Game of Thrones: Being A Princess Is A Rough Gig

As I've said before, Game of Thrones* is pretty much the damndest show. It indulges in soft porn exploitation along side some of the most interesting and well drawn female characters on television. Its racial politics are, to say the least, problematic. The dragons are a delight. All the business up at the GoT version of Hadrian's Wall (as well as, as Lindy West put it, the parts that are Wall adjacent), are so painfully dull, I can hardly bother to follow the plot points. It's War of the Roses fan fiction and it's one of the only modern dramatic portrayals of monarchy that actually understands how monarchy works. I might be bored senseless at The Wall, but the parts set at King's Landing is pretty much my favorite show ever.

Many years ago I wrote a play about the wives of Henry VIII, and one of the most important things I learned is that contrary to what all the fairy tales have been telling us, being a princess was a very rough gig. It's been pointed out that the heroines of most fairy tales are very much a peasant's idea of a princess, with their wish fulfillment and autonomy and princesshood as prize. I'm not saying that anyone's life was particularly easy in early modern and pre-modern times (it wasn't), but the privileges held by princesses came at an enormous price. They were used and valued as diplomatic chess pieces, often sent at a very young age to far away places, often to places where they didn't speak the language to live among people who might not care for them or may even be openly hostile. Depending on the individuals involved, they might or might not be expected to immediately have sex with a much older stranger whose language they might not speak very well. If things don't work out for whatever reason (that reason mostly being that you don't give birth to living sons), you will be completely blamed, with possible disastrous repercussions.

Game of Thrones does an extraordinary job of showing what being caught in that particular trap must have looked like and felt like. Some flail, some are lucky, some are doomed, some do their best to turn it to their advantage, some become monsters. In this post, I'm going to take a look at the various Game of Thrones princesses in the context of some possible real life counterparts. Needless to say, spoilers abound, if you care about that sort of thing.

Sansa Stark. Oh, poor Sansa. She obviously exists in the Game of Thrones universe to be used as a political pawn and as a receptacle of misfortune. Her situation was also a sadly common one for Medieval and Renaissance princesses - betrothed to someone important for dynastic purposes, shipped off somewhere far from home, and then (as they usually do) allegiances shift, the marriage is no longer advantageous and the princess is stuck. Catherine of Aragon faced a similar situation after the death of her husband Arthur - at sixteen she was stranded in England and mostly penniless. She had to beg for funds from the crown for food and fuel. One thing I really like about how Sansa is portrayed on the show is that she's so ordinary. She's a typical young teenager, who wants to marry someone handsome and kind and have a nice, happy life without particularly understanding what any of those things mean. She grew up observing her parents' mostly happy (arranged, dynastic) marriage and wrongly assumed that was how things inevitably work out, rather than seeing it as a happy, but hard won, accident.

The historical princess she most resembles is Elizabeth of York, I think - the Starks are the obvious Yorkish counterpart in the Game of Thrones universe and I'm assuming the resemblance is intentional. Daughter of King Edward IV and sister of the murdered princes in The Tower, Elizabeth grew up in the middle of the violent late stages of the Wars of the Roses as the Yorks and Tudors fought for the crown. After her Uncle Richard was killed in battle, she was married off to the newly crowned King Henry VII, uniting the two warring houses and launching the Tudor Dynasty. But, can you imagine it? Like Sansa, she was a great heiress (and had a far better claim to the throne than Henry) and married a man whose relatives had been murdering her relatives for years. But, here's the thing. Henry VII was a decent man, and by royal, late medieval standards it was a happy marriage. At the end of Season 3, Sansa was married off to Tyrion Lannister, a much older dwarf and son of the House that murdered most of her family. But, like Henry, Tyrion is a decent man, and for the first time in a long time, the person most responsible for her intends to protect her from harm. I have no confidence that things will stay remotely happy in the future (that would be boring, plotwise), but as they stand now, she is far better off than when she was betrothed to the odious Joffrey.

Margaery Tyrell is so much fun. I really hope she isn't murdered any time soon so we can see what it is exactly she's up to. She's an excellent example of a professional princess - one who grew up smart and savvy observing how government and power work, and in a society where women's only way of acquiring it is via marriage she does her best to work within the system to achieve her ends. Her family (as represented by her grandmother, delightfully played by Diana Rigg in full Maggie Smith mode) seems to be completely on board - much as the Boleyns were, embracing the fact that this clever, pretty princess is their best bet for achieving riches and glory. King Joffrey is an evil, creepy, deeply stupid little psychopath who won't listen to anybody, but Margaery just sweeps in and is pretty much calling the shots within minutes and making him like it. I have no idea if she is actually good and kind or if she just wishes to appear so in order to become both beloved and powerful, but either way, kindnesses get done.**

Both King Joffrey and King George II of the House of Bush bear resemblance to the unfortunate Henry VI. Henry was an objectively terrible King who spent his reign having nervous breakdowns and surrounding himself with greedy advisors who gutted the country while massively enriching themselves and letting the actual country they were supposed to be running fall completely apart. This lead to a long, bloody civil war with the Lancasters on one side, ostensibly lead by the young, foolish King Henry, and the Yorks on the other, the powerful northern dynasty who after years of insults and bad behavior on the Lancasterian side, were pushed to the brink. I'm sure this all sounds awfully familiar, but the point I'm getting to is this: with a weak, incompetent king on the throne, the Lancasterian side was mostly being led by Henry's extraordinary wife, Margaret of Anjou. Shortly after their marriage, Margaret proved herself one of the few people in the inner circle around the king who was capable, or willing to actually run the country. Her family was broke, but royal, saw an opening and took it. Within months of their marriage an 18 year old girl was more or less running the English government. I'm assuming this is what Margery is angling towards. A weak king could be a useful road to power for a smart, ambitious woman who wasn't able to achieve her goals in other ways in a repressive society that barely considered her human.

Cersei Lannister is my favorite. Her story is the story of centuries of unhappy princesses and queens. She is Gwenevere, Agrippina and Catherine de Medici rolled into one monstrous figure. In the book, she's pure evil, which is boring. In the show, she's gloriously complicated. Teenage Cersei was the most beautiful, the richest, the cleverest princess and she got to marry the new handsome King. Who was in love with a dead girl and didn't like or want her, so her power evaporated and she had to submit to a life of cold dislike and drunken marital rape. Her children (products of an incestuous relationship with her twin brother, something that was rumored - slanderously - about Anne Boleyn, too) became her life, and she continued to be the pawn of her powerful, difficult father. Poor Cersei, she just can't win. Unlike Catherine the Great of Russia whose family was either dead or hundreds of miles away, Cersei's is constantly looming over her shoulder, snatching whatever bits of autonomy or power she can manage to claim for herself. No one likes or trusts her much.

Cersei is so much like Catherine de Medici which is something I wouldn't wish on anyone, fictional or otherwise. Catherine was one of the richest heiresses in Europe and was married to the handsome, kind and popular King Henri II of France. Who spent their entire marriage essentially married to his mistress, constantly humiliating her. She plotted and schemed (and possibly poisoned) on her husband's behalf and then, after his death, on her childrens'. Much like Cersei, power eluded her because she lacked the talent for inspiring loyalty and trust in others and making political errors due to short sightedness or anger. The most fascinating part of Cersei's character is that she isn't really monstrous enough. I love the "you're a woman now" speech she gives to Sansa when she gets her period (and is therefore available to marry awful Joffrey), and Cersei basically admits that her son is a monster and the best Sansa can hope for is children to love. One of the most heartbreaking scenes in the entire series is when Cersei's father informs her she's to marry a boy half her age for dynastic purposes. She's an accomplished, middle aged women whose son sits on the throne and she still can't escape the trap into which she was born, and seeing her fight uselessly against the bars of her cage is almost unbearable.

Of course, there are other princesses in the show, more than are contained by a decade or two of Disney movies. Daenerys with her dragons, wandering round the desert on her crusade to free brown people and reconquer a nation of strangers, Arya, who is pure fantasy wish fulfillment (but a really interesting one), poor Catelyn Stark who did what many real life nobles and royals did - settled down more or less happily and created a decent life for their children, and on and on. Unlike in Disney movies or in the dreams of peasants, princesshood was a cage with very narrow parameters that needed to be carefully negotiated. Women have always found ways to transcend them, even if that transcendence was limited, often through the church, or through finally claiming power in their own right as Elizabeth Tudor did. In both of those examples, marriage was the enemy. The trick was being both lucky and savvy enough to sidestep the boundaries, most accurately represented by the bonds of matrimony, but there was still no breaking them. Though, as demonstrated above, some women did live their lives happily and well, working within the parameters set for them, primarily by negotiating marriages of their choosing. Game of Thrones is a product of our world, not theirs, so it shows women like Arya possibly breaking free, something that was impossible in early modern Europe

*Please note: I read the first book and part of the second. I stopped because I was bored. I have found the show to be much more interesting than the books. If you want to argue or talk about the books this really isn't the place.

**Though, am I the only one who wonders if it was Margaery who actually shot Ros with the crossbow at Joffrey's bidding?

James Ellroy and Red Riding 1974

Many, many years ago (before some of you were born, no doubt), I picked up a paperback copy of James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential without knowing anything about it. I liked the cover. I liked hard boiled detective fiction and I liked St. Marks Bookshop - which was still actually on St. Marks Place back at the dawn of the 90s.

Ellroy's L.A. Quartet are the blackest of noir. He uses a gigantic canvas to tell his long, violent story of corruption, crime and the emptiness at the heart of the dreams of post-war Southern California. His style is baroque and deeply profane, troubling to its core.

A few weeks ago the Curtis Hanson directed film of L.A. Confidential aired. Trav and I hadn't seen it in a good long while, so we watched it and it's... fine. But it's awfully clean for a film about the ugliest perversions and the deepest corruption. The movie is a well made, intelligently plotted period piece with some nice performances. It doesn't wear its period particularly comfortably and those suits worn by all those cops look awfully new. It seems a little small compared to the book, which is a different sort of animal entirely. There are two (!) serial killer subplots (both excised in the screenplay), dozens of characters - including many clearly based on real people including Walt Disney (who commits suicide), spanning nearly eight years. When I first read it I was dying to see it as a movie, but thought it was unfilmable. I was right, in order to film it, it had to be cut so far to the bone it had to become a different species entirely.

Most telling, the movie's villain, corrupt police Captain Dudley Smith, is killed at the end. James Cromwell is perfectly cast, but in the movie he is just a villain, a bad man doing bad things. In Ellroy's books he's the devil himself. All human greed and corruption made flesh. And like evil itself, he's unkillable. He can be momentarily neutralized, but never destroyed. In the books, taking down Smith destroys Ed Exely utterly, and Smith still isn't dead.

L.A. Confidential is a perfectly respectable movie, but what it needed was HBO and the fulfilled promise of novelistic storytelling television has given us in the last decade or so.

All this brings me to last night when I watched Red Riding: The Year of Our Lord 1974. I haven't read David Peace's quartet of books of crime, corruption and perversion in Yorkshire in the 1970s and early 80s, but I have a feeling they were given the sort of treatment that would have served Ellroy's books well. Set in Yorkshire (the West Riding, I believe, Brontë country) the landscape is bleak indeed. I don't know it for a certainty, but I wouldn't die of shock if Peace was influenced by Ellroy. Both have police so corrupt, they murder and torture, both contain serial killers who attach the wings of birds to the back of dead children. The film is violent and sometimes hard to watch, but it's awfully beautiful. Filmed in gorgeous 16mm, its period setting is perfect.

Yorkshire is thousands of actual and conceptual miles from sunny L.A., but they share the same corrosive misery, a baroque inescapable violence and doom. The young reporter who ineptly tries to sort out the killings and the corruption and lies that surround him is destroyed utterly. Bam. The end.

Why I Hope The Zombies Win

Hello, fellow consumers of culture!

Last night was the midseason (or season - I'm a child of the 70s and 80s, I find this new habit of seasons just popping up all willy nilly completely baffling) premier of The Walking Dead. The first season was enjoyable, for the most part, with its tense depiction of Atlanta and environs in the immediate aftermath of a zombie apocalypse. The second season really fell apart for me. It's based on a well regarded comic book which I haven't read, and I've heard it's pretty faithful to the original. Since I'm woefully rusty in my blogging skills, I once again present a listicle containing my thoughts on the zombie apocalypse drama.

1. I'm tired of zombies. Really, really tired of them. Has anyone else read Pride & Prejudice & Zombies? Beyond tiresome. But I'm guessing most of the people reading it have missed the glut of zombie related theater I've seen over the past decade. Zombie Shakespeare! Zombie proms (I've seen at least three)! And on and on. And, really, zombies are kind of dull.

2. That said, I am enamored of Carrie Ryan's young adult zombie books which began with The Forest of Hands and Teeth. Primarily because they do what no other zombie apocalypse story (that I've seen) has done: take place a couple of hundred years after the initial zombie contagion has struck and imagined a society in which zombies are a given. She's a lovely writer and she's obviously given this a great deal of thought.

3. That farm is super boring.

4. The Walking Dead has an all-male writing team, which a: is unacceptable, and b: shows.

5. Those scenes in season one in which the women spent all their time doing laundry made me want to put my fist through a wall.

6. The one black male character is written to be a eunuch. All the remaining female characters are white, and the writers of the show behave as if there is zero possibility that he could have a romance with one of them. All he seems to do is to assist the white characters to carry heavy objects or to dig holes. It hasn't seemed to occur to any of them that in their little farm at the end of the world, he might find one of the women, you know, attractive, or maybe would have his own ideas about running things. It's incredibly frustrating to watch.

7. Will a zombie eat that insufferable old guy already? He's just the worst.

8. When all of your action involves multiple trips to the local drug store, you have to know you're doing something wrong.

9. The whole pregnancy storyline really killed the series for me. It's such a potentially potent subject to delve into, and they squandered it. This was where the all-male writing team completely fell down on their job. The pregnancy was entirely viewed from a male or baby-centric POV. Call me crazy, but if I were pregnant in a place with zero medical care or possibly even hand-washing facilities, the thought "OMG, I'm going to die" would be pretty front and center. This was hardly even mentioned.

10. The final nail in the coffin for me was the drama surrounding the morning after pill. There seems to be some MAJOR confusion. The morning after pill is NOT an abortifacient. The morning after pill is emergency contraception. If you are already pregnant (i.e. missing periods, etc. as the woman on the show was) this will not work. The writers of the show are clearly oblivious to this. It angered me when it first aired, but have since heard this same misunderstanding of how The Science works from various Conservative pols who are trying to kill women by taking away their access to health care and choice. So, yeah, this stuff matters. And, no, I'm not going to just enjoy the zombie show and calm down.

11. All the characters are so dull, I'm pretty much just waiting for zombie attacks which makes me feel like a ghoul.

12. I have horrible completion mania, so I'm having trouble not watching. I mean, Season 4 of Alias was just unforgivable and I watched the whole thing.

Tap Your Troubles Away!

A late addition to the National Tap Dancing Day posting frenzy. Gilda Radner on The Muppet Show!

Huge thanks to Jillian Tully for posting this most charming of videos!

SPENT: The Game; or I miss the Connor Family

"This is the game that moves as you play" - The Have Nots, X

This is another entry in my "I don't really play video games but" series.

Early this year, the Urban Ministries of Durham collaborated with an advertising agency on a pretty amazing project. They've put together a video game called Spent that mimics what it's like to negotiate the world when you have had all your middle class safety nets taken away and you are starting from zero. You have no savings and you are an unemployed single parent.

Your first task is to find a job. The first thing I did was try to get a temp job, during which, I promptly (and expectedly) failed the typing test. This has happened before in a much more real life and humiliating setting. So I got a job in a restaurant and had to buy the damn uniform. I opted out of their health insurance plan as I could not afford the premiums. The game says "Better not get sick!". Tell me about it. Fuck you, game.

And the game goes on. Rents are raised unexpectedly. Things go wrong. You get sick. All of this costs money and it inevitably snowballs. You have to make awful choices, like if you are running out of food money, do you take the ten bucks your kid's grandma sent him? I ran out of money on day 6 the first time I played. The game gives the option of "asking a friend for money" via facebook. I didn't try this. Also, in real life, when you are poor, most of the people you know are also going to be poor. Also, no one likes to ask their friends for money.

Being poor is really, really expensive, you see.

Here's the thing, and I'm always shocked how the privileged of this world aren't aware of it (and, really, I'm one of them. But I had the incredibly illuminating early learning experience of growing up around people who were far, far more privileged - for the most part- than I was). This is the deal: if you are a white, abled, middle class/upper middle class person, all you have to do is not fuck up. And then everything will be more or less okay. Of course, awful things can happen to anyone - disease, tragedy, what have you. None of us are immune. But a safety net helps greatly. If you are working class or poor, really, everything has to go right. You have to be smart and lucky and work very hard. To transcend one's milieu, you have to be special in one way or another. If you are rich, you can be kind of average and not work that hard and maybe you won't have the best life ever, but nothing truly disastrous will occur either.

And if you are a poor person, and have bad luck, you are going to be royally screwed. Spent demonstrates this tersely and clearly.

The class based nastiness in our culture seems to be going through a really bad phase. Sneering at poor people seems to have become a national past time. A co-worker this week is going to a "White Trash Party". Which, as far as I can tell, is a bunch of rich people making fun of a bunch of poor people. This is really complicated stuff, entwined with all sorts of issues of race and gender (non-white people and women are more likely to be poor), and lord knows, I don't have any answers. But maybe the first thing we need to do, is to have maybe just a tiny bit of empathy.

Television seems to be going through a particularly vile patch of worthless rich people worship (and much as I love Top Chef: Bravo, will you please just shut the fuck up and go away please?). Occasionally you see a poor or working class person who is presented for the purposes of mockery. There was a pretty great piece up at The Awl the other day about a truly repulsive new TV show called Repo Games which is worth a look. As mentioned here before, Jennifer L. Ponzer's book, Reality Bites Back is pretty much a must read at this point for anyone who has even a passing interest in what we watch. She points out, in great detail, how these shows reinforce a truly regressive version of the status quo. One in which poor people and women are to be ridiculed and to be Paris Hilton's fake BFF is something that one humiliates oneself to be.

Empathy happens when people acknowledge that other people are, like, human. And have exactly the same sorts of feelings they have. It's the opposite of objectification, that often misunderstood concept that strips people of their humanity. Which brings me to a piece in this week's New York Magazine, written by Roseanne about her show (Read it! Seriously, just read it. God I love her. She writes as only someone with nothing else to lose writes). I don't think you see enough about Roseanne when you see articles about remarkable and groundbreaking television. I'm not sure why that is. Maybe because it was a sitcom about a family, the most standard television format imaginable, it gets looked over. Maybe it's more insidious. I don't know. I miss the Connor family, and loved them as did the millions of other Americans who made the show number one in the ratings for half a decade. The Joss Whedon penned "Brain Dead Poet's Society" makes me cry just thinking about it, in which Darlene reads her poem in which she writes "too short to be quarterback, too plain to be queen".

So what I'm saying is, it would be nice if there were some working class Americans on TV who weren't the objects of ridicule. And I'm no Socialist, but this ultra-Capitalism we seem to be embracing is so culturally unhealthy and just gross. So, obviously, this grim little video game isn't going to do much in the face of all those "Housewives (TM)", but it's so bracing after a media diet that can seem like the equivalent of having frosting for dinner. Sweet, but so, so sick-making.

BREAKING:

AbFab is coming back!

I repeat, Absolutely Fabulous is returning this summer with THREE NEW EPISODES.

Below, is the original skit from French and Saunders .

Cheers, Darling.

I DON'T WANT MORE CHOICE, I JUST WANT NICER THINGS!

And this:

The Aching Romanticism of Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Fourteen years ago this month, the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer debuted on the (now defunct) WB. I was going to let the anniversary slide by without notice, but then something Fuzzy Bastard wrote in his excellent review of Catherine Hardwicke's Red Riding Hood (which I haven't yet seen), got me thinking:

"The tendency of male critics to gleefully embrace power/revenge fantasies and scream in indignation when confronted with fantasies of romance is just embarrassing..."

Well, it didn't start me thinking exactly, as this is something I think about more or less all the time, but I thought this would be a nice time to revisit. What I mean is, in discussion of genre fiction - whether it be books, movies or television - the world at large is incredibly forgiving of all nature of violent stupidity. Tired superhero tropes, even the dumbest and most unforgivable, while not necessarily liked, are viewed as an individual aberration and not used as an indictment of the entire genre. These same people flip out about romance, as Fuzzy Bastard says above, and deride all of it as awful. And don't give me some bullshit rubric about "geek culture". I'm so over it. When there are enough fans to constantly populate gigantic conventions, and the films of a genre are consistently number one at the box office, a line has been crossed: it's just plain old every day "culture", and it's become a bullying one at that.

I think we're going though a bad patch in which mainstream culture isn't particularly welcoming to women. The reasons for this are vast and varied and something that certainly deserves its own blog post, so I'm going to leave that alone for now and talk about a television show that aired its finale almost eight years ago. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was best described as a Horror Comedy Romance, and I'll go out on a limb here and say that the Buffy/Angel storyline is the greatest romance in the history of the medium. Sorry Spike enthusiasts. Sorry Dave and Maddie fans. Sam and Diane? Please. Luke and Laura? Ew. Kelly and Dylan? Don't make me laugh.

You are simply wrong.

Rewatching Buffy, though some parts feel dated, the story is still fresh. A great deal of this is because like all truly good art, the show isn't really about vampires or magic or a Hellmouth or a superhero, but about people. And a big part of that is - as it is with so many coming of age stories - romance. Seasons Two and Three of Buffy contained romantic episodes that felt like nothing I've ever seen on television. They felt like opera or like myth. I've written a bit about the glorious episode in which Buffy loses her virginity, Angel loses his soul, and all kinds of hell breaks loose. The lead up to this pivotal episode, and the way in which the story is shaped through to the end of the season is a complete fucking master class in story structure.

Angel is evil and killing people, and Buffy feels as if she is responsible as, like all over-conscientious control freaks, Buffy feels responsible for everything and usually reacts by shutting down emotionally. Buffy hesitates, like Hamlet before her, in killing Angel. So he, in the episode Passion, kills Giles's girlfriend Jenny Calendar (undercover gypsy and computer science teacher), and Buffy is shaken to the core. The episode contains that gloriously edited sequence in which Giles finds Jenny's dead body on his bed, strewn with rose petals, as an aria from La Bohème surges on the soundtrack. You so rarely see that kind of gothic romanticism played straight anymore.

Which I guess is what I'm getting at. Buffy manages the tonal shift from comedy to horror to romance so well by taking them all equally seriously. Romance is played straight and worked out creatively, and not as an afterthought. I've seen so many people all over the internet make it very clear that they like the horror and fantasy and comedy aspects of Buffy, but have no interest in the romantic story lines - as if that would be somehow embarrassing. Romance novels are given equally short shrift. And, yes, many romance genre novels aren't very good. But many, many fantasy or science fiction novels aren't very good either, and one rarely sees the bad ones as causing critics or those that blather on the internet to dismiss the entire genre as a whole. I've made it fairly clear that fiction that is aimed at or primarily enjoyed by women is rarely afforded much respect. Most often male critics of genre sneer. It's completely tiresome and the reasons for this have a few causes. One of the big ones, which I don't think is spoken of very often, is that men and women are conditioned to respond to books and media a little differently. The typical (and lazy) critical thought (male) as opposed to emotional reactions (female) is far too simplistic.

A few years ago, I conducted a survey in which I asked a simple question: "What did you read when you were growing up?". I left the question purposefully vague in order to have people interpret the question as they chose, which I thought would be illuminating (it was). First, men were far more likely to question me about what I wanted to hear, i.e. what was the "right" answer. They were also five times as likely as the female responders to mention a learning disability, or a reading disorder. They were six times as likely to respond that they "didn't read much". They also were far more likely to mention being bullied or made fun of for reading (zero women reported this). My raw data makes absolutely fascinating reading.

Reading fiction of any sort used to be referred to as a "feminine vice". Still, many men read mostly non-fiction or maybe for relaxation, Stephen King or Tom Clancy. Other men read widely and well. But, over all, more women read fiction then do men. Another gender difference in my survey response was in the language used - three times as many women than men used the word "loved" to describe a book (27 - 9). Women were also more likely to send me email after email, adding books they had forgotten to list. But the thing that surprised me the most was how much commonality there was in the lists from women, as opposed to the lists from men. Many, many women listed Judy Blume, Beverly Cleary, the Little House books, the works of Frances Hodgson Burnett, Sweet Valley High, the Bontes, Baby Sitters Club, Nancy Drew, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler, All of a Kind Family, Anne of Green Gables, Harriet the Spy and the works of Dr. Seuss.

There is very little overlap in the books the men cited, which as not something I expected at all. Part of this is that the average male responder listed so many fewer books than the average female one. The following books were listed by multiple men, and by equal numbers of women: Narnia, Tolkien, A Wrinkle in Time, Roald Dahl and The Phantom Tollbooth. The only books citied in great numbers by men and not women are The Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown. Men mentioned genre far more often, though, saying they read science fiction, history and comics. It's all so interesting, and I've been sitting on all of it for ages, as I'm not sure what to make of it all. There were many impassioned responses from both men and woman, which is thrilling. But - the results were kind of overwhelming. I don't think I need to say that my sampling skewed ridiculously toward college graduate, East Coast artistic/educator types, so I really didn't expect there to be as large a gender divide as there was. I expected it to be far more subtle.

One thing I gleaned that didn't at all occur to me before I read the responses was that women have very little shame in admitting they liked things that could be perceived as silly or childish. Several men responded with something along the lines of,"I read a lot of comic books and spy novels and stuff, but that's not what you want to hear about" and then proceded to list a bunch of "school" books. Their lists also skewed far more grown up with far fewer mentions of picture books like Where the Wild Things Are and Dr. Seuss (and I'm pretty certain that these books were read and enjoyed by both boys and girls equally). There was a subtle feeling that the men were a little bit more concerned with how they would be perceived - as exhibited by the worry about answering the question "correctly". Women, by and large, didn't seem to care. They answered with gusto, making few apologies for anything they read and liked when they were young. In other words, the women came off as being far more confident than the men, which was (embarrassing for me) completely unexpected. On average, women enjoy fiction more than men do, I think. They also have so much common ground with each other in terms of what they (or, I should say, we) read. The women responders seem to lap up enjoyment without worrying as much about how these choices would be viewed.

I think one of the big reasons for this is because if you're a girl growing up, your options for watching stories about other girls has always been limited. That's far less true for boys. Girls like Star Wars too, of course, but it's not the same. Movies, television shows and plays are overwhelmingly by and about men. Girls mostly have had to look elsewhere for challenging and entertaining stories about girls, and that elsewhere is often in books. So, there are an awful lot of books that are geared towards girls and women. The fiction stacks of Barnes and Noble (and certainly in the Young Adult section) may be one of the very few places where boys and men aren't top dogs.

Which brings me back to Buffy. More than any other show I can think of, it was about women. And not just one women surrounded by men, but about a female protagonist surrounded by lots of other women. That's one of the reasons lots of women also like the much mocked Sex and the City (of which the first couple of seasons were pretty interesting) and Gray's Anatomy (which I think is a nightmare). But, really, in these post-Roseanne times, there's not much - and even less that can be construed as feminist (my long awaited 30 Rock post is on its way, I promise). I mean, we live in a world in which Two and a Half Men can last for nearly 10 seasons! There are so few women on TV shows who bear any sort of similarity to human women as I've encountered them here on Earth, and Joss Whedon, in a show about high school kids and vampires managed it better than nearly anybody.

There is over the top gothic romance at every turn, which I found thrilling. But Whedon always manages to ground all of it in recognizable human feelings. So, I'll leave you with a flashback musical number in which Anya, the 1100 year old ex-vengeance demon sings of her love for Xander. Of course, as it is a flashback, we know, though she doesn't, that he will leave her at the altar and she will go back to being a vengeance demon, and as the song is played, Anya has a sword through her chest that has been thrust there by Buffy as Xander watched.

Ah, romance.

Boo: Mediums and Mysteries

What wonders hath science begot! Men on the moon! Horseless carriages! The telephone! The photograph! Drugs that eradicate all infection! The mystery of the building blocks of life itself solved! Weapons powerful enough to destroy an entire city!

Oh. Wait.

One of the odder things that came into being in the 19th century was the nearly one-hundred year long craze for spiritualism. Begun during the Second Great Awakening in New York State, the Fox sisters claimed they could communicate with those who had "passed over" to the other side. They conducted seances in which (supposed) loved ones of those present communicated by banging and rapping and moving objects and speaking through one of the ladies who acted as a Medium.

I don't think Spiritualism could have come into being without the concurrent advances in science - proponents of the movement weren't conservative - quite the contrary - they were more likely to be abolitionists and believers in women's suffrage. That is to say: Progressives. If germs suddenly existed, if the images of the world around us could be captured forever by using light and glass, why not the spirits of the dead? Why not indeed? How different would that be from that wonder we call the telephone?

Unfortunately, many (I'm being kind. More likely "most", or even "all") Mediums were frauds, and often cruel ones, praying on the grief stricken who would do or pay anything to speak once again with their dead children or spouses or parents. Probably the most famous debunker of faking Mediums was legendary escape artist Harry Houdini. A couple of months ago, Inamorato, his delightful spawn and I, all trekked up to The Jewish Museum to see their wonderful Houdini Exhibit (through March 27), and they had some of his interesting anti-Spiritualist material on display including his faked Spirit Pictures.

As with almost everything else, my first introduction to Mediums and Spritualism was through the writing of Agatha Christie. One of the first books of hers I read was The Tuesday Club Murders, a series of Miss Marple short stories connected via a framing device. It's always been one of my favorites. One of the stories, "Motive vs. Opportunity" stars what may be my first literary medium, Euridyce Spragg. It's not a murder mystery, but a question of a will (in fact, the book was first published under the title The Thirteen Problems). Miss Spragg has wormed her way into the home of the old and vulnerable (and extremely rich) Simon Clode, by conducting a series of seances in which he can hear the voice of his beloved daughter who died when she was a child.

Christie paints Miss Sprague as a complete fraud. One thing that seems pretty consistant in the portrayals of mediums in the popular fiction of the 20th century (and I've read a lot of it) is that they are viewed as a bunch of crass, avaricious social climbers. Issues of class in Christie's books are always extremely dicey for the modern reader as her views aren't exactly progressive. But she really doesn't like Spiritualists and paints them as being cruel parasites who prey upon the bereaved and alienate their affections for their (living) family members - who in Christie's defense, she also paints as being greedy.

Which is interesting only in that Christie also leaves room for the mystical in her writing. She was a devout Christian and I think the idea that some random person could find the key to the infinite via something so silly as a séance was something she found ludicrous. In other books and stories the other group of people who believe in seances are silly old people with too much time on their hands. In one case (as so little in a Christie mystery goes to waste) supposed ectoplasm coming out of someone's mouth was a major clue. It was a pretty common Christie trick to have the most important information be offered by the silliest and most unreliable of her characters.

Also written in the 1920s, E.F. Benson's book, Lucia in London, the fraudulent medium is mostly played for laughs. The residents of Riceholme become avid fans of "automatic writing", assisted by a spirit guide named Abfou, and get duped and taken by Olga, a very competent con artist. In an earlier book they were all taken in by a guru who turned out to be a curry cook. Benson will be featured in a later post, but he was a great popular writer who has fallen into an unjust obscurity. His Lucia books make fun of the gullible leisure class and are completely hilarious, but he is also one of the greatest writers of ghost stories.

It's interesting to note how after a solid few decades of pure reason, ghosts and the spirit world are one again in vogue, and once again the pathway to the infinite is forged by the trappings of science (as opposed to, like, actual science). Any watcher of basic cable knows the popularity of ghost oriented shows. In Ghost Hunters, a group of young "experts" walk around the haunted tourist destination of the week, recording ambient sound and taking night vision pictures and jumping at noises. TV is full of these shows and they're all incredibly entertaining, but no more real than the ladies in their drawing rooms with clackers taped to their thighs.

Please take a look at the January edition of the Agatha Christie Blog Carnival.

Reality Bites Back

As regular readers of this blog know, I've broken up with Project Runway, but I'm still BFF with Top Chef.

Just to be clear.

While crawling through a depression a couple of years ago, I'm somewhat ashamed to admit that I watched hours upon hours of Reality TV (while completely missing Mad Men and 30 Rock, an oversight that's been since remedied). As a writer and lover of fiction, I find it terrifying that so much broadcast (and basic cable) real estate was being taken over by Reality Competition or "unscripted" television. But, documentaries are good, right? And people like watching people, right? And lord knows I need to parse this to separate disdain and snobbery from actual alarm. But no. Most of it is truly awful.

It has recently been estimated that Americans, on average, spend 31 hours per week watching television. That's an astonishingly high number, and maybe, just maybe we should be paying just a tiny bit more attention to what is being shoveled into our fair citizens craniums day after night after day. Which brings me to the point, which is Jennifer L. Pozner's excellent book, Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV. In it, she takes careful stock of the practices, politics, economics and larger cultural implications of Reality TV.

Pozner makes as good an argument as any I've heard for why shows such as The Bachelor are regressive, truly terrible and likely dangerous. I find dating shows to be particularly repugnant. In them, a crowd of seemingly interchangeable hot women are placed in a house to compete for the affections of some dullard they've never met before. Okay. That's completely unfair, I have no idea if the "bachelors" are dullards - they might be interesting and likable in real life. But in "Reality", they are edited to be achingly, painfully dull. But that's just a matter of taste. What isn't, as Pozner points out, is the question of agency.

I cannot watch the Bachelor (and really, Pozner deserves some kind of award for sitting through all of it so you don't have to) because it literally makes no sense to me. A large group of women meet their prospective boyfriend and not one of them says, "You know what? He's not for me. Bye." One might posit that they don't do this because of contractual obligations and whatnot. Which, fine. But that's what we call extratextual - it's outside of the narrative being presented. So what we have a group of marriage mad women, all seemingly enchanted with a stranger, waiting for him to tell them that they are good enough for him. Or not. Ew.

Something Pozner doesn't bring up, but I think is worth stating, is this complete lack of any sort of differentiation between prospective dating partners is a dangerous idea to have pounded into people's heads every week. In rape case after rape case, it is implied that if a woman freely had sex with one man, she is likely to have sex with any man. Otherwise sexual history would be inadmissible (I always wonder why in cases of theft, the defense attorney isn't allowed to ask the victim, "You lent some guy 60 bucks that one time - how do we know you didn't just lend my client (who is a complete stranger, and hit you on the head) money in this instance?"). Women on the Bachelor are edited to be stupid, greedy and backstabbing. Executive Producer Mike Fleiss comes off as a particularly nasty piece of work with quotes like: " It's a lot of fun to watch girls crying. Never underestimate the value of that."

Pozner also spends a lot of pages looking at the really appalling racism of Flavor of Love, and does a nice job of tracing particular racial archetypes all the way back to the minstrel shows of the 19th century. She also spends a great many pages dealing with the muddled brew of race and gender one slurps up while watching America's Next Top Model. Really, someone needs to write an entire book long study on this show as I think after 15 Cycles (as the seasons of Top Model are called) it encapsulates so much that is wrong with America today as it looks to young girls.

The producers of Flavor of Love and The Bachelor are deeply cynical business men, out to make lots and lots of money. Tyra Banks, I think, honestly believes what she is saying about girls and equality and opportunity. She's drunk her own Kool-Ade and to be honest, it's often riveting viewing. She congratulates herself for admitting larger sized (by modeling standards) girls onto the show, and then punishes them for it. She does this again and again. She seems pleased to give a pretty girl who is also a burn victim a shot, or a transgendered person (which was handled surprisingly well), an Orthodox Jew, some truly weird hipsters. But they always wind up being punished by Miss Banks for their differences. Watching her is a little like watching Henry VIII in action: she really thinks everyone should be super grateful for this bounty she is distributing, and when they aren't, she goes completely freaking ape shit. The decisions on ANTM all seem so weirdly... personal.

Pozner also applauds the stars in the crown of reality TV: Project Runway, Top Chef and The Amazing Race (in the new season the Harlem Globetrotters and the Goths are back!) for showcasing the best in people, celebrating differences and talent, and not approving or rewarding (for the most part) bad behavior. She does call out the two Bravo competition shows for Excessive Capitalistic Tendencies, which: granted. But I see no harm in a sometimes craving for Kobe beef or a ball gown.

What these three shows have in common is that they, by and large, respect the people participating. They don't trade in humiliation or cruelty. Which is what I think is the most damaging part of these shows: that people are rewarded for being cruel assholes. Watching hours and hours of this is good for no one without context, and in most of these shows there is none. The edit is often on the side of the bullies, as this makes "good TV". There's a celebration of brute stupidity and cruelty that I think is potentially culture destroying.

I'm really happy that Pozner called out irony as the corrosive force that it is. Look. I'm as guilty as anybody of ironic distance, but that doesn't make it good. It enables us too look on people crying and being humiliated and making really ugly fools of themselves and call it "entertainment". It's almost terrifying.

All this aside, I found the final chapters in which Pozner carefully breaks down the economics of Reality television to be the most interesting. She carefully lays out how deregulation has made broadcast television a nearly entirely advertising driven product. Most Reality shows are completely paid for by advertisers, and are promoted via the network's other properties (broadcast, radio and print). In other words, they don't cost a dime, so they can keep airing them even in the numbers of viewers are low. The profit margins are wide indeed. It's chilling and depressing reading. But Pozner, rather delightfully, seems to be mostly an optimist at heart, writing passionately for the cause of net neutrality, and calling for people to write and blog and make things that are outside Network hegemony. She also likes Pop Culture, and doesn't advocate throwing your TV out the window, just the making of informed choices and being an engaged and aware viewer.

We all spend a lot of time watching and sneering and ignoring, but I really think this stuff matters. Nothing makes me angrier than people telling me to "Lighten up. It's only a TV show/movie/ whatever". Mainly because it's complete and unadulterated bullshit. This is our culture. This is all we have. This is what separates us from the chimps. It matters. The producers of this garbage know this - that is why it makes so very much money, and it costs so much to make a product placement (apparently, Coca-Cola pays more than 25 million dollars to have those coke cups on the judges table on American Idol). If it was "just" anything, it wouldn't be the case. This is powerful stuff. This is something people in power: Popes, Kings, Premiers, Presidents have always known. People used to be arrested for creating media that the powerful didn't like - in some places they still are. People used to be burnt at the stake for creating media-when media was called "books".

So it matters.

More information about Women in Media and News can be found here. More information about Reality Bites Back can be found here.

The Demise of Law & Order and the Reading of Helter Skelter

I really think more notice should have been taken of the latest Great American Institution to be consigned to dust and ashes. By that, I mean of course, what I’ve been referring in recent years as Law & Order: Classic. For twenty years it mined the Post’s headlines for stories, filmed in NYC, and gave untold numbers of actors lots of work between theater gigs. But – alas – it is no more.

Truly, though, in its final seasons it was but a shell of its former gritty, glorious self. It was a little sillier, a little less realistic; both the court buildings and the police station looked a little too shiny, too spacious, a little too clean, almost like – gasp!– sets. If that’s what you want, you may as well film in Los Angeles.

Recently, they aired a block of episodes from back in the 90s, when Clair Kinkaid (Jill Hennessey) was Jack McCoy’s ADA. Sigh. They were truly wonderful. So smartly written, so believably filmed. I think it’s pretty unanimously agreed upon that out of all the lovely young women who have played second fiddle to Assistant District Attorney McCoy (and before that, Stone. I have no truck with that Englishman who filled in the last season or two), Claire Kinkaid was the best, by far. Jill Hennessey is an attractive woman, but she looked like an attractive woman who works in the Manhattan DA’s office. Angie Harmon and Elizabeth Rohm did not. They were too made up and their clothes were both over-styled and expensive looking. Junior ADAs earn a pittance and usually have crippling Law School debt. Claire Kinkaid wore an office uniform and looked like she worked crazy long hours. She looked like the young women on the subway you see riding to work every day.

It’s a funny thing. If there was some distant planet where people received all their knowledge of American life from watching television and movies, their view would be a warped one indeed. So many criminals, so many actors, so many policemen, so many spies. Most people in this country work in service oriented jobs or in offices. By and large, the entertainment industry has done an abysmal job at showing what most people do every day and what their lives are like. In the recent Jason Reitman film, Up in the Air, I was so impressed with how Anna Kendrick's character was played. The thing is, in most movies that show someone’s work place, they have to usually care about what they’re doing. Most people in real life kind of don’t. Which I guess is undramatic, but it also can be very funny. In the first decade of Law & Order, the right balance was struck between the workaday and the dramatic. The last decade or so, the scales tipped wildly in the direction of the dramatic, which I find a little tiresome.

The early seasons of L&O did a brilliant job of dramatizing notorious real life cases such as the Joel Steinberg and Tawana Brawley ones. But one of the most famous crimes of all belongs to California, and feels so deeply embedded in the culture of that state, that the thought of transposing in to NYC seems unthinkable. That’s of course the Tate/LaBianca killings by the Manson Family. I’ve read stacks of true crime books over the years, but I am embarrassed to admit I had never read one of the most important: Helter Skelter by Los Angeles prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi. Honestly, without it, I don’t know if Law and Order would be able to exist. It’s particularly awful that I’ve never read it as my Darling Inamorato wrote a Manson inspired musical called Willy Nilly a few years back.

Of course, the most important (and likely the best) true crime book of the modern age is Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. But the modern non-fiction procedural was born with Helter Skelter. It’s a fascinating case in so many ways, and touches on so many aspects of society and how it was changing in the late sixties. I was surprised how much I didn’t know. Mostly about how the police and District Attorney’s office finally cracked it and tried the perpetrators. It was a mess. Most of what I know about the LAPD and LA County Sherriff’s office is from reading all of James Ellroy’s novels, and from reading Bugliosi’s account, he was pretty accurate. Basically, there was gross negligence on the part of the LAPD and the case should have been broken far earlier.

Reading about Manson’s Family, living out there in the desert forging their own crazy Heaven and Earth, reminds me mostly of things I’d read about towns in pre-modern times that were stricken by madness. Too much drinking or drugs, too much fear, one lunatic with a strong personality, a frightening world filled with threat and dread, powelessness: all these ingredients were in play with the Manson Family, and likely with some witchcraft trials and some of the weirdness surrounding some of the stranger dissenters. And maybe some real evil. Who knows.

The human race is forever fascinated with chaos and order, which is the real payoff of crime (both true and fictional) drama. The chaos of death and murder and wickedness, then made sense of by the cops or the detectives or DA’s office. Solved is such a comforting word. And the word that I think best describes Law & Order is satisfying. The same way that crime books –most of them anyway – end with an arrest, or a trial or a hanging. They are finished. Manson outlived the final episode of Law & Order, still in jail, still mad.

Happy 30th Birthday, Buffy!

As well as having to sing Happy Birthday to one one of my all time favorite literary greats, we must also sing, or raise glass, or point a crossbow at Buffy Summers, who today, in imaginary fiction land, turns 30. Wow, right?

As anyone who watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer knows, no one in the history of all media: print, comics, film whatever, had more traumatic birthdays than poor Buffy. As she said herself, "... you could smash all my toes with a hammer and it would still be the bestest Buffy birthday bash in a good long while."

Season One was birthday-free as it was a mid-season replacement. In Season Two, Buffy lost her virginity on her 17th birthday, to her (vampire) boyfriend, who she loved. Who then proceeded to lose his human soul, revert to his evil ways, and kill lots of people. As Buffy saw it: All because she had sex with him. Friends died. Of course, the genius of writer Joss Whedon is such that Buffy blamed herself, but the show did not. But, seriously. Worst. Birthday. Ever. In Season Three, her father continued his streak of lousy parenting by canceling his trip to spend time with her and, oh, she was subjected to a wretched 18th birthday Slayer test where her powers were taken away, her mother wound up kidnapped, and Giles, her watcher, fired. More horrible family drama in Seasons Five and Six, commingled with mystical problems that made her more typical young adult fuck up-ery even worse. Poor Buffy.

Creator Joss Whedon's instincts are pretty solidly on the money much of the time. Making Buffy's birthday a big deal on the show (rather than, Christmas, or some other holiday) is so smart. For one thing, it brings everything back to his protagonist. But mostly, because of the particular circumstances Buffy lives with. As she says often and is continually reminded, she is one of a long line of mystical warriors who die very, very young. As Spike once tells her, she has to be lucky every day, a monster just has to be lucky once. So birthdays carry a particular significance for her, narratively, that they would not for another character. One year older matters more as the odds of her not getting older are spectacularly high.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a unique phenomenon. A young girl's coming of age tale (rare enough itself), combined with a hero's journey - made specifically female in way no one else has quite done. So Happy 30th Birthday, Buffy, wherever in the aether you might be!

Robbed, I say! Robbed!

I missed Saturday night's airing of the Miss America competition, mainly because it's awful and, really, who cares? But, BUT I missed Miss Arkansas's talent presentation which, as it turns out, is unforgivable. She's a country-western singing, yodeling, VENTRILOQUIST.



She was clearly robbed, the girl who won - Miss Nebraska - just played the piano and did nothing else. Yawn. I haven't run this past my darling inamorato yet, but I think she was born about 100 years too late. I also learned, that when she did this act for the Teen Miss America Pageant, she ended with clog dancing. Really, this girl was made for vaudeville. She's obviously been doing this same crazy five minutes of material for years and years.

This also seems like a perfect time to point out that Miss America is still the largest scholarship organization for women in the United States, which is just pathetic. Apparently, the largest scholarship organization for women requires one's scholars to sport sequined jump suits with impunity and to answer leading political questions without saying anything substantive or offending anybody. It's just not good enough. And, for the record, I think sports scholarships for men who can't keep up academically are stupid as well.

Oh. If you've never seen it. Watch Smile. It's awesome.

So, Who Do You Have On Your Fantasy Top Chef Team?

BE WARNED: There be spoilers ahead!

I don't have much interest in the very popular running and catching and throwing that most citizens of our glorious nation like so much. I am, however, entranced by competitive cooking. If I'm home, and have the TV on, I'm always happy to watch The Iron Chef (or its stepchild, The Next Iron Chef) or Chopped. I won't, however, watch that awful Gordon Ramsey yell at people. His show is far more about humiliation than cooking. I like food and I like watching people cook. I am severely domestically challenged, but I do enjoy cooking and wish I did it more often.

But enough about me. The crown jewel of competitive cooking shows is Top Chef. Currently, we are being treated to an All-Star version in which they have brought back some of the top competitors from previous seasons, and so far, it's been pretty fantastic. Since it's an All-Star tournament, everyone is strong. And Bourdain is back. And the challenges have been creative and interesting. We're 4 episodes in, 5 chefs have been eliminated, and it's fascinating viewing.

When I saw who was chosen to compete, my picks for final four were as follows.

1. Richard
2. Marcel
3. Jen
4. Angelo
   

That said, the pool of competitors is incredibly deep. There are fewer people I'm certain won't make the finals than otherwise. Honestly, coming in, the only chefs I'm pretty sure don't have a prayer are: Spike (he loses focus, and his decision making skills are pretty much non-existent), Fabio (he's just has no range. He sticks around, but rarely wins), Jamie (her food isn't that impressive. I think she's playing out of her league. And she's a total complainer.), Dale L. (I found the fact that he made it to the finals in his season baffling. Sticking around because you haven't lost is different from winning), Casey (I'm still completely prejudiced against her from the mis en place relay from her season when it took her 45 years to chop onions), and Stephen (he's just completely out of practice. He admits himself that he hasn't cooked professionally in years).

Everyone else, I thought, had a fair shot.

They've aired four episodes (the fifth airs tonight), and there's only been one major upset - But it was MAJOR. It knocked out one of my final four, probably the chef with the finest pedigree in the competition. In the second episode Jen went insane. Her food sounded lackluster, and she argued with the judges in a way that was slightly crazy. Colicchio admired her moxie (or so he said for the cameras), but honestly, she came off like someone who was unbalanced. And she was sent home. Jennifer! How? You were Ripert's sous chef at Le Barnadin! If this were a film contest, that's like if the person trained and chosen by Martin Freaking Scocese was out in the first round. Just shocking.

Elia, Dale L., Spike and Stephen are also gone (no real surprises there). I've found watching the women particularly interesting this season. Both Tiffany D. and Carla are competing very similarly to how they did the first time around. They both started off quiet, and then they began winning and winning and winning. Carla and Tiffany D. are also both lovely people and have similar styles: i.e. they cook fairly simple food that is often underestimated by the competition, but tastes incredibly good. Carla is also extremely adventurous and delightfully strange, and has won her first challenge. Tiffani F. is also impressing me. She was thought to be the "bitch" in season 1 (the famous "I'm not your bitch, bitch" comment was directed at her). She is doing well and is having a nice time and seems quite likable.

One of the things I've always liked about Top Chef is they never seem to choose their finalists on the basis of audience popularity, physical attractiveness or even ordinary likability. This is a show where a belligerent, thoroughly unlikable, physically unattractive lesbian can make it to the end. You have to love it. Many different races, all sexual persuasions, all different sizes (including the women!) are included. Top Chef might be the only place left on television where the women are allowed to be as chubby as the men and it's really no sort of issue. It's so refreshing.

Is it me, or has there been a lot of gnocci this competition? Also, now I want to learn how to braise things. And apparently, Colicchio has a new pork belly BLT at his new joint. Yum.

Happy Thanksgiving

I'm thankful for lots of things, some important (my health, my inamorato, my brain) some less consequential (my apartment, the internet, the existence of all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD). Good things all.

Which brings me to the news that hit the geekier realms of the interwebs this week. Warner Brothers distributed a press release that announced that a "rebooted" (how I hate that stupid word - unless you're turning your computer on and off it makes no sense) movie version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer would be released in 2012. Hm. With no input or involvement from Joss Whedon. Sigh. With a screenwriter named Whit Anderson who has fewer writing credits on iMDB than I do (i.e. none).

Thanksgiving is the most American of holidays. It's about food, gathering with loved ones and possesses disturbing overtones of cultural imperialism. The Jane Espenson penned, Season 4 episode Pangs embraces all three of these key Thanksgiving points.



Later today, I will be heading to Chez Piper McKenzie accompanied by various Stewarts. I love food, and I like cooking, but tend to spiral into a panic when faced with anything domestic. But I'll try to leave the atrocities at home. In an interview with Ms. Anderson, the woman about to be the most viciously attacked rookie screenwriter ever, she referenced Christopher Nolan's Batman as a good path to take in superhero reimagining. Sigh. I know. Everyone loves those movies. Except me. They're painfully humorless, and among other things, Buffy was always a comedy.




Joss Whedon has been through a lot with Buffy. It's always been his dream project, and the 1992 movie version was abysmal. Needless to say, he had no control over it. In a nearly unprecedented turn, he had the opportunity, five years later, to do it right. The show lasted seven seasons, and although it wasn't perfect, it was wonderful. And only ended seven years ago. Joss Whedon is still a young(ish) man. To "reboot" his creation (one of the uglier points of the Warners' press release is that they refer to the owners of the property, as the "creators")this soon, seems like a terrible idea, and a project that absolutely nobody wants.

But Joss Whedon is a class act. He responded in kind, and here is what he had to say in its entirety:

Kristin, I'm glad you asked for my thoughts on the announcement of Buffy the cinema film. This is a sad, sad reflection on our times, when people must feed off the carcasses of beloved stories from their youths—just because they can't think of an original idea of their own, like I did with my Avengers idea that I made up myself.

Obviously I have strong, mixed emotions about something like this. My first reaction upon hearing who was writing it was, "Whit Stillman AND Wes Anderson? This is gonna be the most sardonically adorable movie EVER." Apparently I was misinformed. Then I thought, "I'll make a mint! This is worth more than all my Toy Story residuals combined!" Apparently I am seldom informed of anything. And possibly a little slow. But seriously, are vampires even popular any more?

I always hoped that Buffy would live on even after my death. But, you know, AFTER. I don't love the idea of my creation in other hands, but I'm also well aware that many more hands than mine went into making that show what it was. And there is no legal grounds for doing anything other than sighing audibly. I can't wish people who are passionate about my little myth ill. I can, however, take this time to announce that I'm making a Batman movie. Because there's a franchise that truly needs updating. So look for The Dark Knight Rises Way Earlier Than That Other One And Also More Cheaply And In Toronto, rebooting into a theater near you.

Leave me to my pain! Sincerely, Joss Whedon.

I'm making butternut squash ravioli with mushrooms and leeks in a white wine sauce. Hopefully we'll leave out the traditional fighting and also leave the less traditional syphilis at home, too.



Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

I Still Dream of Uncle Tim...

Now that I've broken up with my television love, what do I do now?

Well, last year, when Bravo finally lost the acrimonious court case that ensured that Project Runway (I type those words with deep bitterness) would move to Lifetime, they developed a new competition reality show for emerging designers creatively titled, The Fashion Show. Isaac Mizrahi starred as kind of a Tim Gunn/Tom Coliccio hybrid, playing both mentor and judge. Mizrahi is a wonderful designer and has been an entertaining media presence for nearly two decades. So much, so good. But for some reason, his charm didn't translate very well to this forum. He seemed uncomfortable and affected.

I think pretty much everyone knows that the smartest thing the Magical Elves ever did was hiring Tim Gunn to act as mentor on Project Runway (sigh). The fact that they found someone as all around wonderful as he is, is of course, a miracle. But they should be lauded to the skies for interviewing him to begin with, as he was in no way an obvious choice for this sort of television show. He went to school for sculpture, then taught at Parsons School of Design for 25 years, the last seven of which he spent as chairman of their prestigious Fashion Design program. In other words, they had the foresight to think that maybe someone who has spent the bulk of their career in education might be a wise choice for mentor. Rather than, say, a pop star whose career was rapidly fading.

Which brings us to The Fashion Show v.1's most egregious error: the Kelly Rowland debacle. Now, Kelly Rowland has a nice singing voice as she proved when she was one of the members of Destiny's Child who happened not to be Beyoncé. If she had been pegged to be a judge or the host or whatnot on a singing competition show, it would make sense. As that is what Ms. Rowland does for a living. She is not a fashion designer, a fashion magazine editor, or a fashion model. She does, however, like the rest of us, wear clothing. This seemed to be her only qualification, unfortunately. She used to trail around after Mizrahi and give advice to the designers. This is pretty much equivalent to me walking around the Top Chef kitchen giving advice to the cheftestants because I have a lifetime of experience eating. It was patently ridiculous and the show suffered.

I tried watching it and kind of vaguely meant to stick with it and then I suddenly realized the whole thing was over and I had completely stopped bothering to watch. And I feel the need to add that this was when I was in the midst of a major depression and basically spent most of my time on the couch weeping, eating nachos and watching reality television. I mean, I watched that horrible Matchmaker show, but I couldn't be bothered to stick with The Fashion Show, which could be best described as: Just like Project Runway (sigh), but terrible. And I've always been fond of Isaac Mizrahi and was willing to cut him some slack, but no.

No one seemed to like it, the reviews were pretty uniformly bad, so I was surprised to see it coming back for a second season. But! They have majorly retooled the show so that it seems less like a sad imitation of (sob!) Project Runway. Kelly Rowland has been jettisoned, and she's been replaced by Iman. They really couldn't have come up with a better choice. She's a legendary fashion professional. She's intelligent, articulate and strongly opined. Mizrahi also seems more relaxed now that he doesn't have Rowland trailing along after him. The show is still far from perfect, though the emphasis on team work is interesting. There is still too much emphasis placed on "personalities" rather than the work. It's nice to see the judges (which include a Harper's Bazaar editor in addition to Mizrahi and Iman) calling out insufferable behavior, but it's frustrating to see it rewarded with airtime. Uncle Tim and Klum would never put up with this level of nonsense. But, the bulk of the designers seem nice enough and a few have created some lovely pieces.

When one's heart has been broken, after the inevitable moping around has become tiresome, I believe one should move on. I've seen two episodes of The Fashion Show (oh my God do I hate that title), but I'm not in love. They still feel as if they're trying a little too hard. But the producers seemed to have understood what the problems were in the first season, and have done a pretty good job at remedying them. The lovely presence of Mrs. Bowie is what is keeping me around for now. But the challenges and the judges decisions need to be interesting and accurate, or I'm gone. I'm still fragile.

Below, the runway show from 1995 documentary, Unzipped, incidentally proving that grownup women with personalities make much more entertaining models than armies of interchangeable fifteen year olds.

TCM: Moguls & Movie Stars

We seem to be in the midst of something like an old timey movie golden age here at the beginning of the teens in the 21st century. Silent movie festivals are happening all over the place, and seemingly every movie ever filmed (that hasn't been lost or incinerated) is on DVD or on the internet. It never stops being thrilling to me.

That said, if you aren't watching Turner Classic Movies's new documentary series, Moguls & Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood, you are truly missing out. It's thrilling history, and the rarities being shown after the airing of each episode are added fabulousness. They do a terrific job of putting what was happening in a particular time in film history into a more general historical context.

Exciting to the author of this blog, is a look at the careers of two women I profiled a while back, Lois Weber and Alice Guy-Blaché. Below is Danse Gitane, a 1905 film by Guy-Blaché.

Mad Men Season 4: With A Whimper...

Mad Men's last episode until next July (Tomorrowland) was an odd disjointed piece of work. It felt a little soap opera-y, i.e. it felt as if it was just about what was going on with the characters, rather than about something larger or something else, you know, like in art. I'm not sure what they're doing with this. I hate the idea of "shark jumping" as I pretty much reject the idea of one moment from which there is no coming back (me: an optimist! I must be in love or something.). But this has reduced me to a state of listicle again. Some thoughts:

1. The editing and pacing were sloppy as hell. Particularly compared to episodes such as the John Slattery directed The Rejected or the Sally and Miss Blankenship-centric The Beautiful Girls, which were perfect little movies and this... felt like an episode of a television show. Below is Sun Times blogger Jim Emerson's short tribute to The Rejected's use of office architecture:



2. The scene with Betty and Don in the kitchen of the house they used to share was really nice. I miss seeing them together. Not in a fan-ish, "ooh, I wish they were together" sort of way. Just that there was always something so interesting about their interactions, and I miss that exploration of a really bad marriage.

3. Which leads me to Betty. Sigh. Why does Matt Weiner hate Betty Draper so much? This season she's turned into a one-note villain without any nuances. I found her story fascinating in the first three seasons, and maybe it's more a sad statement of where I was in my life at the time, but I kind of, like, related. She was so trapped and thwarted and so viciously manipulated by Don. I found it chilling in Season 1 when she was so deeply depressed and anxiety ridden she pretty much stopped functioning. And then she started seeing her shrink, D'Hoffryn - who reported back to Don what she told him during therapy sessions, breaking doctor-patient confidentiality. I also loved that early in the series, contrary to the typical way icy blonde WASPs are typically portrayed, she was shown as a pretty fully realized sexual being. She's always been a complete disaster as a parent (to put it mildly: see below), but she had layers. The degree in anthropology, the modeling career, the fluent Italian, the desperate seeking for something outside of a marriage in which she was treated like a child. The firing of Carla was just awful, but I think my problem is we've seen so little of her story, just her effect on other characters - mostly Sally.



4. There are so few movies or television shows that really interest me, I think I sometimes fall into the trap of wanting the ones I like to do everything. One stop TV shopping. That said, I feel pretty comfortable saying that Mad Men's flirting with, and then dashing away from the issue of race is getting truly problematic. Mad Men's exploration into the lives of women in the 1960s is brilliant. But it has pretty much used its African-American characters (who appear and disappear with very little fanfare) and the Civil Rights movement to show what's going on with a bunch of white men. Which, in a show as interested in the nuances of social interactions and progress as this one is, is extremely unfortunate. From Lane's Chocolate Bunny to Paul Kinsey's posturing to Carla's constant, unremarked upon presence there are so many opportunities for portrayals of depth that aren't capitalized on. The most interesting conversation about race thus far was between Peggy and that cute writer boy she met at the warehouse art party in which they get into a fight about civil rights, women's rights and working in advertising. But it was still a discussion by a couple of white people and it never really went anywhere. Many people on the internets have been dying for a Carla-centric episode. Obviously, after her wretched dismissal by Betty, we will all likely be waiting forever. And I had totally forgotten about this, which is actually kind of remarkable in its way:



5. After all this griping, I'm now going to turn into a Mad Men apologist on the issue of the abortion that wasn't. We can all list the abortions TV characters have had because there have been so few of them. Maud. Six Feet Under. Um... Oh! Tami on The Real World: LA. Party of Five, almost, but they bowed to pressure and copped out (as per usual) with a miscarriage of some sort. Friday Night Lights. I think that's pretty much it. In the entire history on American television. IRL, something like one in three American women will have the procedure. So, yeah, discrepancy. A couple of episodes ago, Joan found out she was pregnant with Roger's child and decided to terminate the pregnancy. She made the appointment, sat in the waiting room and then we saw her on the train coming home. Speculation was rampant: did she or didn't she? We learned in the finale that she didn't. She has told her [rapist] husband that the child is his (he's off in Vietnam), and she's keeping it. Normally, I would consider this a total bullshit development. But. Joan is in her mid-thirties. She's been unsuccessfully trying to conceive for a while. It's the 60s - fertility treatment options were pretty non-existent. She's already had two abortions, and has expressed concern about whether because of this she is capable of getting pregnant (her doctor seemed unexpectedly reasonable and told her there shouldn't be a problem). So, as this particular woman has been written, keeping the child seems like a choice she would reasonably make. I don't have a problem with it (though Roger likely will).

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6. Who is Don Draper? I've talked about this a little bit elsewhere, but I'm beginning to think that Don Draper isn't really anybody. He's a brilliant ad man, which means he's smart and ambitious and creative. But at its center, advertising is all about insecurity and want and surfaces. Maybe Don is so freaking good at his job because no one has spent more time figuring out how to put a glossy exterior on a pretty unsellable product (i.e. Dick Whitman). No one understands the romance of it all better. As Dr. Faye said as he broke up with her after coming back engaged from a brief working vacation with his children, "And I hope she knows you only like the beginnings of things." She's right about Don, and that applies just as well to how America has sold the idea of itself to itself. We like beginnings. They're simple and romantic and they're easy. Day to day is hard. Years are hard. But you don't see any of that in a thirty second clip selling the adventure of stepping on a plane or selling weddings instead of marriages. Don proposes to a twenty-five year old woman he doesn't know at all. She looks right, and seems right, but they've essentially had a vacation fling in lala land, which doesn't sound worlds away from the start of his relationship with Betty. Don is an ad man, i.e. the king of the grand gesture. He's been compulsively unfaithful to every woman we've seen him with. He compartmentalizes to an extent that can only be called pathological. One of the more interesting bits of Tomorrowland was seeing how similar Don and Betty are in their inability to see their lives as a unified whole. They're all about clean slates and fresh starts, which, fine, but fresh starts in the real world always retain some residual odor of what has come before. I'm beginning to think the character of Don Draper is a cipher. A handsome face and a shiny suit standing in for an actual person. There's something... missing. His pitch to the American Cancer Society (Roger's question, "So, did you get cancer?" was priceless) at the beginning of the episode about youth and fear of mortality, explains his crazy-seeming marriage proposal.

7. Peggy's reaction to Don's engagement announcement was the highlight of the episode. The look in her eyes was pure "what the fuck?" and his little speech to her was so completely - albeit unintentionally - insulting, the mind just reels. "She reminds me of you." "She has your spark." The silent part of that sentence was "except she's way prettier and doesn't have my number at all!" And then that completely wonderful little bitchfest between Peggy and Joan.

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If the two of them become allies and cohorts I will truly be in TV bliss. I am almost tempted to write the most boring fan fiction ever about how Peggy and Joan split from SCDP and form Olsen Holloway-Harris and just kill. I'd also be okay with Olsen Holloway-Harris & Cosgrove. After all, they need someone to head accounts. I think it's become pretty clear that Mad Men has duel protagonists: Don Draper and Peggy Olsen. I recently rewatched the pilot, and Don was an advertising superhero. Glamorous and smart, with a brilliance so hard it was positively chitinous. Peggy was a mousy little secretary from Brooklyn at her first day of work. In the succeeding six years or so, Don's unassailable exterior has greatly chipped away. He doesn't quite know it, but he's in Cheever-land, and possibly on the wrong side of cultural history. Peggy is all youth and smarts and ambition. She's the one at the forefront now, and it's exhilarating to watch. We'll see what happens as the 60s take hold and Vietnam heats up. Will Don Draper finally drop out and move to sunny California? Shed yet another wife for a newer, fresher start and a different kind of life? I have a feeling Peggy will wind up running SCDP one day and is on the road to becoming some kind of legend. It's fascinating television to watch, because these differently packaged creatures have so much in common, and both seem to recognize that. But the chasm that separates them will only widen as the second half of the decade progresses I think.