If the first result of it is any indication, Converse’s project to get together three artists to work together on a single song is going to produce some pretty entertaining results. Although I have to say that even as a huge OutKast fan, I’m not entirely sure I’d want to live with a quasi-haunted version of Andre 3000 in a filthy London crash pad:

As always with Gorillaz videos, the world they’re living is compellingly twisted, from the content-free tabloid that 2D reads over breakfast and that includes comics that chronicle his own life, to the recruiting poster urging London’s best and brightest to sign up to fight what appears to be King Kong. It’s a nice reminder of the sorts of details that can really make a world, but that not enough people are thoughtful enough to include, much less make intriguing.

The good people at Archie Comics were kind enough to let me give y’all a first look at the cover for Archie 635, in which the Occupy movement comes to Riverdale. The issue’s being written by Alex Segura and drawn by Gisele Lagace. And it looks pretty great:

Archie’s done a pretty flawless job of updating their brand in recent years, whether through the introduction of gay character Kevin Keller, something they’ve done while never getting baited by the response from homophobes, or the Archie Gets Married storyline, which finally let the characters grow up. Segura came to Archie from DC Comics, a move that gave the brand a greater connection to where the rest of the comics industry was at. And this Occupy issue is, I think, a smart, news-relevant move that also works well with the core Archie mythology. Archie’s struggle to choose between Betty and Veronica has always been a conversation about being happy in the middle class or deciding to make the bid for the big time, even if the people you know there are irritable and self-absorbed.

In keeping with our conversation on Tuesday about the pathetically small number of pieces by women published in major American magazines, I thought I’d move beyond frustration to solutions. If it’s so hard for editors (and as many readers pointed out, who’s commissioning and editing is critically important to who gets commissioned and published) to find female writers who have the chops to get major magazine assignments, I’ll offer up 10. These are just a few of the wildly talented women out there that major magazines would benefit from publishing on a regular basis, and their subscribers would benefit from reading. And you don’t need to stick them in a lady-issues slot, either:

1. Mac McClelland: I said it last year, and I’ll say it again. Someone should send Mother Jones’ awesome investigative reporter out on the road with a dude movie star to send back awesome—and non-flirtatious—reports from the road. That, or ship her off to a war zone. Either way, McClelland would turn in an account that’s deeply reportered and wildly entertaining to read.

2. Irin Carmon: The Salon reporter’s turned in everything from ferocious reports on the wide array of measures conservative lawmakers have been pushing to limit women’s access to reproductive health care to seminal essays on the enduring cultural legacy of Dirty Dancing. And she’s proven she can do everything from Jezebel-style blogging to substantial reporting, which is all editors who need to fill the front of the book, the back of the book, and the feature well should need to know.

3. Amanda Hess and Tracy Clark-Flory: Periodically, a major magazine will decide it wants to get a little edgy and profile a porn star or a porn entrepreneur. Sometimes, they’ll even assign a woman to do it, like when Vanessa Grigoriadis hung out with Sasha Grey at the beginning of her transition from pornography to mainstream movies for a Rolling Stone profile. But she’s not the only woman who can write these kinds of pieces. Magazines who want to get erudite about the adult industry should consider Hess and Clark-Flory, both of whom cover porn as a core part of their beats.

4. Willa Paskin: Okay, she already shows up in the pages of New York Magazine, so it’s not like Paskin’s a stranger to the national magazine circuit. But more publications should be putting her gimlet eye for pop culture and ability to break down why a show or movie works—or just as often, doesn’t—on a large scale. Maybe a weekend in Los Angeles with the Sisters Deschanel? Just sayin’.

5. Charlie Jane Anders: The only writer on this list who could write for the fiction section of your magazine as well as turn in reviews, the managing editor of io9 should be your go-to gal for all things science and science fiction. And because she runs the San Francisco-based Writers With Drinks series, she could probably hook you up with a whole other range of talented writers to fill your pages.
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Well, this is charming. The National Association of Theater Owners has decided to respond to the Weinstein Company’s complaints that the MPAA rating system was too rigid and context-resistant to deal with Bully in a nuanced, intelligent way…by being even more rigid and context-resistant! Deadline reports:

Surveys of America’s parents reflect their very strong concern with the use of harsh language in movies. The vast majority of parents surveyed have indicated that the type of language used in “Bully” should receive an automatic “R” rating. You ask us to ignore the preferences of America’s parents and our own ratings rules because of the merit of this movie. Yet were the MPAA and NATO to waive the ratings rules whenever we believed that a particular movie had merit, or was somehow more important than other movies, we would no longer be neutral parties applying consistent standards, but rather censors of content based on personal mores…I have nothing but tremendous respect for you and the work of TWC. Our industry is so much the better for your involvement. But if you decide to withdraw your support and participation in the rating system, and begin to release movies without ratings, I will have no choice but to encourage my theater owner members to treat unrated movies from The Weinstein Company in the same manner as they treat unrated movies from anyone else.

In most cases, that means enforcement as though the movies were rated NC-17 – where no one under the age of 18 can be admitted even with accompanying parents or guardians.

I’m not a parent, but this reads to me less as an attempt to be responsive to America’s parents and much more as a nuclear option to try to limit the audiences for movies that come out of studios that have the temerity to say that the ratings system doesn’t work for them. It’s one thing to enforce the ratings system, and another to jack up the rating that a movie would have gotten otherwise if a studio doesn’t want to comply with the system. That’s not safeguarding community standards: it’s about showing you have power. Particularly since some school districts are going to try to get permission for their students to see Bully anyway, something that would become impossible if the theaters started enforcing rules that required parents to accompany their children to the movie during the workday.

And of course, this is also a move that will limit tickets sales for NATO members who carry Bully. I wonder if showing you’re willing to get into an arms race with one of Hollywood’s best salesmen is worth the lost revenue.

The bridge is yours.

-The only celebrity memoir I’d even contemplate purchasing.

-Another reason you should catch up on Enlightened so you can watch it next season.

-Michael Chabon on his life-long relationship with Edgar Rice Burroughs.

-Amazon v. the Independent Publishers Group.

-This is basically the perfect role for Ben Stiller:

It says a great deal about the quality of publisher and provocateur Andrew Breitbart’s showmanship and his commitment to carrying a performance through that, as the news broke this morning that he had passed away at the untimely age of 43, many people weren’t sure the announcement was real. At ThinkProgress, we send condolences to his family, and remember him as an expert and captivating provocateur, even in our many serious disagreements with him on the issues.

And there’s no question that Breitbart could be a captivating presence. His Twitter feed (the last missive from it was “I called you a putz cause I thought you were being intentionally disingenuous. If not I apologize.”) was a vehicle for performance art and agitprop. A New Yorker profile of him in 2010 started with the image of Breitbart tweeting “Why is Steny Hoyer in Los Angeles sitting on Anthony Weiner’s shoulders screaming the N word into my home? Weird.” He used his feed to savage Ted Kennedy in the immediate aftermath of the Senator’s death.

That flair for the dramatic persisted off the internet: in the wake of Anthony Weiner’s Twitter flirtations scandal, Breitbart stepped off the plane in New York and went straight to a press conference to answer charges that he or someone in his employ had hacked the Congressman’s Twitter account, an event at which he complained that “72 hours in Palm Springs with your family is excruciating when you are being challenged.” It was an amusing, if self-aggrandizing, performance.

Breitbart’s more dramatic tendencies could affect his preferences in reporting. As a publisher, Breitbart’s first scalp—and his biggest—was the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which withered after a so-called sting organization by conservative prankster James O’Keefe. The video hardly damned the organization as a whole, but the report succeeded in starving ACORN of much of its funding and eventually forced the group to reorganize. Despite the diminishing returns of O’Keefe’s hoaxes, Breitbart stood by him, and compared O’Keefe to Sacha Baron-Cohen’s Borat character, saying “I think Borat got real politicians/personalities to act in real ways that we hold them to account for. O’Keefe is more serious.”

That penchant for the dramatic and boundary-pushing also led Breitbart into places no credible journalist would tread, a tendency he held up as proof of his independence, but that led to embarrassing missteps. During the Weiner press conference, he complained that “The media says Breitbart lies! Brietbart lies! Breitbart lies! Give me one example of a provable lie!” But the edited video he published the year before that implied that Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod harbored racist sentiments against white farmers was demonstrably inaccurate and biased, and resulted in Sherrod losing her job. Breitbart declined to apologize publicly to Sherrod, and she sued him for defamation, a suit that is still pending.

If his addiction to drama didn’t exactly help Breitbart’s network of sites become a bastion of credible journalism, his combativeness and hunger for pageviews sometimes meant that he lent his support to more positive causes. After blogger Dave Weigel left the Washington Post after his private emails were published by rival conservative outlet the Daily Caller, Breitbart gave him space to explain himself. And at a time when the Republican party was falling back on socially conservative positions to gain support, Breitbart joined the board of gay conservative organization GOProud, saying “If being conservative means rejecting gay conservatives because they are gay, then fine, I’m not a conservative.” He later left the organization, but remained supportive of its aims.

Dr. Nerdlove has a predictably good post up about the latest big video game controversy. In Cross Assault, a fighting game competition, one of the team coaches, Aris Bakhtanians insisted that “sexual harassment is part of a culture, and if you remove that from the fighting game community, it’s not the fighting game community.” When a member of his own team, Miranda Pakozdi, disagreed with him, he began harassing her so deeply and repeatedly that she started forfeiting matches. As Dr. Nerdlove writes:

Five days with Bakhtanians, that shining example of humanity making constant and seemingly unending offensive comments about her looks. About her body. About wanting to watch her pee, sleep, wanting to fuck her and pimp her out. Listening to him scream “Bitch” over and over again with all of the joy of a five-year old who’s figured out that naughty words make his parents react, then scream “RAPE THAT BITCH!” when a female character is taken down.

Going by tweets, which she later took down, Pakozdi intmated that the only reason she was sticking around was because of a contract that required her to be there for the entire week. So not only is she dealing with a creeper making rape jokes over and over again.. she’s legally stuck with him. She literally is not allowed to leave, at the risk of violating her contract with the competition. She’s effectively trapped in there with him.

It would be interesting to know, given that the players are bound by contracts, if the competition, which has cash prizes and is being broadcast, includes a sexual harassment policy. Freelancers aren’t protected by Title VII the way that employees are, so Pakozdi probably doesn’t have legal recourse, which is too bad. It would be really delightful to see someone like Bakhtanians, who says things like “What is unacceptable about that? There’s nothing unacceptable about that. These are people, we’re in America, man, this isn’t North Korea. We can say what we want,” on a witness stand in front of a whole bunch of jurors. But, if like many comics and gaming conventions, Cross Assault just hasn’t bothered to set up a sexual harassment policy, that would be an unfortunate validation of creeps like Bakhtanians who are so deeply invested in harassing women that they want to establish it as part of their official culture. The gaming and comics communities are full of decent, wonderful people of both genders—and it would be great to see a more organized push for established and enforced sexual harassment policies in all the forums where geeks gather.

There’s been a lot of talk about Chris Heath’s long profile of Gary Oldman that came out in the most recent issue of GQ. Even more than the story itself, the buzz has been over a preface to the piece that explains why it was held from its original planned release date of 2009. It turns out the piece got pulled in a fairly routine process, and then Heath had trouble updating it because Oldman’s manager, who is himself fairly conservative, became convinced that the piece would paint Oldman as holding political views that would make it harder for him to work in Hollywood. As it turns out, the piece has absolutely no details about Oldman’s political views, and it doesn’t actually evaluate one of the claims that Heath makes: “The suggestion that [Oldman's political views or the perception of them as extremely right-wing] cost him an Oscar nomination for The Contender seems plausible.”

Heath describes a call Oldman received from Dustin Hoffman after The Contender came out where Hoffman told him:

“I was at a card game the other night, and there was this big Hollywood exec’ “—Hoffman named him to Oldman, though Oldman does not do so to me—” ‘and he was saying that Gary Oldman is extreme right wing, and he’s a fascist.’ ” Hoffman told Oldman that his response was “Gary Oldman’s a fascist and extreme right? I can’t imagine that that is true,” but nonetheless, the conversation had clearly prompted this phone call. [Hoffman, contacted in 2012, recalled telephoning Oldman and commending his performance in The Contender, but stated that he did not remember the rest of this conversation.] “And he said,” Oldman continues, ” ‘Just be careful, because I said some stuff years ago…I said it to someone who was very powerful who made sure that I didn’t work for a long, long time.’ He was being quite cryptic. And then he reminded me that there was a gap—I think it was a gap between Tootsie and the next thing he did. He said, ‘Just a word to the wise, you’ve got to be very careful; there’s this thing out there that you’re this… I don’t know what you’ve been saying, but you’ve got to be very careful.’ All very strange.”

Tracing the path of rumors, particularly old ones, is difficult. And it would be pretty hard to get people to say on the record that they declined to hire Dustin Hoffman or Gary Oldman, two of the most talented actors of their generations, because they’re not orthodox liberals. But even if Heath reported out that speculation and got a bunch of denials or anxious reactions, that seems like it would have been worth reporting as well.

No one piece is going to resolve the tendentious relationship between conservatives and Hollywood, of course. But it would be really useful to get above the level of insinuation and speculation, even on a case-by-case basis. If people shunned Oldman or prevented him from being recognized for performing his job in an exemplary fashion because of his views of American politics (as a British citizen he can’t vote and he hasn’t given money to any campaign since 1990, so those views aren’t even having an impact), which have no bearing on his ability to do his work, that’s something that should be revealed because it’s ridiculous and has denied us more of Gary Oldman’s greatness. And if the impression that Oldman was denied work or recognition because of his politics is mistaken, it’s worthwhile to debunk that, too.

Much of the frustration consumers feel for media companies is based on the idea that these companies are disadvantaging consumers—and themselves—by refusing to make content available as quickly as possible and in the widest possible variety of formats. But I think Todd VanDerWeff does something valuable in explaining why, for HBO at least, the company’s careful control of access to its highest-value content is what preserves its ability to keep producing that content:

HBO, at least, has long based its model on the idea that a certain amount of people—more than 20 million of them at last check—will pay for the rights to watch the network’s highly acclaimed programming first-run. Those subscribers, in recent years, have also gotten access to the network’s HBO Go, a streaming site that contains nearly every show in HBO’s history, as well as whatever movies the network has the rights to for that period. (Numerous cable companies have made HBO Go unavailable to their subscribers, recognizing—correctly—that it probably represents the cable-less future of the network. They’re being idiots.) The network then releases its shows on DVD around a year after they initially debut…

The problem HBO (and the other premium cable channels) faces is that it’s boxed in by its need to be in bed with cable companies. The easiest solution to the problem posed in the Oatmeal cartoon is simply to make HBO Go available to anyone who wants it, for a monthly fee that would probably be slightly larger than what the monthly fee for the TV network is (to offset any costs lost from cable providers). The problem is that if the network does this, it will be seen as declaring war on the very providers who keep it coming into people’s homes. Even though it seems, to a generation raised on the Internet, like everybody watches stuff on the Internet all of the time, the vast majority of Americans still consume their entertainment on TV. Without the cable companies beaming HBO into those people’s homes, the network loses subscriber fees, which robs it of the ability to program anything beyond cheap movies.

I think folks really want to believe that if content companies were just willing to give them what they want, the alternate revenue streams would make up for the money those same companies would lose by walking away from other formats or lowering prices. But if we’re also arguing that companies shouldn’t get so upset over piracy because most of the people who are pirating things wouldn’t have paid for them in the first place, then companies may not have a lot to gain by trying to appease them. I’ve always been willing to accept that if we were, for example, to unbundle cable, that a lot of channels would die. It’s probably time for folks to acknowledge that if Hollywood moves away from its current pricing models, it will likely change the mix of things that it produces. And some of the casualties will be things that people like.