As a public art nerd and massive Parks and Recreation fan, the good people at NBC have made my week and published Leslie Knope’s guide to the murals of Pioneer Hall. As an advocate for complete and proper crediting, though, I’m disappointed that Ms. Knope’s guide doesn’t provide any information on the artist behind these fine works, only on the events they represent. Who is this genius of Pawnee? Pretty much the only context we do get is that the painter behind one of the murals isn’t Jewish. And not that I fetishize authorial intent or anything, but I would like to have some sense of the artist’s vision, and the role of state sponsorship in shaping the finished product.

Seriously, though, I love this sort of transmedia worldbuilding. I’ve always thought that the secret to Bravo’s success was the fact that they recognize that folks want to live in the world of their favorite pop culture, and so they built shows where, if you had enough money, you could hire the stars to flip your house, cook your food, cut your hair, style you for an event, find you a spouse, or sell you art. You can’t really do that with Pawnee or Greendale, but you can create a temporary illusion to that effect. That’s a real strength of NBC shows. And I hope whatever direction Bob Greenblatt takes the network in, he appreciates that level of attachment.

I’m sorry I missed Occupy Broadway, which sounds like a joyful, entertaining evening of live street theater. And of course I agree with Benjamin Shepherd, who told Wired that “Social movements are about imaging a more just, democratic, joyous set of social relations and I think that begins with art. We’re using public space to create a more colorful image of what our streets could look like through open-access performance.” But I’ll admit I’m a bit more excited about the long-range planning going on in the Occupy Comics movement, which has a three-stage plan for 2012, starting with digital comics, moving to a limited-edition paper run, and culminating in a hardcover edition.

I’m all for temporary, innovative, moving art that transforms public spaces in the same way I’m all for temporary, galvanizing public protest. But if that’s all we get out of Occupy Wall Street or the various Occupy Art efforts, I’d be disappointed. The arc of culture is long and broad, and bending even some substantial portion of it towards justice is going to be a long project. The goal shouldn’t be just to crash Broadwalk theater sidewalks, but to see shows make it all the way through the process and on to the stages inside. A year-long publishing plan for some alternative comics is great — and getting those themes fully integrated into mainstream comics narratives should be the actual standard we’re setting. Occupying everywhere is one thing. Achieving enough change so that we don’t have to think of ourselves as occupiers is where we should actually want to end up.

Always-wise commenter Anthony Damiani asks a fair question about the challenges of building female comics readers:

But the counterpoint is that it’s not like they haven’t tried, a number of times. A book like She-Hulk (in its Superhuman Law incarnation) was a good book that should have attracted a female readership. Marvel Divas and Models Inc weren’t good books, but they were clear efforts. Ms. Mavel? Ghost Rider? Alias? Marvel’s solo books with female leads have had a hard time selling for some time now– and it’s not all because they’re vapid cheesecake male-oriented fantasies.

I think part of this is an equilibrium issue; the “comic-book-shop-as-smelly-boys’-club” effect makes it hostile terrain for books that would otherwise be appealing to a female audience. Which, in turn, leads to Brevoort’s attitude: a sort of despair that what they feel is socially responsible to produce is directly at odds with what they’re actually able to sell.

I agree that it’s true that the comics industry has produced some quite fine comics about female characters. Dan Slott’s Superhuman Law arc on She-Hulk is one of my all-time favorite comics and one of my all-time favorite procedural stories, and it’s tragic that She-Hulk has sort of slipped under the waters, that she’s not even on the list for a second-tier movie in Marvel’s slate.

But I don’t think that’s actually sufficient. It’s not as if women have some sort of mysterious homing pigeon hormones that allow us to swarm the best in lady culture when it’s published even if no one lets us know about it. I’d be genuinely curious to know if Marvel and DC have done substantial advertising campaigns in women’s magazines, or on female-oriented television shows when they’re rolling out new storylines or new artists on comics with female characters? Or if they’ve pitched their comics characters as cover girls or interview subjects a la Marge Simpson’s Playboy spread? Just for fun, I checked the Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire archives for references to She-Hulk, Ms. Marvel, the Scarlet Witch, Catwoman, Wonder Woman. Only the last produced any results actually related to comics or related products: in a guide to famous breasts in Marie Claire that misstates Wonder Woman’s history. If any other industry was making a push to get a product to its core audience and was failing that miserably in reaching them, they would fire their PR people and their marketing department. Maybe someone can offer information I don’t have here, and if so, I’d be curious to hear it.

You can’t expect women to go into comic book stores if they have no idea that anything’s there for them. You can’t expect them to swing by comics and graphic novels sections in physical or online bookstores if they have no conception that there are characters they should get excited about. If you really want a female audience, go after it.

We’ve had quite a few conversations here about copyright, innovation, piracy, customer service, residuals, and international law. And so I’m pretty excited to announce that I’ll get to take some of these questions straight to the source next Tuesday at 10 a.m., when the Center for American Progress hosts a conversation with Motion Picture Association of America Chairman and CEO and former Sen. Chris Dodd. I get to ask Dodd a first round of questions and then we’ll open up the floor, so if you have thoughts, please email or leave comments, and if you’ve got questions you want to pose in person, I hope you’ll come (an RSVP is mandatory for this one). I’ll look forward to seeing you there, and I’ll try to make sure we can post video after.

I’m not particularly impressed by two parts of IMDb’s defense against an age-discrimination lawsuit filed against it by an actress who claimed that the website harmed her career by publishing her true age. It seems disingenuous to claim that IMDb has no role in Hollywood, considering that its IMDbPro databases are valuable enough to warrant a subscription business. And I’m not sure I see calling the plaintiff oversensitive is a winning strategy. But I think there’s almost something sweet about the second point in their defense, that the public would champion an actress who suffers age discrimination. Via The Hollywood Reporter, IMDb wrote:

To be clear, Defendants have never retaliated against Plaintiff (or anyone else) for complaining regarding its practices. And regardless of this Court’s ruling on its motion, Defendants do not intend to retaliate against Plaintiff. Requiring Plaintiff to identify herself to the public is not going to change that. Indeed, if there were risk of retaliation, that risk is mitigated by the public and judicial scrutiny placed on Defendants through this action.

Man, I would love to believe that this were true. The cultural world would be a better and more interesting place if we told more stories about the lives of people whose children are almost or already out of the house, and who weren’t also the evil heads of corporations, heads of state, grizzled dispensers of advice who only appear in single scenes, or Meryl Streep. Unfortunately, I don’t see a lot of consistent clamor in that area. And I kind of think that even if someone was the blatant victim of age discrimination, we’d hear a lot more dismissals about how older people can’t take on certain roles, or how a market doesn’t exist for older people (despite how old much of television viewership skews) in Hollywood than we’d hear statements of support. I really hope to someday live in a world where complaints about discrimination are generally unfounded. But I don’t really expect we’ll ever get there. And we’re certainly not there yet.

The bridge is yours.

-Gorgeous sculptures. I’ve seen one of these in Washington, but if you can catch them elsewhere, you totally should.

-I don’t want Ryan Seacrest to replace Matt Lauer if only because I don’t think Seacrest would be as funny if he cameoed on 30 Rock.

-The Gregory Brothers are coming to Comedy Central.

-David Cronenberg’s son is making a good attempt to out-creep his father.

-Jason Segel. Emily Blunt. Alison Brie. Need I say more?

Hire Greenzo. Dude comes with some extreme environmental baggage, but after he quit NBC, he probably comes cheap. And he’s got conservative bona fides from working for the Lazio campaign:

Plus, then you don’t end up wearing the same jacket as a gay cinematic icon in an ad where you say incredibly regressive things about gay people

If you’re in New York on Dec. 17 and 18, and if you like either my writing on pop culture and economic inequality and the recession, or you like progressivism and online organizing, you should come to Netroots New York. I’ll be speaking at lunch on Dec. 17, and the list of speakers and panels is impressive and getting bigger every day. For those of you who haven’t been, I found my trip to Netroots in Minnesota this summer to be really useful spur to my thinking, both politically and artistically: the posts I’ve written about Muslim archetypes in popular culture and Joe Arpaio as performance artist came out of sessions I attended there. And Netroots New York has a good deal on now: if you pay the full registration fee of $100, someone else can register with you for $25.

And since I’m going to be in town, how about a New York commenter meetup? If you actually go to the conference, I will buy you a drink. If you don’t, you should come out anyway. Let’s say 7:30 on Saturday, Dec. 17, with a tentative location of Union Square. If someone has bar recommendations in the area, holler. Otherwise, I’ll pick something. And let me know in comments if you think you’ll be there.

After a week when I’ve been feeling kind of cranky about pop culture, it was nifty to hear that it turns out that the role of Spock seems to have been written as gender-neutral — and that Nichelle Nichols, who was eventually cast as Uhura, read for the role. I’m not sure why this isn’t default practice more often. There are a lot of characters in a lot of projects that don’t inherently need to be male or female, and that very much includes action heroes in an era of high-powered weaponry. You don’t need to be able to overpower someone with six inches and 50 pounds on you as long as you have enough ammunition. Maybe that’s more of a comment on the generalized lack of specificity in entertainment writing more generally. But it does mean there are opportunities to be taken advantage of. If you’re writing a show where the characters’ backstory can be filled in over time, it doesn’t have to be a weakness. And while writing parts to be race or gender-neutral may mean some more work for casting directors, it doesn’t seem like it should be overwhelmingly onerous burden, given the potential creative benefits.