Marissa Gluck has a cool piece up at Atlantic Cities about how Los Angeles, in the midst of dismantling its citiy’s Occupy encampment, took the time to preserve a mural created by people who were living there or passing through (the mural also had a functional purpose to protect a fountain):

The mural’s preservation is thanks to the efforts of Matthew Rudnick, a budget bureaucrat with no formal art education but with a keen sense of historical import. During the park clean up, Rudnick coordinated efforts between General Services, (which was responsible for cleaning the park), and the Department of Cultural Affairs. “It would be a tragedy to have it thrown away,” says Rudnick. “The work is dynamic.” [...]

The Department of Cultural Affairs is now beginning the process of finding a permanent home for the mural. Interested parties will soon be invited to submit offers to display the mural publicly.

It’s relatively new terrain but one the city viewed as necessary for an artwork that had become an emblem. “We felt giving it to a [caretaking] entity without a public process would come back to haunt us,” says Olga Garay-English, Executive Director of the Department of Cultural Affairs. “It’s more appropriate to have a transparent system in place.”

There’s a radical chic element to all of this, of course, and it’s worth keeping that in mind as Occupy-created and Occupy-inspired art is turned from political expression into commodities. But that doesn’t meant that the work isn’t worth making, or that Occupy-inspired art can’t provide a valuable public example of the connection between artistic expression, political argument, and change. Flavorwire, as one of their 2012 cultural resolutions, hopes the novelists, poets and playwrights who have signed up as part of Occupy Writers will start producing work inspired by their own commitments and in some cases reawakenings. It goes without saying that I agree. Yes, there’s a lag time between events and art inspired by them. But if the 99 percent movement’s going to continue, artists can play a role in sustaining it and looping more people into the conversation, and processing what is past, and passing, and yet to come.

I was substantially put off by the didactic tone of Amy Waldman’s The Submission, but I quite like her new short story, a sad Afghan Christmas tale, in the Financial Times. It centers around Aziz, a translator working for American forces trying to build a road that’s consistently thwarted or destroyed by the forces of a local warlord, who’s extorting the Americans for the resources he needs to build a private army in exchange for holding back attacks. What works about it, I think, is that unlike The Submission, where all the characters personalities and personal lives are bent to serve the cause of representing political positions, this is a story about how public events interact with private needs. Aziz finds the way he translates changing based on the personal goals that he brings to the project: making enough money to pay the bride price and for the wedding he hopes to have, and surviving working for the Americans long enough to do it:

Had the map documented the pace of work, its picture would have been less hopeful. The paving of the 80-kilometre road had started out well: 30 kilometres in the first three months. The pace had halved in the next three, and in the past two months, only seven kilometres had been completed. The insurgents weren’t just interfering with construction. They were blowing up “red” – sections of already-completed road – almost as fast as the contractors could build. Explosives erupted from new, ingenious hiding places: culverts and cliffsides, the asphalt barrels themselves. Assailants haunted the hills, hunted from them. A night raid on the road workers’ camp left 13 Afghans and four Nepalis dead. A sniper shot felled a respected Turkish engineer, and stopped work for two days while American and Afghan forces combed the rises.
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The colonel tried to take more territory alongside the road just to get it built, but terrain cleared was soon lost: the heights couldn’t support a continued military presence. A war to win a battle, Aziz sometimes thought, but he held his tongue. Winter had arrived. Soon the snows would come, stopping work until the spring. Aziz was beginning to despair that he would be grey-bearded, and still a virgin, before the road was complete.

It’s also just worthwhile as a story about Christmas, and how it looks to people who don’t celebrate it, and the power the cultural practice exerts anyway. There’s a lot of good culture about Christmas, but not a lot about Christmas as part of a larger tapestry.

I kind of feel like Netflix is giving us everything and the kitchen sink with Lillyhammer: it’s The Sopranos! And a little bit of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Scandanavia! With a good dose of fish out of water stuff a la You Kill Me! And a sheep! And a girl band! And a bit of Uncanny Valley in that opening sequence that makes the characters look more like Grand Theft Auto avatars than actual humans!

That said, I do quite like semi-goofy gangster stories and Steve Van Zandt, so I’ll definitely check this out.

But I think the show, and the other originals Netflix has signed up for, including an Arrested Development continuation and a House of Cards remake point to a larger challenge for the service as it tries to develop a brand identity. What’s been great about Netflix as a streaming and DVD delivery service has been its breadth. Whether your thing is violent motorcycle gang soap operas, workout videos, or great sitcoms of the ’80s, it had you covered. It would likely be easier for Netflix to dig in and develop a couple of great sitcoms, or one or two great dramas, or to decide it’s going to do a couple of anti-hero shows across formats, effectively deciding that it’s going to court a niche audience for its originals business, or at least one niche at a time. But it’s a harder thing to develop consistently excellent programming across a wide variety of genres, tones, and subject-matter tranches. I can understand why the company would prefer to try for that, though: after causing a lot of confusion and doing itself a lot of damage, I’d want a master-stroke to bring in new or disaffected former customers, and to make a lot of my audience very excited. I’m just not entirely sure how it’ll pan out.

Thanks to the vast expansion of our cable news industry, you could spend hours tonight watching talking heads speculate about the potential results of the Iowa Caucuses tonight. But fortunately, you don’t have to! You can keep hitting refresh on Twitter or the news site of your choice while watching any one of these movies, which actually get the mechanics of politics right in a way that most others don’t, and that most snap-judgment analysts won’t.

1. Primary Colors (1998): Unlike most political movies, which set up a dichotomy between often-unnamed but clearly defined members of opposite parties, the vast majority of Primary Colors takes place during the Democratic primary. That means you get tough debates, hilariously incompetent campaign volunteers who get whipped into a professional fighting force, the entrance of a late-breaking messiah candidate who turns out to be not-so-messianic, and best of all, a deeply cranky conversation about a meeting with the Lubavitcher Rebbe. This is politics as informed and presented by people who have actually been there.

2. Definitely, Maybe (2008): This movie may be disguised as a romantic comedy, but it’s a savvy look at the disappointment of the Clinton years that draws its small dramas from an actual understanding of political pressure points. Fundraising gets you places. Both candidates and journalists have a dangerous desire to be liked. Not putting union bugs on Democratic paper goods during a campaign is disastrous. The president probably will not remember his early volunteers years down the road.

3. The American President (1995) and Thank You For Smoking (2005): It’s sort of amazing how naive Aaron Sorkin is about lobbying in The American President, a movie that makes the profession look so sexy and principled it’s sort of shocking it wasn’t a product of the influence industry itself. Thank You For Smoking is a loopy tonic to that misconception. Watch this double-header as we gear up for a Super PAC-filled election year, and vow not to get fooled again.

4. Contagion (2011): In the hysteria of an election year, it can be easy to forget that there’s life beyond politics and elected officials. But a lot of what’s important about presidential candidates is the people they’d appoint to serve under them, and any administration is limited in the changes it can make by layers of existing bureaucracy, regulations, and the time it takes to turn a ship much bigger than the Titanic around. Contagion‘s a critically important reminder that in crisis, it’s not always a matter of whose finger is on the button.

5. All the President’s Men (1976) and Dick (1999): These two very different retellings of the same essential story make two different but critically important points. First, journalism is hard, and it’s difficult to do it even when you have all the right breaks and time in which to do it: so how hard must it be to nail down true stories on the campaign trail, where everyone is sleep-deprived and exhausted, and events are moving extraordinarily rapidly. Second, politicians are people, often eccentric, obnoxious people. They want power, but they want other things too, including pot brownies and to kick their dogs.

Continuing the science-fiction-as-class metaphor, with a soupçon of immigration, is the gorgeous-looking, and yet mysteriously distributor-less Upside Down:

There’s a pretty clear emerging pattern in science fiction movies of physical boundaries between classes. In Time had the zoned checkpoints that Justin Timberlake has to cross through, the border fee he pays escalating at every checkpoint. These aren’t just basic visa fees: he’s got to prove that he’s got time to burn, or at least that he wants to be there badly enough to spend part of his life to pay for the crossing. When he comes into possession of a million years, the movie becomes a story about trade and monopolies. It’s not just frightening to the ruling class that the years get out into other districts, it’s that the borders themselves are permeable.

It looks like the same will be true in Upside Down. I’ll be curious to see how the boundaries between the two worlds are physically controlled (it looks like it’s a matter of finding inflection points and making the conceptual leap that allows you to realize you can walk on the ceiling), but there’s no question it’s important. The Boarder Patrol actually goes by the same name in these worlds and our own, and is clearly willing to try to prevent that conceptual realization and those crossings by force.

In both movies, there are two clear reasons that the ruling classes don’t want the borders they’ve set up to be permeable. In both cases, they’ve built beautiful, controlled worlds that they don’t want disturbed by the presence of uncouth members of the lower classes. They have beautiful things, and they don’t want to share. But in both movies, the goal is also to make sure no one realizes the borders can be crossed, that resources can be redistributed, that the system everyone lives isn’t a natural and immutable condition.

I wonder if that’s a more important message for privileged people than for the people who want to cross borders, though. It’s not like Mexican immigrants, or gay binational couples don’t already know that the system is rotten, and aren’t working to subvert it, whether they’re continuing to make border crossings irrespective of the danger or lobbying to get laws changed. It’s the folks who think that borders can be entirely secured, that we can preserve some kind of purified society, who need the lesson.

The bridge is yours! And welcome back! I missed y’all.

-Hollywood may be releasing Oscar contenders late in the year, but they’re not box-office hits.

-Goodies from The Avengers.

-NBC starts filling out its robot rights drama.

-The U.K. Defense Ministry turns to video game technology to soup up its simulations.

-Scissor Sisters. Krystal Pepsy. Azalea Banks. Get happy:

If I was in possession of a large amount of extremely valuable and beautiful beachfront Hawaiian land that I wasn’t allowed to continue owning, and if I cared about my family’s legacy and the future of my state, I would have a number of options. I could sell it. I could work with the National Parks Service to set up the first National Seashore in Hawaii. I could collaborate with the Hawaii State Parks agency to preserve the land and make it accessible to people other than my family. I could spin it off into an independent charity. I could donate it into a university. I could sell some of it and purchase a small piece of it at market price to preserve as a family compound. Matt King, the wealthy lawyer portrayed by George Clooney in Alexander Payne’s smug The Descendants, considers only that first option. It’s a movie that ultimately argues that the highest moral cause is a rich man keeping what’s his. And that’s not the only thing that I disliked about the second painfully politically-misguided (and oddly out of touch) movie George Clooney gave us in 2011.

That conviction that Matt’s only options are turning the land into money or keeping it for himself doesn’t just give us a narrator who is painfully self-absorbed. It’s of a piece with the movie’s odd tendency to treat the land deal part of the plot as if it’s hugely momentous and then to dissipate all the tension surrounding it. There’s essentially no debate about what to do with the land because the positions of the family members who don’t want to sell are never articulated: it’s just asserted that there are people out there who would prefer to hold on to the land even though the law says they can’t. The closest thing there is to an argument is about whether to sell to a local developer or one based out of another state. We know that Matt thinks some of his relatives are shiftless spendthrifts who would prefer to take a higher price from the non-local developer, but no one on the other side talks about what it means to them to support the Hawaiian economy, or what, if any, responsibilities they feel they have to their state. They’re just bodies there to indicate that there are substantial votes on each side. And ultimately, the big decision we’ve been told has to be made at this family gathering is actually seven years away from its deadline and pushed aside until King can find another solution.

The same shallow approach applies to every other discussion of Hawaii’s economics in the movie. The Descendants deserves credit for getting lots of non-white people into the camera frame, often on planes next to Matt King’s head as he jumps from island to island. But the movie focuses most directly on native Hawaiians during Matt’s opening monologue, as illustrations of troubles in the paradise that he declares “can go fuck itself.” The vacant, the indigent? These are things that Matt King has to endure, along with his wife’s coma. If what makes one Hawaiian is a fondness for comfortable clothing and a sense of noblesse oblige without the oblige, there are regional and ethnic identities I’d be more interested in spending time exploring.
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We’re done with Boardwalk Empire and Homeland for the season, and while I’ll pick up The Walking Dead and Community when they return, we’ve got some pretty substantial space in the schedule. What do you want me to recap? I’m happy to pick up an ongoing show, or to give a shot to a new one — I’ll definitely be doing House of Lies. Nominations go until noon on Friday: we won’t do a formal vote, so second things you want even if someone’s already tossed them in the pool. I’ll make a final schedule and publish it on Monday.

Over the holidays, I read Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. It’s a lovely little novel, though perhaps better as a commentary on science fiction than as an actual entry in the genre. One of my favorite parts of the book, about a semi-depressed time machine repairman searching for his missing father, comes in a description of the universe the story is set in:

At the lower end of the scale are the unincorporated areas, which have, as the name suggests, no particular look and feel, no genre. Although sometimes referred to as ‘reality’ it should be stressed that this layer of Universe 31 is quantitatively, but not qualitatively, different from the other regions. The difference is one of degree, not nature. On the other end of the scale, the affluent inhabitants of the upper-middle to upper-end neighborhoods, perhaps searching for authenticity, or nostalgic for a different age, devote significant amounts of their time and resources to the creation of a simulated version of the unincorporated areas. Considerable expense is required for the upkeep of these highly stylized ‘reality’ gardens, with the verisimilitude of one’s personal family garden being a point of pride and a symbol of status among this stratum of inhabitants…Although techncially SF, the look and feel of the world in these borderline neighborhoods is less thoroughly executed than elsewhere in the region, and outcomes of story lines can be more randomized, due to ac omparatively weaker buffer from the effects of 31′s incomplete physics. As a result, the overall quality of experience for the residents of these striving areas is thinner, poorer, and less substantial than of those in the middle and upper regions, while at the same time, due to its mixed and random and unthemed nature, less satisfying than that of reality, which, although gritty, is, at least, internally consistent.

There are a lot of interesting ideas in this concept, that the wealthier you are, the more you live in reality. Of course wealth gives you access to a greater range of experiences; to resources that can help you play around with different identities and different tropes of identities; and to the luxury of nostalgia and time spent defining authenticity whether you live in a science fictional universe or in this one. And of course it’s deeply irritating that our popular culture, science fictional or otherwise, so often resorts to trope to describe certain classes of people, whether it’s sassy lower-middle-class black women, Southeast Asian convenience store proprietors, or incompetent deputies. But I’m compelled by the idea that it might be a bad fate to be so low on the totem poll as to be unreachable by trope, cliche, or genre, that it’s worse to be ignored entirely than stereotyped. Before we want our stories to be authentic, to typify genre, or to transcend it, we want them to be recognized as worthy and listened to in the first place.