirely indistinct Frieda Pinto), he — and we — knows that Will’s loyalty will weaken now that he’s been presented with an easier companion. When Caesar defends Will’s father, in the throes of an Alzheimer’s-induced confusion, in Will’s absence, Will acquiesces to the animal control bureaucracy of the state of California, and lets Caesar be locked up in an ape refuge that is in reality the sadistic playground for torturers like Tom Felton and Brian Cox, soft-shoeing through old routines. (In this respect, and when law enforcement attacks the apes, government’s the enemy, though given how absurdly lax the protocols are at the lab where Will works, you’ve got to think that some bureaucracy, governmental or otherwise, could have saved us a whole mess of trouble.) And Will doesn’t try very hard to get Caesar back, leaving him alone in an environment he’s totally unprepared for.
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I don’t normally engage with nonsense, but Tevi Troy’s insistence that the president’s reading list “constitute the oddest assortment of presidential reading material ever disclosed” because “the near-absence of nonfiction sends the wrong message for any president, because it sets him up for the charge that he is out of touch with reality,” merits singling out for how uniquely grasping and bizarre it is, and how simultaneously snobbish and anti-intellectual. Troy writes:

Sure enough, the list has already prompted this accusation. As Reuters described his selections, “President Barack Obama, perhaps seeking a break from harsh reality after a tough summer battling the economy and Republicans in Congress, has picked a summer reading list that is long on fiction.”

Beyond the issue of fiction vs. nonfiction, there is also the question of genre. The Bayou Trilogy has received excellent reviews, but it is a mystery series. While there is nothing wrong with that per se, not every presidential reading selection is worth revealing to the public. Bill Clinton, for example, used to love mysteries, but he did not advertise the titles of what he once called “my little cheap thrills outlet.” Room is another well-received novel, but it is about a mother and child trapped in an 11-by-11-foot room. This claustrophobic adventure does not strike me as the right choice for someone trying to escape the perception that he is trapped in a White House bubble.

The Grossman novel, which is about an Israeli woman who hikes to avoid hearing bad news about her soldier son, could create complications for Obama on the Israel front. Grossman is a well-known critic of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians, so reading this novel will likely not assuage those concerned about Obama’s views on the Middle East.

First, using that Reuters quotation to argue that there’s some sort of consensus that the president’s reading means he’s out of touch is just a laughable reach. President Obama, and any person who holds that office, consumes vastly more non-fictional material than the average American, and doesn’t even have the benefit of reading it in engagingly-written histories or argumentative volumes. The idea that a novel or two, in the midst of all the briefings and reports, might somehow dilute his concentration is a direct heir to the idea that novels will rot delicate ladies’ brains, and deserves to be taken precisely as seriously.

Second, hating on mysteries? Mysteries and romances are some of the best-selling genres in the United States, and I was reading an academic paper yesterday that attributes the rise of chick lit aimed at African-American and Latino readers for rising reading rates among women in those demographics. It’s not remotely shameful to read in either genre (I have a shelf of Julia Quinn’s romance novels in my apartment, thank you very much), but it is pretty embarrassing to be such a horrible snob that you get in a snit when someone else reads in those genres.

Finally, it’s pretty depressing that Troy can look at a reading list that includes novels about the victims of horrible crimes, the parents of war victims, and people who give their lives to healing others, all experiences that the President hasn’t had directly but that have implications for his job, and see only Troy’s own paranoia about Obama’s mindset. People need to read fiction precisely as a tool to expand their moral imaginations, certainly a quality I think most of us would hope for in presidents, or columnists.

There are times when I’m profoundly relieved that my personal Roman Polanski boycott means I don’t have to watch something:

I didn’t actually see God of Carnage onstage, where it strikes me that its manneredness might have seemed a bit less cloying — I tend to like dialogue that feels a bit bigger than life, but I think it does work a bit better in a setting that’s foreign, whether like Deadwood because it’s a time that’s lost to us, or Angels in America, because the divine is invading New York. And perhaps I will think differently if and when I have children, but I’m just not sure that the dark heart of humanity truly lies in a well-appointed living room in Brooklyn.