I had a nice time at New York Comic Con this year, but Mandy Caruso, an illustrator and (clearly very talented) costume designer who was cosplaying as Black Cat at the convention….did not. She’s described some of the unattractive, but still, sadly routine gawking and requests to pose for photographs she experienced. But things apparently got really bad when she was asked by what appeared to be a legitimate media outlet for an interview. This is what happened:

Him: Damn, alright! Well let me ask you an important question then…what is your cup size?
Me: (big talk show smile) That is actually none of your fucking business.
Him: Oh! I think that means to say she’s a C.
Me: I actually have no breasts at all, what you see is just all of the fat from my midsection pulled up to my chest and carefully held in place with this corset. It’s really uncomfortable, I don’t know why I do it.
Him: (to the male crowd) Aw, come on what do you guys think? C cup?
—a few males start to shout out cup sizes as I stand there looking at this guy like this has to be a fucking joke, then look at the crowd and see that no amount of witty banter or fiestiness will stop making this whole thing fucking dumb. It was clearly a ploy to single out cosplaying women to get them to talk sexual innuendos and flirt with this asshole and let him talk down to them simply because they were in costume and were attractive. Whether I’m in a skintight catsuit or not, I’m a fucking professional in everything I do and I don’t need to play nice for this idiot.
Me: This is not an interview, this is degrading. I’m done. (I walk away)
Him: (clearly dumbfounded and surprised) ..Come on, it’s all in good fun!
Me: Being degraded is fun? That was unprofessional and I hope that isn’t your day job because you can’t interview for shit, my man.

Caruso has declined to name the news organization whose staffer did this. But I wish she would. It’s going to take a very long time to shift the culture of fan communities. But at minimum, no respectable conference or event should ever credential this staffer, and the organization that would have seen fit to publish an interview like this. The whole point of a credentials process is to weed out people who intend to provide serious coverage of an event and people who are just abusing a shot at getting free admission to a place where they can ogle women.

It’s a great coup for the Alfred E. Smith Foundation, named for the Progressive, wet politician and first Catholic presidential candidate, that its annual fundraising dinner has become a mandatory stop on the presidential campaign trail. And it’s good for us for reasons of politics, if not of comedy, that we get to see President Obama and Mitt Romney show off what they think they need to lock down in the final weeks of the presidential campaign.

First, there’s President Obama, who chose to focus his jokes for the evening on the most ridiculous news stories of the campaign cycle in an implicit critique of the media and a funny, likable act of self-deprecation:

Perhaps most importantly, Obama went confidently after his performance in the first debate. “I felt well-rested after the nice long nap I had in the first debate,” he joked. And he went on to “apologize to Chris Matthews. Four years ago I gave him a thrill up his leg. This time, I gave him a stroke.” He made the crack that a lot of other people made that evening, telling the crowd that “I learned there are worse things that can happen to you on your anniversary than forgetting to buy a gift.” It was a comprehensively self-aware dissection of his own performance, one that was aimed at dispelling lingering doubts about where his head was in the first debate, and reassuring the audience that he was fired up for the final debate before the election.

Obama’s other jokes were a sly tour through the campaign’s most frivolous moments. “I went shopping at some stores in Midtown,” he said of how he spent his day in New York. “I understand Governor Romney went shopping for some stores in midtown,” a riff of Romney’s explanations about his friends who were NFL and NASCAR owners. Obama explained that he stopped by “The House That Ruth Built, though he really did not build that. I hope everybody’s aware of that.” He explained that though the campaign season felt endless, “Paul Ryan assured me we’ve only been running for two hours and 57 minutes.” The closest he came to an attempt to score substantive points was a riff about the economy. “I don’t have a joke here,” he said in a hanging punchline. “I just thought it would be useful to remind everybody that the unemployment rate’s at the lowest level since I took office.”

Romney, by contrast, spent more time on attempts to land hits on Obama:

Read more

Two weeks ago, the Kansas City Star drew attention when the paper’s public editor explained the paper’s long-standing policy against using “Redskins” when referring to Washington’s National Football League franchise. The name, public editor Derek Donovan wrote, is “an egregiously offensive term.”

Last week, the Washington City Paper, DC’s alt-weekly newspaper, announced that it also would no longer refer to the team as the “Redskins.” And the City Paper, which has a contentious history with the franchise and its owner Daniel Snyder, went a step farther by posting an online poll so readers could choose a name the City Paper would use to identify the team instead:

Washington City Paper is unilaterally renaming the local NFL team to avoid using its racist nickname any longer. Last week, we solicited your suggestions, and this week, you can vote on the new name. Whichever one wins, that’ll be how City Paper refers to the team from now on, in print and online.

The final choices the paper gave readers were all derived from local landmarks or popular references. In the end, the Washington Pigskins (aka “The Hogs,” an homage to the team’s 1980s-era offensive line) won, beating out the Washington Half-Smokes, the Washington Monuments, the Washington Bammas, and my personal favorite, the Washington Washingtons, which I find so ridiculous that applying it to an actual pro football team is a perfect way to highlight the inanity of continuing to use “Redskins.”

Is Dan Snyder going to give in and change the team’s name because the Washington City Paper, a publication he hates, doesn’t like it? Doubtful. But if Snyder, the NFL, and a large swath of the sports media are all fine with using a racial epithet to describe a football team, the City Paper and its readers figure they’ll have some fun over it. That’s a different strategy than the one employed by the Kansas City Star, but it’s one that will bring more attention to the issue in a city that is at least starting to become a little more aware of the problem.

The bridge is yours.

-What happens when Kickstarter projects get funded, but don’t get finished?

-I co-sign Maureen Ryan’s endorsement of Cinemax’s Hunted.

-The top celebrity donors to the presidential campaigns.

-Get ready: Justice League v. Avengers 2 in 2015.

-Save The Date is, without question, my favorite romantic comedy of the year:

I wrote earlier this week about American Horror Story: Asylum, and how for me, the show is most effective when it brings out the monstrous in human behavior rather than when it trots out the whole, bloody bag of horror tricks. But as always, I enjoyed talking to my podcast partner Asawin Suebsaeng of Mother Jones, who’s much, much fonder of scary violence than I am, and hearing what he has to say about the show’s execution:

Also in this week’s edition: more on Alex Cross and discussions of Happy Endings and Don’t Trust The B—- In Apartment 23, which blessed event I am so ridiculously excited for.

“Can you stop talking about politics and be a cop, please?” Detective Alex Cross (Tyler Perry) snaps at his boss, high-ranking cop Richard Brookwell (John C. McGinley) near the end of Alex Cross, an adaptation of James Patterson’s novel Cross, about a brilliant, African-American detective. In the immediate context, Cross is asking his boss to be more aggressive in his efforts to protect Leon Mercier (Jean Reno), an industrialist who is heading up the Detroit Fund, a major effort to revitalize the failing city, from Picasso (Matthew Fox), a dedicated and unnervingly skilled assassin. But much of Alex Cross raises the question of what it means to be a pop cultural cop at a deeper level, and reaches some disturbing answers.

In movies and television, being a detective or beat cop has often meant that you can break rules, beat or threaten suspects, shoot people and almost always get away with it after a semblance of a review—and even if you don’t, you can retain the audience’s sympathies. In Alex Cross, it also means that you can beat your colleagues, steal evidence, drop a murderer off a roof rather than bring him to trial, and frame someone for a death penalty offense without regret or compunction. From a liberal perspective, it’s always made sense to be skeptical of glamorizations of this kind of power for reasons of both self-protection and principle. There’s no question that much of the popular appeal of tough cops lies in the fact that their violence and corruption is deployed against people who are coded as distasteful or decadent, be they people of color who are presented as gang-bangers or terrorists, or hippies who are harbingers of anarchy a la Dirty Harry. And while it’s easier to dismiss these violations of the order when these tactics are turned on people we’ve been taught to hate and fear by people movies and television tell us we can trust, if we bother to think clearly, it’s awful to imagine that brutality straying beyond what we’ve defined as acceptable targets—which should tell us how awful it no matter who is the subject of renegade police violence.

Alex Cross spends a great deal of time establishing its titular character as someone we can trust to deploy violence, and to transgress the rules that constrain him in his work as a police detective. He believes in rehabilitation and innocence, visiting a young prisoner who’s taken the rap for two murders committed by her uncle, who tells him “You can’t save everybody, Doctor Cross,” only to have him remind her that “I’m not trying to save everybody. I’m just trying to save you.” He is an intellectual, a man who plays chess in the prison yard by starlight, and who offers his daughter suggestions for how to improvise during her piano practice. He is a loving father, one who is delighted when he finds out his wife is unexpectedly pregnant, and plans to transfer to a desk job with the FBI so he’ll be able to earn a better living and stop risking his own safety on the streets. He is affectionate with his mother-in-law, Mama (Cicely Tyson), who appears to be channeling Ruby Dee’s performance as the mother of drug lord Frank Lucas in American Gangster, if with somewhat staticky reception. If nothing else, it’s a virtue that Alex Cross makes so transparent the process of cinematically signaling who is a legitimate employer of extreme violence and legal manipulation and who is a legitimate target of those abuses.

The targets, in this case, are a constellation of decadent white men, and two Asian women the movie treats with astonishingly callous disregard. The first of these men is Picasso, who enters the movie by putting himself on a card for a cage fight that’s being held in an abandoned church, and betting heavily on his own performance. If that weren’t enough of a signifier that Picasso has deviated from commonly-held sensibilities and morality, he’s swiftly revealed to be a sexual sadist. Picasso takes home an attractive Asian woman he met at the fight, but when they’re in bed, he asks her “Do you like it?” When she says yes, he tells her “Well, I can’t have that,” and proceeds to paralyze her and cut off her fingers one by one to torture information out of her. “There is no way it takes all ten fingers,” Cross’s partner and boyhood friend Tommy (Edward Burns) declares at the crime scene the next day. “The other nine were for fun,” Cross tells him. That they later make a macabre joke out of using her severed fingers to open her safe apparently isn’t meant to sully our respect or affection for Tommy and Alex, though we are, of course, supposed to be revolted at the man who committed the initial violence against her.
Read more

This post discusses plot details from the October 18 episode of Parks and Recreation.

After a couple of rocky episodes that made me feel like Parks and Recreation was recycling old material rather than moving forward in expanding the world of the show or demonstrating how Leslie’s new job in Pawnee and Ben and April’s stint in Washington would affect their existing relationships with Pawnee figures. But I thought this episode was, if not a revolution for the show, a step forward, bringing new information about familiar characters and featuring a number of characters acknowledging problems that will drive plotlines further in the season.

Parks and Recreation is often at its best when Leslie is forced to compromise or violate her values, which was the case tonight when she starts teaching a sex education class and gets shut down by town scold Marcia, who points out that a city law prevents Pawnee employees from teaching anything but abstinence education. The fact that it’s seniors makes Marcia’s position a transparent farce, especially since, in keeping with Pawnee’s slight surrealism, it sounds like Pawnee’s retirees have more active sex lives than most people in their twenties. “I have two partners, often at the same time,” one older lady tells Leslie. Others, naming the risks of unprotected sex, list “Heart attack,” and the rather pragmatic “Partner dies on top of you!” The team is on the case—and good Lord do I want to see Donna finish putting a condom on a pineapple and explaining what “this scenario” is—when Marcia shuts them down, with a regretful assist from Chris.

There’s an extent to which Marcia’s obviously gay husband Marshall feels like a bit of an obvious piece of information to reveal about Pawnee’s main moralist. But in a way, it works, because the way Marshall’s presented suggests that Marcia may not be denial so much as she is avoiding sex herself. “Perd, we strongly believe in teaching, and practicing, abstinence,” she says on television. And Marshall, in an abstinence-focused redo of Leslie’s initial workshop, raps “I waited until marriage and then some to do it / If you decide to sin, you’ll rue it / Word.” In a way it makes me like Marcia a bit more to imagine that what makes her happy is hanging out with her fabulous husband, cooking up trouble for all the people in Pawnee who are more obsessed with getting laid than they are, as an asexual prankster rather than a true believer.
Read more