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.