I think a lot about our relationship to celebrity and to culture, and while I think Antiviral, the first movie from Brandon Cronenberg (son of David) may get at the intensity of our obsession, I’m not sure it looks like it’s got the equation quite figured out:

With intense fandom, I think most people tend to dream of living inside the fictional world they’ve become attached, or to inhabit a persona, but when it comes to actual famous humans, while a small number dream of inhabiting their lives, mostly what strong fans want is for those people to live out their fantasies of what those people’s lives should be like. When Kristen Stewart cheats on Robert Pattinson, people are angry because they believe the two have some sort of obligation to them to live out a fantasy. When utterly unfounded rumors swirl that Gillian Anderson is living with David Duchovny, Scully and Mulder fans’ hearts beat a little faster, because it’s as if a fantasy has stepped out of viewers’ brains, as if there’s a weird kind of power to the wish. When people threaten Ellen Page for dating Alexander Skarsgard, it’s not because they think he should be dating them, but because Page fails to live up to some sort of bizarre standard for the kind of woman Skarsgard ought to be dating. For the most part, we don’t want to consume these people’s flesh or feel what they feel. We want them to be our paper dolls, a desire that’s tyrannical even as it distances us from the real lives of the people we’d like to command, off-camera and on, for our entertainment.

In the midst of the happy news that women will moderate two of the four presidential and vice presidential debates—CNN’s Candy Crowley will be the first person to moderate a presidential debate since 1992, and ABC’s Martha Raddatz will moderate the vice-presidential debate—Eric Deggans makes a critically important point: advances for women appear to have traded off with advances for people of color this time around. This is the first year since 1996 that no person of color will interrogate either the presidential or vice presidential candidates. He writes:

Ifill would have been a great choice for one of the slots; unlike Lehrer, she’s been involved with covering this election full-time and will co-anchor PBS’ convention and election coverage later this year. But Lehrer, who has quietly retired from PBS’ NewsHour, has moderated more presidential debates than any other journalist; it would have been tough to leave him off the list if he still wanted to be a moderator, and it would have been tough for the commission to have two moderators from PBS when so many others want the spotlight.

Still, it’s sad to note that there are so few journalists of color in key anchor positions, that there are few other names with the experience, profile, gravitas and record of impartial journalism needed. NBC’s Lester Holt? Ifill’s colleague Ray Suarez on the NewsHour? CNN’s Don Lemon, Christiane Amanpour or Soledad O’Brien? (NPR’s Michele Norris, another great pick, is sidelined from political coverage because he husband is working on Obama’s campaign.)

I agree with Eric that part of this is a pipeline problem—Anderson Cooper’s diversion into daytime television also doesn’t help the cause of getting a gay moderator either. But I also think that part of this is about preserving the right of white guys to interrogate other white guys. President Obama’s presence on the stage is meant to represent African-American interests, never mind the interests of other minority groups. Women get their crack at him and the other men who will take the podium. If, in four years, we’re back to a bunch of white guys, I imagine moderators of color will get a chance again. But as long as we have as few presidential debates as we have, there remain few opportunities to question the candidates, and scant time to get in all the questions, from all the quarters of America, that they should be prepared to answer.

This post discusses episodes four through six of the second season of The Wire. For next week, we’ll watch episodes seven through nine.

D’Angelo Barksdale’s explanation of chess, and by extension, the drug game, is one of The Wire‘s most famous scenes, and justifiably so. It’s a quick and striking way to explain both the Barksdale crew’s business and the what deprivation does and doesn’t mean to the junior employees of it. But that sequence is hardly the only time The Wire uses this device. These three episodes of The Wire all rely on deficiencies in an array of characters’ cultural literacy to illustrate the gaps in between their present state and their aspirations.

First, there’s Nicky, trying to keep Ziggy under control and scratch together the money to rent, or even buy a home for his girlfriend Aimee and their daughter Ashley, who steals and sells a product whose value he can name, but that he doesn’t entirely understand. “I know it’s digital. So what?” he asks Ziggy, who holds on to one of the cameras after they fence them, and is trying to explain to Nicky that the camera doesn’t require film. “If you put a picture on there you don’t have to go to no photomart to get it turned around or nothing?” Even when he’s only working a few days a month, Nicky is busy enough, and poverty is grinding hard enough on him, that he doesn’t have time to research his aspirations.

Ziggy, by contrast, aspires, but picks targets that don’t afford him the respect he desires. When he lays down $2,000 for a leather jacket that will be damaged working the docks, Nicky sees him for a fool, seeing the jacket as on par with the bills Ziggy lights on fire in the bar. “For a goddamn jacket?” he asks his cousin. “You’re out your fucking mind, Zig.” Later, Cheese mocks not the value of the jacket but its style—it’s an exercise in flash so excessive that it’s a joke. The jacket doesn’t look good on Ziggy, and wouldn’t look good on anyone, but he has no idea how silly he looks, or how pathetic he is when he claims he would have shot Cheese and the other men who collected from him.

Then, there’s Stringer, picking up concepts in class that are useful to him, but untranslatable to the men and boys who work under him. It’s almost laughable when he asks them, “Y’all heard of WorldComm?” Of course they haven’t. Community College may not be the only thing that’s distancing Stringer from Avon—there’s prison, their differing perspectives on how to deal with D’Angelo—but it’s certainly giving him ideas and tools. The latter may not be enough to transition him into a new business and a new class, but his possession of them distance Stringer from his compatriots.
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The bridge is yours.

-Joan Didion is writing a screenplay for a political thriller.

-More Dredd stills.

-A theory of Harry Potter‘s wizarding gene.

-NBC makes clear its interests in the Olympics as a promotional tool.

-Red Dawn, still happening:

NBC did not exactly earn itself warm fuzzies from the Olympic audience it hopes to entice to its new fall series last night when the network interrupted coverage of the London closing ceremonies to preview Animal Practice, its new sitcom starring Justin Kirk as Dr. George Coleman, a veterinarian in the Gregory House model, JoAnna Garcia Swisher as Dorothy, the woman who owns the hospital where he works, and Crystal the Monkey, who receives third billing on the show as Dr. Rizzo, a primate with a medical license, or at least, a tiny ambulance and sets of scrubs. That billing is important. As NBC tries to retool itself, the network is offering up shows for the Law & Order set in Chicago Fire, the CBS set in Guys With Kids, and the Glee set with Ryan Murphy’s sitcom The New Normal. Go On, which did a test premiere last week to generally strong ratings, is its effort to make the Community formula emotionally accessible to a broader audience. Animal Practice, which comes from Community producers Anthony and Joe Russo, feels a bit like a vengeful slap at that sitcom’s audience, a “You wanted smart and spiky and weird? Fine. We’ll give you smart and spiky and weird. And a monkey.”

Part of the problem with the show is George himself. I love me some Justin Kirk, but it’s tiresome to watch him play yet another TV asshole whose jerkdom is meant to be excusable and adorable because Dorothy dumped him after he failed to provide basic emotional reciprocity in their relationship. In Community, the self-sabotage and self-deception that landed Jeff Winger at Greendale was fascinating—why would an obviously talented man fake his college degree when he could have easily graduated? In Go On, Ryan’s grieving his wife, giving the problems he’s trying to face some actual emotional heft. But it’s hard for me to sympathize with a jerk who pain comes from immaturity rather than a deep wronging or a reckoning with the way he’s brought harm upon himself. It’s not really charming or awesome to watch George offer to sleep with a depressed patient whose even more depressed cat tried to commit suicide, as happens in the opening to the show: I’m not really in the mood to celebrate George’s skills as a lothario before I even have any sense of whether I like him or not.

Beyond innuendo and crankiness towards Dorothy, it seems George’s schtick is using animal science to diagnose the people around him. He tells Doug, his newly-single and down-at-the-mouth colleague that he needs to reestablish his primacy. “I’m not a primate,” Doug grouses. “I live in Brooklyn, I get my food from Fresh Direct, I have opposable thumbs.” But he lets George take him girl-shopping based on what dogs women are taking to the park, and later, George hooks Doug up, which I suppose is what counts for altruism in the show. It’s not a terrible joke, but it’s not transformatively clever, either. In place of Community’s commentary on pop culture, Animal Practice has the doctors betting on horse races that include some of their former patients, and betting on turtle races where the hamsters act as jockeys. The latter, in particular, and Rizzo’s presence are cute and memeable, but adorable animal juxtapositions do not a show make unless you’re the National Geographic Channel.

And the animals are used more creatively than the humans. Animal Practice, like Go On, has the virtue of an extremely diverse cast, but falls immediately into stereotype humor. Kim Whitely is Juanita, the African-American nurse who keeps George and Dorothy’s menagerie of a hospital running with some semblance of order. Betsy Sodaro is Angela, who because she is somewhat heavier and less conventionally pretty than Swisher, must by the laws of dumb comedy be oversexed, weird, and loud. “I am not peeing in a cup unless it’s for money. Or love,” she tells Dorothy. And as Dr. Yamomoto, Bobby Lee is moderately less stereotypical than Matthew Moy’s Han Lee on 2 Broke Girls, though that may simply be because he’s a doctor rather than a diner owner and because Animal Practice hasn’t been on the air long enough to joke about his penis. Animal Practice literally has him tell Dorothy “You’re a really bad lady. You’re worse than my wife. But you’re really sexy,” as if being Asian-American means that you can achieve a veterinary degree but only basic command of English.

I don’t like to judge comedies on their pilots, but Animal Practice is throwing up a lot of warning signs for me. A diverse cast should be a chance to have a richer show, rather than to check boxes and revert to stereotype humor. Jerks need justification, and to be humbled sometimes. And if the biggest selling point on your show is a monkey, that doesn’t show much trust in your stories about humans, or the talented people who have agreed to play them.

It’s been a year when many of the people whose art shaped my childhood and young adult years, from Maurice Sendak to Nora Ephron, have shuffled off this mortal coil, but I was particularly sad to learn this weekend of the death of Jean Merrill, who wrote books that treated children as if they were more than capable of thinking about politics. If Sendak trusted children to reckon with the fact that the world could be a frightening place and that they had responsibilities within it, Merrill expected her young readers to have worldviews and ideas and allegiances.

Her best, most famous book, The Pushcart War is almost entirely out of print now, which is a shame, both because it’s a terrific, detailed allegory for urban politics, and one in which children play a critical role. In that novel, New York City’s pushcart peddlers find their livelihood, and indeed their lives, under threat with the introduction of bigger trucks by a number of trucking companies. The trucks block the spaces where they sell their goods, and have started pushing and injuring peddlers who refuse to relinquish the spaces that have been theirs for years. The trucking companies, of course, have financial sway with the mayor, so the peddlers begin a lobbying campaign that involves everything from a civil disobedience and sabotage campaign that sends one of their number to prison, a high-stakes poker game with the mayor and trucking moguls that creates a fund to support the peddlers’ activities, the enlistment of a pretty but dippy celebrity, and the independent mobilization of children on the pushcarts’ behalf.

The pushcart peddlers, as it turns out, played a significant role in city children’s lives, selling them toys and snacks, and acting as part of a community safety net while their parents were at work. That adult politicians and businessmen fail to see their interests and the possibility of their mobilization opens space for New York children to assert their loyalties and preferences, and helps shift the campaign. It’s a great long-term story about organizing, and one that provides a great template for children to think about the conditions that govern their homes, schools, and parks as political issues every bit as worthy as the adult interests that tend to govern decision-making.

Then, there’s The Toothpaste Millionaire. The story of a friendship between a white girl and an African-American boy, it’s another story about the ability of children to see opportunities that adults miss, and their ability to shift markets and communities when they’re underestimated. Rufus Mayflower, the main character of The Toothpaste Millionaire, in a series of events narrated by Kate Mackinstrey, his best friend, gets irritated by the price of tubed toothpaste and sets himself the challenge of manufacturing a gallon of a similarly effective product for the same cost. It’s a funny little story, but like The Pushcart War, an allegory about corporate complacency, and about respect for what children can accomplish in their own communities.

We trust children and young adults to handle a wide array of concepts, from choosing your family as an adult in the Twilight novels to torture and bigotry in the Harry Potter series. But there’s something odd about the standard demurral of young adult fiction to engage with political and economic systems, except in a cursory or fantastical way that’s at a remove from the levers of power in our own society. Children are affected by politics long before we give them a voting say in them. And if they can advocate for the right for their parents to marry or act as symbols of the need for health care reform, it would be nice if more authors followed Merrill’s lead and treated their readers as citizens.

This post contains spoilers through the August 12 episode of Breaking Bad.

As we march towards the conclusion of Breaking Bad, I’ve started watching the show like an augur, reading every line of dialogue for potential clues to the future. Hank’s calling Holly “my girl” could foreshadow his getting a half-formed wish through terrible means. The weird poetry of Hank’s praise of Marie’s therapist to Walt, faking grief for his own advantage, “they come in like zombies, out like larks,” makes me wonder what kind of creature Skyler might emerge as if she survives her time at Walt’s side. And that tarantula that begins and ends the episode, lethally dangerous but bumping impotently against the lid of the jar in which it’ll bake to death, is a miniature of the man who knocks, a reminder that Walt has been able to barge into all sorts of doors, but someday, he might find himself without a way of the house he’s built for himself.

As devastating as the end of this episode was, Todd’s genial smile and wave turned swiftly to murder, I felt like there was also a moral correctness to it. Breaking Bad has spent a lot of time letting us enjoy watching its characters pull off elaborate heists. If anything, that’s the show’s signature means of getting us to feel emotionally attached to behavior we’d find immediately criminal and easy to judge if it was pulled off with less style, be it the bodies Walt and Jesse dissolve in chemicals and ship off into the great unknown, their mobile cook setup, or their attack on evidence control. Jesse’s “yeah, bitch,” is one of the show’s signature catchphrases, and his exultation at their innovative successes is one of the show’s few repeated positive emotions.

Breaking Bad‘s been working up to a reckoning with the consequences of that cleverness, though. The team’s ingenious plan to wipe Gus’s laptop inadvertently revealed the clue that led Hank to Mike, putting increased pressure on Mike personally, and on the triumvirate of Walt, Mike, and Jesse. Now, they’ve brought tragedy down on themselves in a direct and immediate way, and it’s clearly traceable to Walt’s arrogance. If he’d heeded Mike’s instructions, not only would Jesse not have had to endure an agonizing wait beneath a moving train, but their exultations might have wrapped up such that Walt, Jesse, and Todd wouldn’t have been high on the adrenaline of victory, and they might have looked like nothing more than a couple of working class adults messing about in the desert. Instead, there’s blood, and a critically important spur to the show’s future action.
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