Author Archive
Walter Mitty (1UP)
by Josh K-sky on Aug.16, 2010, under Comics, Movies
Scott Pilgrim vs The World would have been the best video game movie if it was, in fact, based on a video game instead of on a comic book informed by video games. As it is, it’s a brisk and hilarious mishmash of comic book tropes, which work poorly, video game tropes, which work really well, and dreadful gender politics.
The comic book (which I haven’t read — maybe Big Josh will weigh in) introduced a video-game world that the movie faithfully reproduces. Chyrons spring up around characters and props, placing them in context and giving the viewer vital information as if about an opponent. When Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) fights each of his girlfriend Ramona’s evil exes, the fights are riffs on Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter and other arcade games from the period just following Q*bert and the collapse of my own interest (I will whup you at Ms. Pac-Man, but little else).
In addition to the video game stylistics, the movie also employs comic book stylistics, which suffer in comparison to the former. No movie has played with comic book aesthetics better than American Splendor. Ang Lee’s Hulk gave it a try, but Harvey Pekar’s story benefited from having the form address the content — it is the story of a man who tells his own life in comics. In Scott Pilgrim, the form and experience of video games is native to the original story, which (like The Hulk) happened to be told in comic book form. So effects like having visible ‘D-D-D-D-D’s come out of Scott’s bass, or animating the exit wound when drummer Kim pantomimes shooting herself, add nothing but clutter.
The style of the film is exciting in other, more light-handed ways. Director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) hopscotches through the first act, jumping from setting to setting while remaining in one linear conversation. I’ve seen it done before, but never so deftly or without care for suspension of disbelief, and it allows Scott’s world to be introduced visually without any expositional slowing.
Spoilers and gender politics-grumbling below the fold.
Adventures in Ill-Advised Paragraphs
by Josh K-sky on Aug.15, 2010, under Los Angeles, Politics
There’s nothing wrong with anonymity — in its place. For instance, many people engage in discourse and commerce on the Internet anonymously (assuming the websites they’re dealing with have any scruples) for sound personal reasons.
Michael Hiltzik, Trying to shed light on a shadowy figure in Proposition 23 battle, August 15, 2010
The L.A. Times has suspended Pulitzer-winning business columnist Michael Hiltzik without pay, and discontinued both his column and his weblog, in response to the news that Hiltzik used psuedonyms on his blog and elsewhere to comment on Times-related matters, including his own work.
Opinion L.A. (an latimes.com blog), Hiltzick Suspended, April 28, 2006
It’s a very good column. Hiltzick, probably my favorite L.A. Times columnist, is pushing to expose the donors who are hiding behind the “Adam Smith Foundation” in order to overturn California’s landmark greenhouse gas emissions control law, AB 32. Just… dude. Choose better examples.
Are the Courts Progressive?
by Josh K-sky on Aug.09, 2010, under Politics
There’s a temptation for liberals, especially when confronted with demagogic initiatives like California’s Prop 187 and Prop 8 and Arizona’s SB1070 to look to the courts and the function of judicial review as the locus of minority protection in U.S. democracy. In its ugliest form, this takes the form of an anti-populist snobbery: “thank god we have the courts to protect us from yahoos.”
An old Scott Lemieux post provides a good summary of why, although this may be the case from time to time, progressive outcomes are rarely due to judicial review. Long excerpt below the fold.
A Change Is Gonna Come
by Josh K-sky on Aug.07, 2010, under Politics
[M]arriage has always been understood, with very few exceptions, as the union of a man and a woman. This is true across time, across cultures, across religious traditions, etc. Does it really seem likely that this remarkable consensus is nothing but a nasty desire of one group to flaunt its privileged position over a minority? Is it really feasible that the world’s cultures all consulted about how to put down gay people and came up with marriage as the solution?
William Duncan, director of the Marriage Law Foundation, in National Review’s The Corner
It is a rather amazing fact that, of the very many dimensions along which the genital activity of one person can be differentiated from that of another (dimensions that include preference for certain acts, certain zones or sensations, certain physical types, a certain frequency, certain symbolic investments, certain relations of age or power, a certain species, a certain number of participants, etc. etc. etc.), precisely one, the gender of object choice, emerged from the turn of the century, and has remained, as the dimension denoted by the now ubiquitous category of “sexual orientation.” The is not a development that would have been foreseen from the viewpoint of the fin de siècle itself[...].
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet
42. Same-sex love and intimacy are well-documented in human history. The concept of an identity based on object desire; that is, whether an individual desires a relationship with someone of the opposite sex (heterosexual), same sex (homosexual) or either sex (bisexual), developed in the late nineteenth century.
a. Tr 531:25-533:24 (Chauncey: The categories of heterosexual and homosexual emerged in the late nineteenth century, although there were people at all time periods in American history whose primary erotic and emotional attractions were to people of the same sex.);
Judge Vaughn Walker in Perry vs. Schwarzenegger
This is a court ruling, not an academic seminar at Berkeley.
Kathryn Jean Lopez at The Corner
One of the most impressive and least discussed aspect of the ruling that has overturned Proposition 8 is its sense of history. The standard right-wing dismissal of gay marriage is that marriage has for millennia been an institution that joins a man and a woman, and that same-sex marriage hasn’t even been on the agenda of gay rights groups for very long. Even sympathetic critics see the place of marriage on the gay agenda as emerging “as if out of nowhere over just the past few years”, and not without reason.
The excerpt I pulled from the ruling is slightly misleading; for all the attention Perry vs. Schwarzenegger gives to the historical contingency of homosexuality, it gives much more to the evolving qualities of marriage. Racial restrictions and divorce laws loosen over time. Historian Nancy Cott testified about the laws of coverture and the ways in which “the wife was covered, in effect, by her husband’s legal and economic identity.”
“Chauncey” cited above refers to George Chauncey, who authored the amicus Historian’s Brief in Lawrence vs. Texas. There’s been much discussion about how the legal framework of Walker’s decision is aimed directly at Justice Kennedy, seen as the swing Supreme Court vote. Less has been made about the importance of the historical grounding to Kennedy; as Rick Perlstein wrote in an article about Chauncey, “the heart of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s new legal doctrine in the 6–3 decision [of Lawrence vs. Texas], ranging over some dozen paragraphs, is a virtual recapitulation of the Historian’s Brief arguments.”
It would be hard for the Supreme Court to allow a radical challenge to an eternal truth, and right-wing rhetoric like the reductio ad absurdum in the William Duncan quote depends on this. But the case has been carefully made that a century-long shift has led to an incontrovertible conclusion. The challenge no longer looks like a radical upset, but as a mostly typical (and slightly queer) American pattern of expansion of justice and liberty.
Happy (Belated) Birthday to Us!
by Josh K-sky on Aug.07, 2010, under Uncategorized
We just marked our First Blogoversary. Big Josh showed up here on August 5th, 2009 with a review of Chew #1; his enthusiasm may have led directly to a TV deal.
Here’s to another year of humbuggery and wet blanketism, love and theft, the occasional great comment thread, and all the vampire dental anatomy the Internet needs. Thanks to our several faithful readers, and thank you Josh for having me aboard.
Cougar Town
by Josh K-sky on Jul.21, 2010, under Uncategorized
This interesting Ta-Nehisi Coates article got me thinking about another meaning for the term “leaker”.
I vaguely remembered learning about a 19th-century intentional community with a strong operating tenet of free love. Birth control was done by men holding in their ejaculation, a learnable practice. Men who weren’t as good at this as the others, according to one of my AmStud professors, were known as “leakers.”
A little googling and I refreshed myself that the practice is also known as coitus reservatus, the intentional community was (of course!) Oneida, and that another notable sex practice there was this: “Postmenopausal women were encouraged to introduce teenage males to sex, providing both with legitimate partners that rarely resulted in pregnancies. Furthermore, these women became religious role models for the young men.”
Beware, young bros at Pasadena’s Vertical Wine Bar. You might catch a nasty case of religious instruction.
Dream Logic
by Josh K-sky on Jul.19, 2010, under Movies
“It’s a dream, Alex. You can do anything you want in here.”
–Dreamscape (1984), the second or third PG-13 movie
Inception has a few good things going for it. Spoilers ahead.
A Jewel in the Crowd
by Josh K-sky on Jul.15, 2010, under music
“If I was not who I say I am, I could have easily overpowered you already. You have just seen how I willingly gave the Ring back to your master. In fact, if I wanted to kill you all, I could do it — NOW!”
He stood up, and suddenly seemed to grow taller and well-muscled. In his eyes gleamed a light, keen and feral. Throwing back his cloak, he laid his hand on the hilt of a long sword that had hung concealed by his side. Sam stared at it, horrified.
“But I am the real Strider, fortunately,” he said, looking down at them with a suddenly kinder eye. He smiled. “I am already betrothed to an elf-maid, and I have no need for the power of the Ring. I am Aragon son of Arathon; and if I can save you from your own stupid mistakes, then I will.”
There was a long silence. Pipsqueak and Morrie stared at Strider with new-found respect at this revelation of his state.
–The Fellowship of The Ring, J.R.R. Tolkein
In this Funny or Die video, Jewel dresses up as a Woman in a Grey Flannel Suit named Karen and, shyly persuaded to sing by her fellow “conventioneers” (“She only sings at the Christmas party”), blows the crowd away with a couple of Jewel songs.
She then comes back out and does an encore as herself.
This is terrible. Karaoke is the exact wrong place to stage what tvtropes.com calls a King Incognito moment. That works in two situations: where the king needs information that he won’t get if he asks people who know who he is (consider Henry V walking among his troops on the eve of the attack, or, for a variation, Zeus rewarding mortals who treat him kindly not knowing his identity), or when, as in the excerpt above, the king must travel for his own safety.
Karaoke has an exact opposite mythopoetic gesture. We’ve all been to the bar where amid the drunk jocks and party girls (bless them) moaning through “Light My Fire” or “Lady Marmalade” there’s a shy, old man, talking to no one, who reveals as golden a throat as ever ran with the Rat Pack. Karaoke is a scene where an ordinary person can reveal talent that only celebrities are suspected to have.
By mixing with the rabble and then revealing her powers, Jewel sucks the fun out of karaoke. The message of this video is that, actually, most people can’t do the things celebrities do, that privilege follows a natural order, and there’s no point in trying to join the elect if you’re not already in it.
Jewel’s own life story is one of rags to riches. What an awful revision this gives it.
Vietnam
by Josh K-sky on Jul.15, 2010, under Politics
At Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok pulls this quote from Bill Hayton’s Vietnam: Rising Dragon:
It might seem strange, given the system’s surveillance and security networks, but the Communist Party is wary of high-profile law enforcement campaigns. Failure would be worse than embarrassing for a party which is supposed to represent the people’s will. Such campaigns are only ever risked at times and in ways which demonstrate the Party’s continuing hold on power.
In this country, we have the exact inverse — high-profile law enforcement campaigns fail all the time, with the only consequence of expanding the Party’s continuing hold on power. For Party read law enforcement narrowly, or the State if you’re like that. Consider the War on Drugs, a failure by any -on-drugs standard but a huge consolidation of police power and imprisonment.
Somebody oughta tell the Vietnamese.
You Forgot Zeppo
by Josh K-sky on Jul.11, 2010, under Politics, Uncategorized
In the introduction to A Companion to Marx’s Capital, available for download, David Harvey suggests that Marx is synthesizing from three intellectual traditions active in his day: English political economy, German critical philosophy, and French utopian socialism.
A long excerpt below the fold. (continue reading…)