Jonathan Franzen has been in the news lately for saying two things. First, he told attendees at the Hay Festival that e-readers are a threat to our society:

Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough…a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience…Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change…Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don’t have a crystal ball. But I do fear that it’s going to be very hard to make the world work if there’s no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government.

Then, in the same speech, he apparently voiced some skepticism about whether President Obama should be spending his time reading: “One of the reasons I love Barack Obama as much as I do is that we finally have a real reader in the White House. It’s absolutely amazing. There’s one of us running the U.S. [Although] when I heard he was reading Freedom I thought, ‘Why are you reading a novel? There are important things to be doing!”

Now, I’m obviously a big advocate of having a reader in the White House, both because I think consuming smart culture, whether it’s Freedom or Homeland can provide perspective on both issues and the national mindset, and because I think even presidents need a break. I’ve never particularly understood people who object to presidential leisure, within reasonable limits, of course. The presidency is an incredibly difficult job, probably too large for one person. But if we’re going to have one person do it, that person needs to be saved from burnout and insanity as best as possible, a process that means both vacations and reading things that are not giant briefings with check boxes attached.

On the larger issue of e-readers, I’m not sure I see Franzen’s point. Most e-readers don’t contain the option to alter the words of the text itself, only to highlight, add bookmarks, and marginalia and notes. Having a print copy of a book doesn’t guarantee that it’ll be treated with reverence, as any college student or deeply engaged reader’s marked-up texts can attest. The move from cotton paper to pulp-based paper actually means that our books are less permanent and lasting edifices than they used to be. Digital copies may last longer, and in more pristine condition, than our paperbacks of today do. That doesn’t mean that books can’t be fetish objects, or artwork, of course. But digital can offer its own interactivity, picture quality, etc., and so if you’re just critiquing the form in terms of its permanence, I think Franzen is barking up the wrong tree. The real question should be whether any innovation in the form brings in more readers and gets them to read more books. It’s still early, but research suggests that people who own e-readers are upping their book consumption. From both an economic and an intellectual perspective, that should make Franzen pretty happy.

By Tara McGuinness

My colleague Alyssa has written about Bruce Springsteen’s new song “We Take Care of Our Own.” As usual, the Boss’ latest is a perfect and poetic anthem for a divided national conversation dominated by the question of whether our country and economy will work for most Americans or just the wealthy few—the 99. His answer? “We take care of our own… we take care of our own, wherever this flag is flown.”

Judging by this weekend’s sale of concert tickets for Springsteen’s April 1 show, it is clear that while the Boss reminds us we need a country that works for all Americans, Ticketmaster, his ticket provider, continues to take care of people who can afford $600 tickets on eBay.

Ordinary fans who got up at 10AM on Saturday morning when tickets went on sale were shut out, receiving notifications that tickets were unavailable just three minutes after the sale started. A pair of floor tickets for that show were listed for $624 even before tickets went on sale, and by Monday morning, there were more than 80 eBay listings for Springsteen at the Verizon Center, all costing hundreds of dollars. Some listed for more than a thousand dollars.

Springsteen, whose music champions the downtrodden and working man, had a similar problem in 2009, where Ticketmaste redirected some prospective customers to its own premium resale page, TicketsNow. After some people unwittingly bought tickets at multiples of face value, Ticketmaster apologized and said they would never do it again.

New York Senator Chuck Schumer even called for an investigation at a time Ticketmaster was seeking approval of its merger with Live Nation, which was completed in Jan. 2010. Springsteen spoke out against the merger, though it didn’t stop the U.S. from approving it. The new parent company—The Live Nation and Ticketmaster Entertainment is $2.5 billion company—that appears to be making excellent profits.

Unfortunately the last dust up didn’t prevent the Boss from using Ticketmaster for his next tour. Other artists, like Paul Simon, have combated scalpers with assorted programs. For a show at Washington’s 9:30 Club last year, all tickets were delivered through Will Call, and the purchaser could only pick up tickets on the way into the show, with no time to resell. Springsteen is perhaps the most powerful entertainment advocate for the American working class, so perhaps that is why we hold the Boss to a higher standard than anyone else. The $600 ticket is just another indicator of the growing disparity between the super rich and everyone else in the United States today, especially because in between the time Greetings from Asbury Park (1973) was released to the time Magic (2007) came out, there was a 10 point drop in average worker wages and a 219 percent increase in corporate profits.

No one captures the spirit of hard working Americans like Bruce Springsteen. But in sticking with Ticketmaster, the Boss’s tours are setup for the bosses—not necessarily everyone else.

Sundance is an overwhelming event, and I heard from some veterans of the festival that this was a somewhat difficult year to encapsulate, despite Robert Redford’s call to watch serious movies for serious times. But most of the best movies I saw at Sundance had a certain joy to them, even when discussing difficult ideas or events, and the very best had a marvelous sense of humor. I haven’t published full reviews of all of these movies yet, though I’ll catch up in coming days, so bookmark this page if you want a guide to the best independent movies that will be coming to theaters this year.

DOCUMENTARIES

Under African Skies: It says a lot about how wonderful I thought the music-making part of this story about Paul Simon’s Graceland, and his return to South Africa decades later, that I’m willing to forgive its less-than-stellar work on the cultural boycott of South Africa. It’s a debate about the responsibility artists owe politics that’s too heavily weighted in one direction. But the video footage of the recording sessions is amazing, as are the interviews with South African musicians about everything from what it was like to have this strange Paul Simon dude show up and want to work with them to what it was like to be able to go to Central Park without a pass.

The Invisible War: There’s nothing particularly stylistically innovative about Kirby Dick’s documentary about the epidemic of rape in the U.S. military. But the movie falls with the force of a sledgehammer, exposing as ineffective and dishonest the brass in the armed forces responsible for keeping women and men safe, and making it clear that an epidemic of sexual assault is hurting both men and women, and driving out of the armed forces exactly the people the Pentagon should most want to keep there.

The Atomic States of America: Based on Kelly McMaster’s memoir of growing up in a town on Long Island polluted by atomic runoff, the movie is the story of an agency captured by powerful interests and backed up by powerful presumptions of authority, and the ordinary citizens who have fought back against the industry they believe is poisoning their communities. I’d have been curious to hear more about how citizens in other countries that are more dependent on atomic energy than we are, but it’s amazing looking into our past romance of the peaceful atom—and thinking about what it means for our uncertain energy future.

Love Free or Die: Bishop Gene Robinson’s story has been told before, and the first openly gay Anglican bishop is hardly a retiring figure. But Macky Alston’s wonderful documentary isn’t just about him. It’s about the difficult process of organizing within the Anglican church, which shut Robinson out of the Lambeth Conference, to make it a more welcoming and affirming institution for the gay people who have kept faith with it. And the movie argues that a gay rights movement without the faith community is leaving power and influence on the table, and risks making gay people choose between love and faith.

The Queen of Versailles: Tons of ink and miles of film have been devoted to chronicling American excess in a recession age. But it’s hard to imagine that anything will do better than this story about David and Jackie Siegel, who built an empire selling time-shares to people who couldn’t afford them and then pushed themselves to the brink of financial ruin by building what would have been the largest house in America. Whether it’s expertly breaking down the housing crisis’ role in the crash or chronicling the horrifying wastefulness of the Siegel’s consumer spending, The Queen of Versailles is funny, biting, and utterly American.

FICTION
Read more

This post contains spoilers through the January 30 episode of Alcatraz.

By David Liss

Alcatraz, I’ve come to realize, would be a much better show if it were about strange goings-on in the prison in the 1960s. The time-traveling inmates on their psychopathic 21st century crime sprees remain the least interesting part of the show, but last night’s episode demonstrated how transcendently weird and wonderful this series can be when it is allowed to linger on its core strength: Alcatraz of the past.

This week’s time-hopping prisoner is Cal Sweeney, a bank robber who only targets safety deposit boxes – ostensibly because that keeps the robbery being classified as a federal crime (though he ends up in federal prison anyhow, doesn’t he?), but we learn that there is a deeper psychological component involved. In the modern era, Sweeney’s m.o. is to romance a bank teller and gets her to give him unmonitored access to the safety deposit boxes (though, at least in my bank, it’s not the tellers who do that). Then he jabs a needle in her neck, robs the boxes, and tracks down the owners of the stolen objects, whom he tortures and kills. Neat.

Back in the 1960s, Sweeney has a contraband operation going on through the prison laundry room. It’s all going swimmingly until crooked deputy warden Tiller tosses Sweeney’s cell. A precious object goes missing, and when Tiller demands a cut of the contraband business, Sweeney says no way until his beloved box is returned. It’s Harlan, laundry room protégé and next-cell-neighbor, who comes up with the solution. Infiltrate Tiller’s birthday party, held at the warden’s residence, and get a word alone with the deputy warden.

The two narratives proceed much as they have in previous weeks, but never before has the magnetic pull of the flashbacks so effectively dwarfed the contemporary “main” story. Madsen and Soto have come to feel totally forgettable despite their being the stars of the show. They’re there to follow around the bad guy and collect clues so we understand him better. Along the way, we come to care about and be interested in, if not like, Sweeney. We still don’t give a crap about the protagonists despite half-hearted efforts to give them character by showing Madsen loving dim sum or having Soto talk about his (absurd) journal article which used Gotham City crime figures as a statistical model.
Read more

Justin Long is working on ensuring his long-term employability in case Mitt Romney becomes our next president by proving he can nail a Mitt Romney impersonation:

And this is a dandy summary of Bain Capital: “We buy up struggling companies, and we streamline them. We make them better, smarter, more efficient. Mostly by firing people.” To my mind, the idea that Romney is enthusiastic about firing people, combined with the phoniness of the “my friends” verbal tic, is probably the best attack on him. There’s nothing worse than someone who thinks he’s connecting with folks but has no idea that he’s expressing ideas or philosophies that are actually offensive or reveal him to be out of touch.

In other words, President Obama should desperately hope that America decides that Mitt Romney is Michael Scott but with more sexual success and better suits. It’s one thing to watch someone desperately try to connect with the people he’s got working for him. It’s quite another to work for that person, or to have your country lead by him. I hope this does become a regular feature. Impressions helped define Sarah Palin. And the longer the Republican primary continues, the longer comedians will have to try out and perfect their material for fall, no matter who the eventual Republican nominee is.

The bridge is yours.

-It’d be nice if people were willing to donate more than $1 million to serious political causes, as well as satire.

-How Angry Birds learned from the music industry’s response to piracy.

-The proposition that video games make the kiddies crazy is not worth fabricating quotes to prove.

-Could K-Pop finally conquer America?

-Mindy Kaling’s OB/GYN show got picked up by Fox, in the second-best pop culture news of the week.

It seems that Cynthia Nixon has found a way to follow up on last week’s flub with a statement that clarifies sexual orientation is not a choice without discounting choices she has made in her life. She told the Advocate today:

My recent comments in The New York Times were about me and my personal story of being gay. I believe we all have different ways we came to the gay community and we can’t and shouldn’t be pigeon-holed into one cultural narrative which can be uninclusive and disempowering. However, to the extent that anyone wishes to interpret my words in a strictly legal context I would like to clarify:

While I don’t often use the word, the technically precise term for my orientation is bisexual. I believe bisexuality is not a choice, it is a fact. What I have ‘chosen’ is to be in a gay relationship.

As I said in the Times and will say again here, I do, however, believe that most members of our community — as well as the majority of heterosexuals — cannot and do not choose the gender of the persons with whom they seek to have intimate relationships because, unlike me, they are only attracted to one sex.

Our community is not a monolith, thank goodness, any more than America itself is. I look forward to and will continue to work toward the day when America recognizes all of us as full and equal citizens.

As I suspected last week, she distinguishes between sexual orientation and sexual identity. For Nixon, it makes more sense to identify with the population of people with whom she is more likely to pursue relationships than the broader pool of people she might be attracted to, which seems perfectly reasonable. Unfortunately, her statement does not address the biphobia inherent in both her own identity choices as well as in the backlash she has faced over the past week. By conforming her identity to the gay-straight binary, she is reinforcing the very monolith it seems she wishes to challenge.

Nevertheless, Nixon’s point supports the ideal of a world where everybody can live their lives how they will without having to justify their identities, and for that, she should be applauded.

Well, this looks dandy, doesn’t it?

I think it’s very smart for the trailer — and perhaps the show — to play up Melisandre’s role, and the role of religion in general, in Westeros. Over the course of the novels, one of the things I’ve come to find most fascinating in them is the duel between the rationality of realpolitik and the rationality of religion. There are a lot of purely rational or strategic actors, both on the state and individual level, in George R.R. Martin’s novels. Littlefinger is probably the most prominent example of that phenomenon: he’s cold, calculating, not particularly attuned towards conventional morality (including killing his wife or making sexual advances on his teenaged ward who happens to be the daughter of the only woman he’s ever loved) if he can find a way to turn events to his advantage. Illyrio Mopatis is motivated less by a desire for power than for profit, to the extent that he’s willing to see an entire continent destabilized to fulfill his aims. Someone like Ayra Stark, who has been essentially abandoned by the Gods, has made vengeance her religion and is extremely tough and strategic in pursuing that goal.

Then, there are the mystics. Part of what makes Stannis Baratheon unpredictable — and thus makes him more powerful — is the fact that he makes decisions that aren’t purely governed by rational strategic calculations. Melisandre’s advice makes him think more than some of his competitors about how the common people of Westeros understand leadership and moral authority, and to take actions like fortifying the wall or going after Ramsay Bolton. The neglect of the wall and the continued empowerment of a psychopath are both stains on Westeros that have major ramifications for both the stability of the realm and the integrity of law in the nation. By trying to address both of those problems, Stannis puts himself and his forces at risk, but he has an enormous amont to gain both strategically and morally from taking on tasks that his rivals ignore. Similarly, the High Septon acts as a wild card, surprising Cersei by reasserting the importance of moral purity and using his power to enforce norms in a way that affects her standing as a rational leader.

In fact, the whole series is really about what happens when you try to assert purely rational governance in a world where fairy tales and Gods reach out into the world and muck up your affairs. It’s one thing to play the Game of Thrones when the rules are stable and the motivations of the actors you’re dealing with are predictable. It’s quite another when dead men walk, dragons return from extinction, and even humans are governed by things other than pure self-interest.

One of the most depressing trends for me at Sundance was something that’s been building for a while: the fact that the talented actors who made The Wire so great can’t seem to get out of Baltimore.

First, there’s Isaiah Whitlock, Jr., who will be forever defined by state Sen. Clay Davis’ favorite obscenity:

He’s already had to imitate Omar in Cedar Rapids (one of the better, and more overlooked, small comedies of the last year):

And in Red Hook Summer, Whitlock gets forced to pretend to be Davis again in the movie’s most forced, artificial moment, one that interrupts a tremendously powerful plot line. It’s unfortunate that people want so much to be associated with The Wire or to make in-jokes about the show that they’re willing to sacrifice their own world-building and dramatic continuity to do it.

It’s less irritating, but still depressing, to see the actors who so thoroughly inhabited roles on The Wire getting stuck in those kinds of roles again. That kind of repetition is the hallmark of LUV, the depressing-on-many-levels movie about Vincent (Common), a man trying to start a small business after his release from prison, who gets pulled back into his old life as a killer for drug dealers, and pulls his nephew in along with him. The movie’s riddled with implausibilities and disturbing ideas, including the idea that an elementary-school kid would easily and automatically be comfortable wielding a gun, negotiating with high-level drug dealers, and running away to North Carolina. But it’s perhaps most disturbing for a movie that wants to transcend our stereotypes about black men using black actors in the same old roles over and over again.

First, there’s Michael K. Williams, who, after Omar’s death, has apparently been reincarnated in the person of a Baltimore homicide detective. Unfortunately, karma hasn’t seen fit to give him Jimmy McNulty’s panache or faculty with language. He spends a lot of time saying things like, “You’re young. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. You can still do something with your life.” Then, there’s Anwan Glover, who’s been downgraded from the glories of Slim Charles to playing a drug kingpin named Enoch who appears mostly to hang out menacingly in an abandoned warehouse, to be duped into believing that Vincent didn’t actually kill one of his relatives when of course he did, and to buy a large cache of drugs off of Vincent’s nephew, who is acting as the front for the deal. It’s a totally stereotypical, flimsy role, though Glover does a nice job with it.

It’s one thing to be defined in public memory by the best role you’ve ever played. It’s quite another to be forced by your industry to inhabit it over and over again. Killing a tough, transcendent role ought to be proof that you should be allowed to do a wide range of other things, not that the public will only buy black men as aggrieved or menacing.

What is it with Republican presidential candidates and campaign trail songs? Newt Gingrich has just been sued by Rude Music Inc. for using Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” in political events since 2009:

The company wants him to stop immediately and is asking a court to award the band damages. But it’s not necessarily clear that they’ll rule in his favor. As Slate explained in 2008, after the band Heart asked John McCain’s presidential campaign to stop using their song “Barracuda” to introduce Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin at rallies, if campaigns get licenses to perform songs from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, they’re probably in the clear. If you’ve got an ASCAP license, you don’t have to ask artists whose music is registered through the society for specific permission to play their songs. “Eye of the Tiger” is in the ASCAP database, so it’s probably a question of whether Gingrich’s campaign or the venues where the song has been played have they appropriate licenses.

That said, there’s something amusing about the regular kerfuffles between Republican candidates and recording artists. Ever since George Will and Michael Deaver tried to see if Bruce Springsteen would endorse Ronald Reagan for president, Republicans have run into trouble over the songs they’ve played on the campaign trail or the artists’ whose work they’ve tried to claim have supported their messaging. McCain didn’t just run into trouble with Heart during the 2008 campaign: Jackson Browne sued him for using part of “Running on Empty” in a campaign ad (ASCAP licenses don’t cover video productions, which must get separate permission). Tom Petty went after George W. Bush for using “Don’t Back Down” in 2004, and asked Michele Bachmann to stop using “American Girl” on the trail. Maybe it’s time for Republican candidates to start reaching out to artists before picking their soundtracks.

This post contains spoilers through the January 29 episode of House of Lies.

I thought it was smart of House of Lies to move beyond Marty a bit this week to start fleshing out the other characters. But the way it happened reaffirmed for me that the show should really be an hour rather than a half-hour, given how surprising some of the character reveals were, and how little we still know about Clyde and Doug other than a semi-generic bullying story.

First, take Jeannie. We’ve had essentially no sense of her personal life at all before it’s suddenly revealed that hey! she’s engaged!, her future mother-in-law is a drunk, and her fiance is a semi-conventional but very rich dude. It doesn’t strike me as particularly surprising that Jeannie is resisting introducing him to, as he puts it as they head off for their respective engagements, “these guys I share you with every week,” given that they’re jerks. But it does suggest that there’s a totally different Jeannie than the relatively restrained one we’re seeing as part of the team. The show’s version of introducing us to that side of her is to have Jeannie moon over a bad cafe musician in San Francisco all night, and then go to bed with him. It might be a meaningful sequence if we had any sense of Jeannie’s relationship to her boyfriend-now-future-husband and why she might be anxious about the engagement (given her behavior at the end of the episode, she appears to be hiding his very existence from Marty and company). I’m more inclined to believe Jeannie when she tells her hookup “You, this, tonight, and your penis, and your mediocre weed, they don’t have anything to do with my real life,” than I am to believe the musician who is psychoanalyzing her. But something’s up, and we don’t have the context to be able to think about it in a meaningful way*.

Speaking of context, I’m getting increasingly frustrated by the dynamic between Clyde and Doug. Honestly at this point, Clyde may be the character I least enjoy watching on television, and as y’all know, I watch a lot of television. The hookup points schtick is sort of gross on its own, and given that we’re getting the impression that’s what Clyde lives for, that it may be the sole substance of his personality other than humiliating his friends on airplanes and giving terrible advice about “being Clooney,” he’s not a person I want to spend any time with whatsoever.

Doug, on the other hand, has some interesting things going on. His over-identification with Harvard is understandably irritating to his coworkers, but it’s at least an indication of some deeper need. And I appreciated the way he clumsily tried to step up with Roscoe tonight, whether asking if he needed to be watched going to the bathroom, hitting up food trucks with him, or solving his “case.” “There was a kid who was handsome, not in the classic sense but smart, but handsome, and smart, genius-level, and there was this other kid who tortured him,” Doug tells Roscoe. “He really just tortured him. And the kid’s mom was like ‘Stop all the crying, doug.’ But then this kid realized that the other kids were just jealous. That’s all. Jealous of his awesome awesomeness. He went on to be super-awesome. And today that kid is Justin Bieber. True story.” It’s a nice little moment, and it made me want to get some more details about Doug’s backstory. He deserves more than tics and a Harvard-seal-embossed briefcase.

Then, there’s Marty, who’s stuck with the client from hell, abandoned by his father, who’s left him “off to speak to a bunch of swooning Jungian analysts in Taos,” and feeling angry at his unreachable ex, who is”dependable, that is, in her psychosis.” He does badly with Roscoe in San Francisco, pawning him off on the team and feeding him out of vending machines, and I wish the show hadn’t pulled a punch by letting him off the hook for it, and having Roscoe over his bully problem by the time Marty got around to paying his son a little attention. I’d honestly watch a family show about Marty, Jeremiah, and Roscoe with a dose of Roscoe’s mother on the side, and even though I know this show is not that, I can’t help but treasure the moments when we see glimmer of the real pain, and fear, and love they’re all experiencing together. There’s something genuinely tragic about Marty’s rant on the phone to Monica that “You know what he understands now? He understands that life is unsteady, and full of regret and recrimination. You have let our son down because you are not there.” But like so many other things in House of Lies, this would be better if Monica was an actual person, if Marty had to take real responsibility, if we could spend time with the story of his mother’s death instead of some fraud-committing former-hacker twerp.

By Kate Linnea Welsh

Last night in “Another Ham Sandwich,” the legal proceedings against Will that The Good Wife has been teasing for weeks finally got started, and the grand jury hearing – which almost resembled a bottle episode – provided a showcase for excellent work by many of the show’s skilled actors. First, a note on the title: in case you, like me, didn’t recognize it, it’s a reference to a comment supposedly made by a New York State judge about how a grand jury could be made to “indict a ham sandwich” if that’s what a prosecutor asked; Tom Wolfe made the phrase famous in The Bonfire of the Vanities.

As the grand jury hearing gets underway, Diane must tell the rest of the firm – but first acknowledges Alicia’s hitherto-unspoken involvement by taking her aside and telling her first. Two things of note here: Alicia is honestly shocked to learn of what’s really been going on, and Diane is unswervingly attesting to Will’s innocence as a matter of course. Is she really that sure of him, or is her reputation and livelihood so entwined with Will’s that she can’t let herself admit any doubt? Or, for Diane, is there any difference between the two? She also tells Alicia not to feel responsible, which of course ensures that Alicia will feel responsible. (Although really, this is Alicia. She’d feel responsible anyway.) Alicia immediately makes an appointment with Peter – supposedly to discuss his mother – and then finds Will and Elsbeth outside the grand jury room. The reason Will offers for not telling Alicia sooner isn’t about privacy or embarrassment or putting her in the middle, but rather about his own psychology of self-preservation: “This is legal. It’s not personal. If I told you it would become personal.” And Alicia wastes no time in allying herself with Will against Peter, going so far as to tell Elsbeth that she wants to use “what [she] know[s] about the State’s Attorney” to help. Her public decisiveness surprised me a little until I realized that, personal feelings aside, Will is in the right and Peter’s office is in the wrong, and black-and-white moral judgments tend to be Alicia’s fallback when she has to justify her decisions to others – or to herself.

Alicia and Peter do finally talk about the grand jury trial, but Peter insists “It has nothing to do with us.” “Peter, how can it not?” Alicia asks. “Because I won’t let it.” And here we have the trifecta, along with Diane’s unshakable belief in Will’s innocence and Will’s insistence that the investigation isn’t personal if he doesn’t tell Alicia. This show is full of people who believe they can create the world in their image if they say things forcefully enough, and their shifting alliances control which world exists at any given time. Those three, Eli and Alicia, even Elsbeth and Wendy – that’s how they operate. The exceptions here are Kalinda and Cary: their strength comes from observing rather than dictating reality, which in part explains why they can be so effective, why they always seem slightly out of place, and why they have such a unique rapport with each other. Alicia finally gets Peter to admit that “of course” the issue is that he thinks she’s sleeping with Will – and then she looks him in the eye and says she isn’t. Which is true, as far as it goes, but Peter knows something’s up and almost smiles as he marvels, “My God, you have changed. I used to be able to tell when you lied.” Alicia offers up a substantial amount of personal and political capital when she asks Peter to just stop the hearing, hilariously implying that he’s been corrupt forever, so why stop now? But Peter – running for governor, don’t forget – refuses to go back to his old ways on behalf of his romantic rival: “Will Gardner is not my family.” Fair enough, but his children are his family, and they’re likely to be hurt in this. And if Peter is thinking about his campaign, I’m not sure the benefit he gets from keeping his office clean outweighs the risk of public reaction to his wife carrying on an affair with someone convicted of judicial bribery.
Read more

This makes me exceedingly happy: CBS just bought a recession-themed sitcom pilot from Louis C.K. and Spike Feresten. Not a lot of details yet on anything other than the fact that that the show will apparently be about “young people who are trying to achieve their creative dreams.” But I’d follow C.K. into a burning building at this point if he promised me that content was inside it and I’d get to consume it before I succumbed to smoke inhalation.

I also think this is an interesting experiment in whether C.K.’s deeply compelling brand of honesty and moral comedy can find a mass audience, and whether he can do it without the explicitness that’s made Louie such a wonderful discussion of sex and gender from a man’s perspective. I hope the former will be true — I’d love to see a show that combines the sometimes-painful optimism of something like Parks and Recreation with the class consciousness of Raising Hope and the lived-in friendships of Happy Endings do well. On the second, while C.K. may (outside of race) get the most attention for his routines about sex and sexual humiliation, his up-front approach to things like buying a house, or having his daughters prefer their mother to him, or professional failure would translate extremely well to the networks without requiring him to compromise the material at all.

I’d also really like a show from him (or really, from anyone) to continue the trend that Southland started of having the characters talk like real people of those backgrounds and in those circumstances would, but bleeping them out. We’ve seen a bit of this on Parks and Recreation, where the generally clean-spoken characters occasionally lapse into real-world profanity, and on other shows, but I think it would be decent practice to do a bit more of it. Television doesn’t just capture characters in the least-stressful moments of their lives — quite the reverse. I can understand why we’ve got some limitations on speaking words aloud in prime time (even though I think its the job of parents to keep their kids away from content they find generally objectionable), but I think it would make sense to find a compromise that keeps the kiddies’ ears clean while trusting adults to know what’s really being said.

The idea of the apocalypse is so big, and so overwhelming that it’s hard to look at directly, even in art. We can have heroes who avert the end of the world, or who even if they can’t stop the devastation, survive to carry on humanity’s legacy, as in 2012 or Deep Impact. And we can have mad anti-heroes like the ones in Southland Tales, who see what the other people around them can’t, who make us feel smart and sympathetic for being perceptive enough to believe in them. But both of those scenarios don’t really get at the full horror of the apocalypse: in the former, the only people we’re invested in survive; in the latter, we get to walk away pleased with ourselves if sorry for the recently and cinematically departed. One of the many things that makes Beasts of the Southern Wild, the joyous and insanely original movie that was the best thing I saw at Sundance, so remarkable is that the main character, the 6-year-old girl through whose eyes we see the world and who we want badly to survive, may also be the person who’s brought about the end of all things.

Her name is Hushpuppy, and she lives with her father Wink in a region called the Bathtub, which we’re meant to understand lies outside the levees in Louisiana. Hushpuppy’s mother, a figure of legend who was so beautiful she caused water to boil when she walked into the room and gave miraculous birth to Hushpuppy after shooting a gator, is long-since vanished. Life in the Bathtub is wildly celebratory, even in the midst of what most viewers would probably define as extreme poverty (and which they may find disturbing when it’s recast as magical realism: there is nothing transcendent about poor children eating cat food, as Hushpuppy does in one sequence, though it’s made clear that moment is a low). There are no marble countertops or Wolf stoves in the Bathtub. But Hushpuppy is absolutely convinced that she’s not deprived. “Daddy says on the other side of the levee, on the dry side, they afraid of the water like a bunch of babies,” she tells us in her introduction not just to her neighborhood, but the code she and her neighbors live by. “The Bathtub has more holidays than the whole rest of the world…Daddy’s always saying that up in the dry world, they ain’t got none of what we got. They only have holidays once a year. They got fish stuck in wrappers and babies stuck in carriages…Me and my daddy, we stay right here…We’s who the earth is for.”

All of which makes it more disturbing when Hushpuppy comes to believe that she’s thrown the world violently off its axis. After a series of incidents involving a blowtorch, a football helmet, and Wink’s short-term disappearance, Hushpuppy, in a moment of acting her age, strikes her father. Even in her terror at the thought of being punished or abandoned by Wink, Hushpuppy is philosophical: “If Daddy kill me, I won’t be forgotten,” she insists. “I’m recording my story for the doctors and the scientists. In a million years, kids in school will know that there was a Hushpuppy and she lived with her Daddy in the bathtub.” So it makes sense that her reaction to hitting Wink happens on the same scale: when he falls, icebergs shear off the poles, long-frozen aurochs begin to float towards land and defrost, and a storm — presumably Katrina — soaks the Bathtub, leaving behind a landscape that’s drowned, and seemingly dying of a mysterious ailment. “Mama, I think I broke something,” Hushpuppy tells her missing parent.

What follows is both a rollicking adventure to the levees, the post-Katrina refugee centers, and back to the Bathtub — and a profound moral reflection on Hushpuppy’s responsibility for the calamity that’s fallen her community and her family in the form of Wink’s illness. Beasts of the Southern Wild may not explicitly be a movie about global warming, but there’s no mistaking the movie’s profound respect for interconnectedness, whether Wink’s teaching Hushpuppy to survive in the Bathtub without him, and perhaps without any community at all, or Hushpuppy’s reflecting “The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right.”

The movie also has a deep skepticism of government-run recovery efforts, which attempt to medicalize Wink and civilize Hushpuppy, rejecting them as another symptom of drylanders being out of sync with the states that are natural to them. That’s a somewhat radical proposition in a world where much of the debate has been whether the government response to Katrina was sufficient, not whether it was attuned to deep ecology. But there’s an extent to which that reaction is in keeping with the movie’s radical perspective on our relationship to the dreadful events we’re complicit in creating. We — and Hushpuppy — need time to face up to the terrors we’ve unleashed, and what we have to give up in order to banish them.

When she runs away from the Bathtub after her escape from civilization’s clutches, Hushpuppy tells us, “Everybody loses the thing that made them. That’s even how it’s supposed to be in nature. The brave men stay and watch it happen. They don’t run.” She ultimately faces up to her responsibilities. It remains to be seen if we can do the same.

The bridge is yours.

-Who needs product integration when you can set the show at the company?

-New Frank Ocean!

-Thinking about democracy and the internet beyond SOPA.

-Get your Avatar: The Legend of Korra fix with this clip.

-Apple is super-upset about the Times’ series on working conditions in their supply chain.

This post contains spoilers through the January 29 episode of Luck.

Because Luck is so big and sprawling, I’m going to focus these recaps on a different character every week. And because this is the premiere, and I’m new to horseracing, I want to start with Gus. I’ve always liked Dennis Farina, who I think can be a wonderfully sensitive and underrated actor, and I particularly appreciate him here as Gus, a role I found to be even more sensitive and nuanced on a second pass.

I think it makes sense to look for structure and the larger idea in David Milch’s work. We’re not far enough into Luck for me to see the show as clearly as I do the themes in Deadwood, of course, but Ace is clearly the power broker here, the man who thinks he can see the future and manipulate it, who can turn the recession and the financial desperation of the area into a revitalization and expansion of gaming at Santa Anita. That life is made possible in part by Gus, who handles the great details and the small of Ace’s post-prison existence, whether he’s adjusting Ace’s thermostat to “67 degrees. 67 degrees is perfect,” or acting as “the first front in history” so Ace can own a horse again. But does that make him a butler? A political factotum? Or the citizen to Ace’s great man?

Whatever it turns out to be, there’s a real tenderness in Gus’s service to Ace. “I got a pencil right here, and I got an old ad from Sears I can write on the back of,” he tells Ace when Ace asks him to get a tape recorder, eager to be helpful as quickly as possible even though he misses the larger picture in the process. We learn that he’s answered every letter Ace got while he was in prison, a touchingly old-fashioned gesture. And though he ventures into the world of horse racing out of duty (Gus has trees to tend), telling Ace nervously “What do I know? All four of his legs reached the ground,” Gus finds genuine joy there. The look on his face when Mon Gateau eats a carrot off his hand for the first time is utterly charming in a world that’s already revealed itself to be brutal in the break of a horse’s leg, desperate in the form of Jerry’s gambling.

“All I’m worried about is you relying on me when I’m out past my depth,” Gus confesses to Ace after the latter’s tiring first day out of jail. “You don’t know your own depths,” Ace tells him. It’s an interesting, paternalistic moment, and it remains to be seen what it means. Is this the powerful issuing a vote of confidence in the common people, or a powerful man seeing in his factotum a man who could rise above his station?

Back in December, Fox News Business host Eric Bolling led a discussion as to whether the new Muppets film (The Muppets) was “brainwashing” kids to hate Big Oil and capitalism in general. Days later, Bolling “apologized” to “Froggy,” a fake Kermit puppet he had with him, challenging the Muppets to debate his claims further. Kermit and Miss Piggy finally responded to Fox News this weekend at a press conference in the UK, highlighting that the film features a gas-guzzling Rolls Royce and questioning whether Fox News is even “news.” Watch it:

There’s been an awful lot of furor over Spike Lee’s declaration at Sundance, made with justifiable anger (and to my mind considerable accuracy), that Hollywood doesn’t know much about black people and doesn’t much care. The response to that statement, and a couple of other recent incidents, really seem to make clear how correct Lee is, and how loath the industry is to acknowledge his fundamental correctness.

Even before he got to Sundance, the Hollywood Reporter framed a Q&A with him by saying that Lee discussed “what he sees as a dearth of influence among African-Americans in Hollywood.” That kind of framing makes a fact seem like an opinion. During the Q&A, Lee asks his questioner multiple times to name an African-American in the entertainment industry who has the power to greenlight a movie, and the only person THR can come up with is an animation executive. All the studies of race and gender representation in the industry show that people of color are dramatically underrepresented in directing, writing, and producing positions. The only way that Spike Lee’s observations about race and Hollywood are an opinion rather than a fact is if the industry consensus is that it’s fine for people of color to be underrepresented in entertainment relative to their actual presence in the population. And if that’s the case, I’d really rather someone in Hollywood say that up front than listen to folks pretend that getting racial and gender diversity in positions of power is important to them.

And I think a lot of people in Hollywood want to believe they’re squarely committed to racial justice, or at least proportional racial representation. You see that in Charlize Theron trying to buck up Viola Davis after the latter says that not looking like Halle Berry makes it harder for black women to get good roles in mainstream entertainmentby telling Davis that “You have to stop saying that, because you’re hot as shit,” a statement that asks Davis to ignore the assumptions that have measurably governed her career and suggests that self-esteem can overcome institutionalized racism.

You see that in the affection for The Help, a perfect example of the kind of movie that Red Hook Summer co-writer James McBride is talking about when he says, “Nothing in this world happens unless white folks says it happens. And therein lies the problem of being a professional black storyteller– writer, musician, filmmaker. Being black is like serving as Hoke, the driver in ‘Driving Miss Daisy,’ except it’s a kind of TV series lasts the rest of your life: You get to drive the well-meaning boss to and fro, you love that boss, your lives are stitched together, but only when the boss decides your story intersects with his or her life is your story valid.”

But complaining about this, even for 30 seconds, which is about as long as what the press has called Lee’s Sundance “rant” or “tirade” lasted. As McBride put it in that same essay, “When George Lucas complained publicly about the fact that he had to finance his own film because Hollywood executives told him they didn’t know how to market a black film, no one called him a fanatic. But when Spike Lee says it, he’s a racist militant and a malcontent.” The easiest way to marginalize a truth that would require you to make genuine changes if you accepted it is to marginalize the person telling it, to make him out to be crazy, or extreme, or whiny, or demanding rather than justifiably angry. That’s what’s happening to Spike Lee. Journalists should be thoughtful about what kinds of perceptions they’re abetting, and whether they’re framing the reaction to the Red Hook Summer session, or the reaction to The Help, or any other discussion of race in Hollywood in a way that’s the best representation of the truth, or a representation of a mass mentality that’s running scared.

This post contains spoilers through the January 29 episode of Downton Abbey.

Downton Abbey spends much of its time exploring changing roles in a world at war, particularly for women. But this week’s episode, one of the best in the season, seemed to me to be particularly good at exploring what choices were and weren’t available to these women we’ve come to know and care about so much, and the way the people around them conspire to limit their choices, ostensibly for their own good. It’s fitting that the episode began with images of Daisy and Mary bound by fate rather than choice as Matthew and William are terribly injured in France. “Someone walked over my grave,” a suddenly stricken Daisy tells Mrs. Patmore, and Mary drops a cup of tea in the drawing room, telling the family startled by her loss of composure that “I suddenly felt terribly cold.”

I wrote two weeks ago that it was awful to see Daisy trapped into marriage by everyone at Downton’s sense of her own good. This week, everyone conspires to make William’s dying wish to wed her before his death come true. “He was happy to think they were true!” Mrs. Patmore says of the lies she encouraged Daisy to tell. Daisy isn’t the only one whose true consent is not considered particularly important. When the vicar worries about a gravely injured William’s ability to truly express his intentions, a riled-up Violet, who’s already taken on the medical establishment and the military, takes him to task. “Can I remind you, William Mason has served our family well? At the last, he saved the life if not the health of my son’s heir,” she lays down the law. “You cannot imagine that we would allow you to prevent this to happen…You living is Lord Grantham’s gift. Your house is on Lord Grantham’s land…I hope you can find some way to overcome your scruples.” In the end, it’s really only William who is thinking of Daisy’s ability to have choices, even if they’re choices after he’s gone, when he says that they should marry so she can have his pension after his death. “It won’t be much, but I’ll know you have something to fall back on,” William tells Daisy, becoming truly worthy of her love, or at least her affection. Seeing Ethel and Jane’s plights in a world without a man, that’s no small thing to leave Daisy, who lacks both those women’s force of personality.

While Daisy’s getting railroaded into a wedding, Lavinia’s being denied the one she badly wants. It’s striking that Dr. Clarkson takes Lord Grantham aside to inform him not just as Lord Grantham says, “You mean there can be no children?” but that there can be “no anything.” The continuation of the family line takes precedence over any individual woman’s happiness. And once again, a man makes decisions that he insists are for a woman’s own good. “I love you so much for saying it,” Matthew tells Lavinia when she insists that despite his paralysis, she wants to be with him. “But there’s something else that may not have occurred to you. We can never be properly married…It’s not important now. But it will be. And it should be.” It’s a terrible knot: there’s something admirable in Matthew insisting that Lavinia has a right to sexual happiness. But it’s dreadfully paternalistic in him making that decision for her despite the fact that she isn’t allowed to have the life experience that would give her the knowledge to weigh all the elements of her choice. “I couldn’t marry her now. I couldn’t marry any woman,” Matthew tells Mary later, revealing the challenge may be less his concern for Lavinia’s well-being than his own self-loathing. “And if they just wanted to be with you?” Mary asks, cleaning up his vomit and tending him with a solicitousness that would have been impossible when we first met her. “On any terms?” “It’s nothing,” Mary tells Isobel of her nursing when Isobel finally arrives at Matthew’s bedside. “Sybil’s the nurse in the family.” But Isobel knows something important has occurred. “It’s the very opposite of nothing,” Isboel insists, referring less to Mary’s specific actions and more to her arrival into being the kind of person who can truly think wisely about her own and other’s happinesses.

Evidence of that inequality between men and women is everywhere. The Major can refuse to acknowledge his child with Ethel and reap nothing but the disapproval of Mrs. Hughes: his ability to choose comes at the price of a double cost to her, the inability to do anything but have the baby, and the choices that event robs her of in the future. As much as Vera Bates is totally the worst, Sir Richard’s manipulation of her is a stark reminder of what happens when the advantages of gender are multiplied by the advantages of money and class (Violet, of course, is a reminder that those same factors can erase the gender gap). And Branson’s continuing to insist that everything rests with Sybil, without really acknowledging the costs she faces, telling her ” Sometimes a hard sacrifice must be made for a future that’s worth having. That’s all I’m saying. It’s up to you.” Would that it were. Would that it may be.

Because I have a particular fondness for fairy tale retellings, and occasionally, a girl’s got to watch television that she doesn’t analyze to death, I’ve been keeping up with both Grimm and Once Upon a Time. Both could be loosely described as fairy tale procedurals. In Grimm, a cop finds out that he’s descended from a long line of fairy-tale creature-fighters, and begins taking out the worst of them with the help of his policing skills and a werewolf who repairs clocks for a living and does pilates in his spare time. In Once Upon a Time, Emma, a bail bondswoman who gave her son up for adoption as an infant, has her life turned upside down when the boy tracks her down and asks her to move to Storybrook. There, Emma becomes the town sheriff, working to solve a number of mysteries caused, unbeknownst to her and the rest of the town’s residents except the mayor, by the fact that all of the citizens are exiled from fairy tales by the Mayor’s — really the Evil Queen’s — curse.

I think there are two reasons Once Upon a Time is working better than Grimm for me. First, the serialization in Once is much stronger than it is in Grimm. In the latter show, Nick is supposed to be part of this long tradition of monster-hunters, enmeshed in a struggle with some sort of monster organization. But the show hasn’t done very much to advance or make meaningful that narrative except to give Nick a van full of evil-vanquishing goodies. Monsters show up, are defeated, and disappear without giving us a sense of the larger world around us.

In Once, by contrast, the episodes are part of a contiguous fairy tale about the rise of a great evil. Every case teaches something about what happened to the characters in the past that contributes to our understanding of where they were when we met them — and our sense of where they’ll go. The interlocking stories feel considered, rather than slapped together. And the fairy tale characters are reconsidered in ways that feel thoughtful and intelligent: Snow White is a forest-dwelling badass after her exile from her cushy castle life; Rumplestiltskin is a grieving father; and Midas is basically a central bank, controlling the economies of entire kingdoms.

Second, I think the re-envisioning of the detective role is more interesting in Once Upon a Time than in Grimm. Nick is basically your standard white-boy detective with a black partner for balance and some extra equipment. It’s true that it’s not totally unusual for blonde white women to be cops either. But Emma’s operating in a world that feels different because it’s largely ruled by women on Once. Women hold the mayor and sheriff’s office. The most notable teacher in town is a woman, as is the proprietor of the local watering hold. There are, of course, men in Storybrook, ranging from the therapist to the newspaper editor. But Rumplestiltskin is the most powerful man in town by a good measure, and he tends to exert power outside the traditional channels rather than holding official office. The show doesn’t hammer it in obsessively, but it is nice to spend time in an environment where the normal assumptions about who controls things are flipped.