Memo to Brian De Palma, and folks who want to follow in the footsteps of Darren Aronofsky. Sometimes, when women have competitive or power-imbalanced relationships, we solve them in ways that don’t involve making out with each other in highly aestheticized settings!

There is something really weird about the assumption that women who are rivals work that ish out by hate-banging each other. It’s almost as if men think we don’t have other skills or resources to deploy on each other, or on them.

I’m going on vacation next week, but we’ll start up again with the first three episodes of Season Three of The Wire on September 11. There’s also a spoiler for this week’s episode of Breaking Bad in this post.

After watching this week’s Breaking Bad, I’ve been thinking about moments that are not precisely suicidal, but when characters approach death or the possibility of it, even if they don’t acknowledge that’s precisely what they’re doing. There’s a lot of that in Mike’s trip down to the river in Breaking Bad, in Frank Sobotka’s rendezvous with Vondas and The Greek, in Nicky’s attempt to murder his old self with his shooting of George Glekas, in Omar’s plan to kill a man and reckoning with the responsibility of using that power according to his code. In the Steve Earle song that closes the third season, the singer promises to “bring you precious contraband / And ancient tales from distant lands,” but for all that the lyric is a way of encapsulating that this is about the shipping business, and for all that this is another season that ends with the limitations of federal prosecution and local resources, the local’s reelection of Frank is both a political manuever and a reckoning with that larger question: it’s a form of suicide.

Ziggy’s act of murder is the clearest act of self-destruction in these violent final three episodes. “We had a deal motherfucker. A deal. You listen to me. It was my fucking ass out there on the line,” he tells George, who has cut the percentage he’s paying the younger man for stolen cars. “You don’t play me like that. You don’t.” But he does, of course, and because Ziggy can’t kill the part of himself that gets played, that gets talked into fighting Maui and that buys a duck and then can’t keep it alive, he kills George instead. “I got tired,” he tells his father in jail. “I got tired of being a punchline to every joke.” Murder may not have freed Ziggy of that tendency, but it’s given him a permanent role and a uniform, an orange jumpsuit instead of a leather coat, his hands behind his back instead of flailing at windmills.

For Brother Mouzone, killing itself is his identity. Cheese makes the mistake of assuming it’s Islam, asking “You slingin’ bean pies up in hear or something?” But Mouzone clarifies quickly that it’s the instruments of his trade, the plastic bullet he shoots Cheese with first, “what’s seated in the chamber now,” the “nine at close range” that Omar shoots him with, leaving a relatively clean wound. He may talk about the dangers of “a nigger with a library card,” and complain about his magazines, but these things are not what Mouzone is. And he and Omar recognize each other in the moment that Omar shoots Mouzone on the basis of bad information from the Barksdale crew. Omar’s insistence that “See, that boy was beautiful. Wasn’t no need for y’all to do him the way you did,” may be sentimental, but his decision to call 911 is in keeping with those articulated ethics. Death and violence are powerful tools. They shouldn’t be wasted or misused, and if they are, the mistakes, if at all possible, should be corrected.

Frank and Nicky are men who think they understand force and violence up against men who truly do. Nicky may have the car and a roll of cash, but he’s child in certain fundamental ways, living in his parents’ basement, retreating to the playground and a childhood friend and a bottle when Ziggy ruins his life. When he threatens to kill the Greeks after Frank’s death, it’s a child’s threat, wheeling arms and shouting, rather than actual plan of attack. He reaches manhood when he has the sense to fear Vondas and the Greek, to take them down from a police station rather than under a bridge. It’s a good thing. Sergei may be in jail, still complaining about being nicknamed Boris, but he’s a man who explains matter-of-factly that a shepard broke the rules he needed to traffic women successful, the product died, and he needed to be killed to close the circle. Sergei may not be a killer in the way that Omar and Brother Mouzone are killers, but he walks the same line they do. It’s Johnny Cash singing that line about love at the beginning of the first of these three episodes. But in the world of The Wire, death is what needs to be finessed, even more than life and all its possibilities.

Recent reports that the National Basketball Association’s Sacramento Kings were considering — and set to announce — an imminent move to Virginia Beach, Virginia appear premature. The report, which came initially from Inside Business, sent shockwaves around the sports world, given that Virginia Beach has never appeared on the list of possible destinations for the Kings, a franchise that has listed nearly every other city in North America as a potential suitor.

Virginia Beach, as Matt Yglesias noted, may not be a bad future destination for an NBA franchise. Connecting the dots in the roll-out of this story, however, makes it look like little more than a coordinated attempt to get Virginia Beach’s city council to finance an expensive arena project for a hypothetical NBA franchise that may never come to the city.

There are the corporate giants who want a new arena in Virginia Beach and already had a plan in place to build one — they were so excited by the “news” that the Kings were considering Virginia Beach, they were able to schedule their pitch to the city council for tomorrow, less than a week after the initial report. They have already enlisted a respected economics professor from a local university to study the economic impact an arena would have on the city, an element any good pitch needs.

What the corporations were missing were the major franchise they promised would move. Enter the Kings and their billionaire owners, the Maloofs, who are so desperate to extort a state-of-the-art arena from someone that they seem willing to move virtually anywhere on Earth to do it. And the “news” was mutually beneficial: it sent Sacramento, the city that promised the Kings a new $391 million arena only to watch the Maloofs walk away, into a tizzy.

The way it has all played out would seem enough to make Virginia Beach take a step back and realize that it is a pawn in the corporate welfare chess match that has become professional sports, but it wasn’t. So lest Virginia Beach think it has an exclusive date to the arena-extortion prom, a quick reality check: the Kings have reportedly considered moves to at least three cities, including Anaheim, San Diego, and Las Vegas, and at least three others — Louisville, Seattle, and Kansas City — have been widely mentioned as potential landing spots if the franchise decides to move. A few of those cities already have a taxpayer-financed arena, others, like Virginia Beach, would have to shell out public money to build a modern-day Colosseum that is enough to satisfy the Maloofs, at least for the next decade or so.

Virginia Beach could certainly use an infusion of taxpayer dollars into its economy, though they’d be better spent if the city were to restore the millions of dollars in education cuts that jeopardized junior varsity sports, the jobs of hundreds of teachers, and the futures of thousands of students earlier this year.

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R), an ardent opponent of government stimulus that actually works, is now throwing his weight behind corporate welfare that doesn’t, using a spokesperson to say that the arena will “benefit the local and state economy and spur job creation in the region.” Recent studies, however, have shown that NBA arenas don’t create jobs and don’t provide a path to economic development; in fact, it’s likely they do the opposite, diverting government resources from projects that would actually help local economies to provide a massive corporate welfare check to billionaires like the Maloofs and corporations like Comcast-Spectacor, the $30-billion-a-year behemoth that wants to build the Virginia Beach arena.

That diversion has taken place in cities like Atlanta, where public schools are weathering millions of dollars in budget cuts even as the National Football League’s Atlanta Falcons are asking for a new stadium. And it would happen in Virginia Beach, which slashed its public education budget this year, jeopardizing the jobs of hundreds of teachers and the futures of thousands of students.

There’s only one piece missing from the typical arena story, and that is that the Maloofs will eventually get their Taj Mahal, whether from Sacramento, Virginia Beach, or another city willing to sign its taxpayers onto an arena project that will leave them drowning in debt without any of the promised economic prosperity. And then, while that city isn’t looking, it will become tomorrow’s Sacramento: a town doing everything it can to help greedy billionaires who are looking for their next handout from any city that will give it to them.

The bridge is yours.

-The idea of a national hip-hop museum is a pretty good one, especially if it aims to be a comprehensive video and audio archive.

-Gorgeous breakdowns of the Willow comics covers.

-And speaking of the Buffy-verse, Marti Noxon is developing a show for Showtime.

-The idea of the CW airing a political fixer show is the funniest thing I’ve heard in ages.

-On the other hand, I really can’t wait for The Girl:

About a month ago, I wrote about young adult author Cassandra Clare’s insistence that a character in her The Mortal Instruments series, Magnus Bane, whose Asianness is a major part of his identity be played by an Asian or Asian-American actor. Now that Taiwanese-Canadian model Godfrey Gao’s been cast in the role, actor Edward Zo’s made a video about the significance of the casting (the key parts run from about 1:10 to 7:00):

Of the points he makes, I think two are particularly critical. First, is that young adult fiction is a particularly important place to set standards and expectations. Readers or viewers who grow up invested in romances between gay characters, or who see non-white people as sex symbols, create markets for both broad categories of characters and specific actors. Sometimes, those attachments can be overwhelming, and unfair, as has been the case with Kristen Stewart, when she diverted from the insane expectations fans had placed on her. But if it means getting an Asian actor work, and work on an entirely different set of terms, that could be a powerful force for good.

And that leads to the other point Zo’s making: that the terms on which Asian men are given work needs to change, given that the hypercompetence they’re often granted can be as much a straightjacket as a display of awesomeness. Rational nerds get stripped of their sexuality. Ninjas get stripped of all of their other personality components. Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon‘s Li Mu Bai was the rare Asian warrior character to reach a mass American audience who also got to love a woman passionately, his repressed desire playing out as a grand, Jane Austen-style tragedy. Asian actors—as do actors and characters of all races—deserve a chance to be more than one thing at once, to be smart as part of their desirability, to be competent in pursuit of deeply-held goals, and to screw up without being pathetic.

As my colleague Igor Volsky noted yesterday, one of NBC’s Utah affiliate has decided not to air Glee creator Ryan Murphy’s new sitcom, The New Normal, about a gay couple who decide to have a child by surrogate because, ““For our brand, this program simply feels inappropriate on several dimensions, especially during family viewing time.” This doesn’t actually strike me as particularly surprising. But I think the channel might have made the decision for different ones than we might expect.

I’ve only seen the pilot of The New Normal, but other than the fact that the show depicts a gay couple in a partnership who want to have a child, it’s not a particularly challenging depiction. The couple conform to butch-femme stereotypes. They don’t have much in the way of sexual chemistry. People who dislike gay couples will not enjoy a show that insists in the most obvious possible terms that they’re here, they’re conforming as quickly as possible, get used to it. But I think it’s less challenging, at least thus far, than something like Glee, which equated a gay teenaged couple losing their virginity with a straight one, or even The Wire, which gave a lesbian couple on the baby track an actual erotic life.

But what I think is narrowly effective about The New Normal, and that might make the affiliate’s audience most uncomfortable, is that it shows bigotry as directly hurtful to the people in range of it. For most of the pilot, Jane (Ellen Barkin), an older divorced woman, is an outrageous caricature of a biased person, who speaks aloud what for most people is subtext or subconscious fear, rather than having her anti-gay views and her racism subtly inflect her thinking, bubbling up in surprising ways that leave everyone around her on edge. But the people around her do a nice job of acting out the pain her outrageous statements cause them. She acts as a roadblock in her daughter Goldie’s (Georgia King) efforts to better herself the one way she believes she can—Goldie is a young single mother—by carrying another couple’s child for a large, one-time fee that would allow her to attend law school. Jane is mean to the gay couple (Justin Bartha and Andrew Rannells) who choose Goldie to be their surrogate. Even when she doesn’t mean to, Jane inadvertently ends up coming across as racist to one of the men’s assistant (Nene Leakes). Jane’s views are more disruptive and hurtful than the act of two men building a family together.

And that, I think, is the real reason conservative viewers might be uncomfortable with The New Normal. It’s one thing to find gay couples distasteful or upsetting, but if you believe that gay people and the people who accept them are aberrant and easily confined to places that are far away from you, they don’t represent much threat. But if your views make you the dangerous, damaging, abnormal person, then it’s much more reasonable to feel threatened and upset.

This post contains spoilers through the August 26 episode of Breaking Bad. I’ll be on vacation and may not have the ability to watch next week’s episode, though if I do, I’ll blog it.

Earlier in this season of Breaking Bad, Jesse asked Walter White if a meth empire was really something to be proud of. At the beginning of this episode, Walt’s belief that it was gave him a powerful tool to extract respect from the kind of men he once feared. By the end of it, he was beginning to realize the limitations of the thing he is the best at.

“I’m the man who’s keeping it,” Walt told Mike’s contact. “Yours is just some tepid, off-brand generic cola. What I’m making is Classic Coke…Do you really want to live in a world without Coca-Cola?…You’ve got the greatest, no, the two greatest meth cooks in America right here…You all know exactly who I am. Say my name…I’m the cook. I’m the man who killed Gus Fring.” All of these things are absolutely true: Walt’s meth is powerful, and pure, only he can make it, many people want to buy it, and he is a killer. But while Walt’s narrowed his universe to match that set of facts, and to construct circumstances in which those facts override all other considerations, not everyone has decided to join him there. If he’s Satan, he’s rebelled without being sure of his legions in his war on God, and conventional morality, and Grey Matter.

There’s Skyler, who is collaborating, but not shutting up. “Walt. What is this?” she asks him when he and Jesse come to stash the chemicals at the car wash. “Why are you hiding it here?…Who are you hiding it from? From the police? Or someone else? Someone who would kill for it?” Walt tells her to go back into the office, but her appearance there is marked by a subtler and more potentially important exchange: the first moment when Skyler and Jesse have been in agreement. “Hey, Mrs. White,” Jesse tells her, including her in the courtesy he’s always extended to Walt. Noticing her looking at the truck, he reads the name of the company: “Vamanos.” “I wish,” Skyler tells him, relying on a literal reading of the word. I’ve long wanted to see an alliance between Skyler and Jesse, who are both deeply entangled in Walt’s affairs, both increasingly angry at him, and who, between them, could paint the most complete portrait of Walt’s affairs of any characters who remain living.

But if that’s to happen, Jesse will need to extricate, root and branch, the hold Walt has on him. And as their bond slipped this week on the way to the events that must surely sunder any sympathy Jesse has for his former teacher, Walt resorted to an accusation even uglier than the ones that he’s made about Skyler. “Look at you. What have you got in your life? Nothing. Nobody. Oh, wait, yes. Video games and go-karts,” Walt told Jesse. “And when you get tired of that, what then? And how soon will you start using again? Look. Look I know how upset you are about what happened to this boy. I am just as upset as you are…Do I have to lock myself in a room and get high to prove it to you?” That Walt’s turned cooking meth into Jesse’s program of recovery is a sickeningly beautiful example of his inversion of conventional morality.
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