After a lot of seriousness over the past few days, there was something amusingly wacky about the presentation by Paul Fisher, the model scout who is revamping his network on the CW’s new reality show Remodeled. Even in Hollywood, the man has a world-class ego. Particularly when he started talking about how he’s going to put together a mental health program for women in the industry because “There are 7 million kids around the world who are sticking fingers down their throats…Our industry must take responsibility for the images they’re putting out,” while promoting his show with footage that shows him mercilessly dissecting candidate’s looks. Me being me, I had to ask about the contradiction.

He told me that the best way to fix the problem was “Step one is get in the game. Step two is when you have the muscle,” and said that “One of my dreams, ma’am, is to be able to sit front row at the Calvin Klein show, that Versace show, and not see those size zero, size two models walking down the runway…I promise you everything in my power and my ability, I’m going to try to never see a girl with a size zero or a size one walking down the runway again.” And he suggested he’d die trying to change the industry.

Perhaps I should be less skeptical. But this is coming from a man who talked about how virtuous modeling is because of the charity work models with big deals do, and linked the expansion of his empire to changes he swore would be inevitable in the industry as he gained power. There is something good though about the idea that the culture’s bent enough that charity for the rich is compulsory, and that it’s cooler to argue that models should be healthy and representative as possible instead of embracing heroin chic. That said, I will be sure to poke Mr. Fisher to see if he’s keeping his promise. If he’s going to offer me the moon, I might as well keep after him to deliver it.

I went into this thinking I was going to write about Gemma Teller Morrow, and the Queen herself will definitely get plenty of attention in an upcoming Sons of Anarchy week. But I’m not quite caught up on the show yet, in part because I got distracted along the way by a woman who reminds me a lot of Gemma: the Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham. Maggie Smith is a genius, of course, and the Dowager Countess has become one of the most famous and impressive zinger machines in any form of popular culture. But beyond the barbs, Violet is a fascinating model for women in television that upsets the norms on everything from age, to sexual involvement, to deployment of power. Watching her grapple with modernity is one of the most creative and moving long arc plots any network’s put on television in years.

The first and most obvious thing that makes Violet—and consequently her storylines—so different from almost anything else we see on television, is her age, and the corollary to it, her widowhood. Every other woman we’ve talked about in this series has been in her teens and twenties. I spend a fair amount of time arguing that we need to tell stories about women who are single or prioritizing their careers or intellectual commitments over the search for romance, or who are confident who they are instead of going on heroes’ journeys. But it is absolutely true that there are common experiences and processes that people tend to go through during those years, simply by virtue of leaving high school, going to college, and entering the economy. And those stories can vary broadly in the details, but there are powerful tropes about all of those processes, and it’s extremely hard to find something new in them or achieve escape velocity from them. The easiest way to tell different kinds of stories about women is to tell stories about different kinds of women. And while we often talk about different kinds of women in terms of race or class, telling stories about women in different stages of life opens up different arcs and issues.

Unlike questing twenty-somethings, the Dowager Countess of Grantham has a sense of herself that’s been fixed by time and consolidated by money and position. Violet’s beyond sex and marriage—at least for herself—though she’s manifestly confident in the wisdom that experience has given her about both. When she says things about Sybil not being entitled to her opinions “until she is married—then her husband will tell her what her opinions are,” it’s an example of retrograde thinking, but it also comes from a set of developed convictions about how to preserve harmony. Her instruction to Cora that “We are allies, my dear, which can be a good deal more effective,” comes from the same place. She didn’t have the opportunities that her granddaughters do to make errors and recover from them. The rules that govern her life are the result of figuring out what makes life, if not easy, less emotionally difficult.

And it’s fascinating to see what happens when, after someone’s gone through the process of being uncertain and crafting an iron-clad self, the world changes and makes those rules less necessary, even ridiculous. When Violet and Cora talk about how angry Violet gets when her rules are violated, that anger comes out of two very different places. First, breaking the rules by doing things like having premarital sex with Turkish diplomats who die in your bed, carries greater risk in Violet’s world than it does in, say, her granddaughter Mary’s. It makes sense that Violet would be not just disturbed by the mess her granddaughter’s created, but afraid for her. The world is changing such that Mary may survive it (based on what we’ve seen in the American air schedule), but neither she nor Violet know that for sure yet. And second, it must be terrifying to see the world order change around you and to realize that your rules may not be relevant, they may not guide you correctly any longer, and to face, at an advanced age, the prospect of reinventing yourself. That process in your teens and twenties is fantastically difficult, and we like to think that we only have to do it once.
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David Bowie suggests copyright is over, or near enough:

I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing. Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity… So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left. It’s terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen.

I don’t really think this is true. There’s no question that we need a good, smart, comprehensive look at both copyright and patent law, but I doubt we’ll entirely eliminate either.

And I think “music itself is going to become like running water and electricity” is the kind of thing that people say, along with occasionally arguing that content should be free, that really merits more serious and critical examination. Given the opposition to public funding for the arts (at least above current levels), I think we’re unlikely to see a scenario where people are willing to pay tax dollars or a small fee each month to create utility-like backing for artistic creation. Maybe we’ll see more non-profit fellowships, but probably not enough to make up for the total collapse of a music market in a world without copyright. On the other hand, metered-usage models like Spotify may provide a way forward for people to pay to access a service rather than for individual tracks, which might mean we end up with a more electricity-like approach to music consumption. But of course that model requires someone to have copyrights in order to get paid.

And while labels may be irrelevant for someone like David Bowie, and while tools like Kickstarter may help people get the capital they need to record the tracks that will make it possible for them to make a living out of touring, I still think that labels will continue to exist in some form even if the relationship between them and artists shifts over time. I think it’s possible that the roles of labels and managers and publicists will collapse into each other, much in the same way I’m told agents now often do a lot of the initial heavy lifting in the book editing process.

This post contains spoilers through the January 12 episode of Parks and Recreation.

If there’s been a theme to this season of Parks and Recreation, it’s accepting who you are, and all the gifts and limitations that come with that state. It’s a theme that was fully on display tonight in a somewhat subdued return for the show, as Leslie tries to figure out how to run a campaign, Ben tries to figure out life after Pawnee government, and Local Hero Pistol Pete comes to terms with his Roman Catholic childhood as the son of a single father.

After the loss of her campaign team, Leslie’s trying to convince them — and herself — that her staff represents an ass-kicking All Star team, even though it consists of a man who lines his shoes with red carpet, a man who thinks he can drive trucks (rented, hilariously, from a firm called Sissman), a campaign manager who Googlesources her wardrobe, and Andy, who rushes into Leslie’s confrontation to tell her, “Leslie, I tried to make ramen in the coffeemaker and I broke…everything.” It turns out that may be what happens when you try to turn a local election into an extravaganza. Leslie’s planned relaunch ends with a too-short red carpet, a stage out of Ron’s workshop, and a group effort to get a three-legged dog across a vast expanse of ice that was supposed to be a basketball court. The moment when Leslie admits to the increasingly disconcerted crowd (pulled together by Jerry, getting a rare, and though mixed, welcome, win), “This is the worst political event ever in history” was the best part of the event. But whether she realizes that simply being Leslie Knope — someone whose accomplishments with the parks pulled Pistol Pete out of a self-imposed exile from pubic attention and the memories of a tough childhood — is enough remains an open question.

The two people who did have come-to-Jesus moments about themselves in this episode, Ben and Anne, ended up switching jobs. Leslie roped Anne into running her campaign with a typical dose of hyperbole, telling her “Anne, you beautiful tropical fish. you’re smart as a whip and you’re cool under pressure. You’ve resuscitated a human heart in your bare hands…You haven’t? You will. You’re that good of a nurse.” And if anything, this episode proved that Anne’s a really good nurse. She listens to Pistol Pete, and figures out why he’s reluctant to take on his mantle of glory. “Right now he’s curled up in the back seat of my car,” she explains to Leslie. “Who sounds like a piece of work. But I think maybe he did the best he could as a single father. I don’t know. I might be too close to the situation.”

Then there’s Ben, who’s trying to fill post-political life with plans to revolutionize Italian cuisine with “The Low Cal Calzone Zone” and claymation projects. When he sees the latter, he’s shattered. “In my head I compared it to Avatar, Chris!” he wails. “And how could it not be longer?” I think it’s a little cheap to have Leslie keep resolving the issues with Ben and her campaign by saying things like, “I don’t care if you’re poison to my campaign. This team has a lot of heart and zero knowhow.” But if she’s going to win this thing on evidence of her hypercompetence, she’s sure setting up a lot of things that she can tell voters don’t matter because she’s so good at her job.

Slammed at TCA today. But since it’s HBO day, have a trailer for Veep, which I saw the pilot episode of last night. Thoughts to come, but it is excellent. Get excited:

This post contains spoilers through section 7 of A Visit From the Goon Squad. For next week, let’s finish the novel.

Perhaps it’s because I’m writing this at the Television Critics Association press tour, but A Visit From the Goon Squad feels more like a television show than almost any novel I’ve ever read. Normally, that comparison goes in the opposite direction to compliment and elevate a television show, but in this case, it shouldn’t feel like a demotion. Do you remember that opening tracking shot that begins the Battlestar Galactica miniseries that kicked the whole shebang off? Where you skip from one character to the next, and in a couple of minutes, you learn an enormous amount about who’s going to matter and get an initial sense of who they are? A Visit From the Goon Squad feels like that. And much like Battlestar Galactica, this is a novel about climactic moments, both when everything changes for everyone, and little things when people get set slightly off kilter in ways they can only recognize with hindsight.

First, the big thing. This is a New York novel without being heavy-handed about it, and because of that, it’s a September 11 novel in a way that I suspect that terrible day will figure in many events in the future. The references to it will be glancing, not all events will be organized around it, and yet, September 11 will be recognized as a moment that sent almost all of us off in different directions, however slight the course correction. Sasha “hated the neighborhood at night without the World Trade Center, whose blazing freeways of light had always filled her with hope.” For Jules, September 11 is a way of expressing his profound dislocation from the world after his release from prison. He tells Stephanie “I go away for a few years and the whole fucking world is upside down. Buildings are missing. You get strip-searched every time you go to someone’s office. Everybody sounds stoned, because they’re e-mailing people the whole time they’re talking to you. Tom and Nicole are with different people.…And now my rock-and-roll sister and her husband are hanging around with Republicans. What the fuck!” And Stephanie finds a conversation about al Qaeda in New York a symptom of the awfulness of her new life in the suburbs with Bennie, proof of the blinkered nature of the people around her.

That same deftness shows up in the revelations the characters have that aren’t connected to major world-historical events, that might, in fact, be inexplicable to anyone else. There’s Sasha’s realization about why she steals:

It was easy for Sasha to recognize, looking back, that the peeing woman’s blind trust had provoked her: We live in a city where people will steal the hair off your head if you give them half a chance, but you leave your stuff lying in plain sight and expect it to be waiting for you when you come back? It made her want to teach the woman a lesson. But this wish only camouflaged the deeper feeling Sasha always had: that fat, tender wallet, offering itself to her hand—it seemed so dull, so life-as-usual to just leave it there rather than seize the moment, accept the challenge, take the leap, fly the coop, throw caution to the wind, live dangerously (“I get it,” Coz, her therapist, said), and take the fucking thing.

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In his review of Rob, Todd VanDerWeff says something: “Everybody’s trying to figure out the way to do these vaguely politically incorrect shows where the characters talk about race and culture and so on frankly and honestly. Everybody’s chasing that whole envelope-pushing thing that cable does so well because they vaguely sense that this is something network could do well, too.” In that case, they might well look to David Nevins and to Showtime for tips on how to do those things right without being obvious, or without making a hash of things trying to represent the full range of a debate.

At his executive session yesterday, one of my fellow critics asked if he thought House of Lies glorified the 1 percent and the people who produce their wealth at a time of rising anger against them. “House of Lies is all about excess and confronting the contradictions of it and the hypocrisies of it. I think House of Lies is an incredibly timely show,” he said. “We’re not really about taking the sanctimonious, obvious route to confront those issues of income disparity. But I think it’s got very interesting things to say about how business is run.” He trusts his audience to see something on screen and to interrogate it, rather than to simply accept that because it’s on screen, it must be good.

When I asked him about whether, given the nice ratings for Homeland and House of Lies, he thought there was an unmet appetite for shows that took on the issues of the day, he agreed heartily:

Relevance is a big deal for us. I want to do shows that resonate in the wider culture. I think theere’s a huge opportunity to challenge the world that we live in. Relevance, timeliness, is, I think, one of the things that can define Showtime…I feel like that’s a big part of what happened with Homeland. I got to Showtime the summer of 2010. My first day was in August. And that script showed up. I’d had conversations with Howard [Gordon] and Alex [Gansa] back when I was a producer. They gave me the script within my first week there…we started talking about what the pay cable version of that would be. I realized we didn’t have a show that played in the fall with Dexter, and a year from then, the fall of 2011 would be the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and her was a script that if we were smart about it, was going to resonate with a lot of the things that were going to be occupying journalists and pundits. It’s rare that something lines up like that…In a similar way, House of Lies, some of it is by coincidence but some fo it is by design.

The political cycle moves much faster than the television development process, so Showtime would have be unusually good at forecasting to have shows land in the same way that Homeland and House of Lies have. But I appreciate hearing anyone say that trying is worthwhile.

By Kate Cox

When Alyssa graciously invited me to hang out in her space again (thanks!), I happily accepted, and then reached out to some wise friends for topic ideas.

A non-gaming friend who is regular reader of my blog said to me, “I would really love to know your thoughts on gamer culture.”

At the very moment she was writing her message to me, the internet was exploding with the story of one man who was very, very bad at his PR job, one customer who pushed buttons, and one webcomic author who decided vengeance was a tool he enjoyed employing. The Paul Christoforo situation rapidly went from bad to worse and by the next morning, a true mob mentality had taken over in many forums.

There I sat, horrified and depressed. When the entitled mob begins to feel wronged, when the legions of Reddit and the armies of Twitter mobilize… bad things happen. Home addresses get published, threats get made, and lives get ruined. I firmly believe that two wrongs don’t make a right, and siccing hundreds, thousands, or even millions of angry nerds on one bully was surely an uncalled-for thrashing.

Is this disaster, I despaired, what gamer culture really looks like?

But then, a couple of days later, Child’s Play announced their 2011 fundraising total. Child’s Play is a charity that the very same webcomic authors started, back in 2003. The core idea? “Gamers give back.” Players and now publishers come together to donate toys and games to children’s hospitals: the grown-ups are reaching out to kids in need. Every year, these efforts bring in more charity than the year before, to more hospitals nationwide and around the world. And every year, I’ve seen more and more gamers and more and more huge companies leap onboard to do good for others.

2011’s total was over $3.5 million.

That’s more like it. Charity! Giving! Maybe this could be what gamer culture really looks like?

But of course, the reality is neither so bleak nor so noble. I am forced to concede a point. Emily, this is what gamer culture really looks like:

Because the internet is for cats. (Avenue Q notwithstanding.) And because this cat is named Guybrush Ulysses Threepwood Cox (usually called “Cat” or “Damncat”). That’s gamer culture, right there and purring: a permanent, nerdy reference in our house.

It’s like the rest of geek culture, really: mixed good and bad, but enthusiastic and devoted either way.