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
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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.
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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.