Saturday Sesame Street

This right here is my favorite Monsterpiece Theatre. The Taming of the Shoe is also a good one, but The 39 Stairs is my fav. The line, "There had better be something exciting at the top, I shall tell you!", which I sometimes randomly say to the consternation of those around me, is one of those reasons:


Grover in general is one of the others. I personally love how he almost loses his footing, and his reaction to the brick wall. And I absolutely adore the end exchange:

COOKIE MONSTER: Are you okay?

GROVER: I don't know.

COOKIE MONSTER: Stay there. We still on camera.

GROVER: Hurry.

How could adults and kids alike not love that?

Michele Bachmann Is Why We Need To Elect More Republicans

No, seriously; that title isn't MST3000 material. I think Michele Bachmann is why we need more Republicans in Congress. Just listen to her crazy ramblings:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

A good democracy has more than one party, and at the moment the Republicans left - especially in the House - are tending toward the unhinged side with Michele Bachmann being the head of them all. And while that leads to fun Chris Hayes, I really think that bipartisan efforts and better legislation in general could come about if there were more moderate Republicans in the mix. I can't help but feel like maybe we (collective we, because I don't live there) shouldn't have voted Chris Shays out of representing Connecticut's 4th district.

A Few (Somewhat) Random Thoughts

My commute to and from work is north to south in the morning (and thus south to north in the evening) and, on a good day, about forty-five minutes. Some days it is closer to fifty-five, and on iffy days it is closer to an hour. Given that, I spend a lot of time on Connecticut roadways. And what I can tell you, having spent that time on the roads, is this: 

People in southern Connecticut need to learn how to drive in inclement weather. People in northerner Connecticut need to learn how to drive more cautiously in inclement weather.

Why? Well, today's afternoon forecast was a wintery mix. In southern Connecticut, where I work, that meant flurries in the sky that dissolved before hitting the ground. It was in the upper 30s and the sun was still out, meaning there was nothing but the barest hint of wetness on the ground. There wasn't even any slush. And yet... the top speed until I hit the line of accumulation demarcation was about 20 miles per hour. It was like these drivers had never seen snow flakes before, like they were terrified that somehow the snowflakes, if hit too fast, would severely damage their cars. It was, in a word, hell. Meanwhile, after I passed that lovely line of demarcation, after the sun had set because it took an hour to get there when it normally takes 20 minutes, the slowest the cars around me were willing to go was 60 mph. And because snow started gathering before it did in the south, there was actual snow and ice on the ground and the wintery conditions were actually fairly dangerous. That was clearly the time meant for speeding.

Along the way, though, I learned a few things.

One of those was that I love the duet of "As Long As The Grass Shall Grow" sung by Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash. This is a reworking of the song written and performed to protest the treatment of the Native Americans, and it takes almost nothing from the original except the melody and a bit of the chorus. According to a guy who was not Bob Boilen on All Songs Considered (I think it may have been Stephen Thompson), Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash recorded this version of the song about a year before they both died. It is absolutely beautiful, a truly wonderful love song. This may be because it fits right into the musical styling I love, but I also think there is something to the lyrics. This is a song that deftly fits the Cashs' history; and unlike many love songs that highlight the beginnings of love, this one celebrates a robust and aged love - a love that is still strong even though its participants are nearing their twilight and the love shared between them has spanned the decades. I highly recommend listening to it; it's the third one down in the list of songs featured on the Lesser Known Love Songs list.

Fourth on the Lesser Known Love Songs list is one by Betty Davis. Not the actress Betty Davis, the one whose eyes were immortalized in the Kim Carnes song. This one:

Called "Anti Love Song", Carrie Brownstein on All Songs sums it up when she says, "The lyrics represent a total reluctance and resistance, but the way Betty Davis sings it conveys this undeniability and an understanding that she's going to give in to this very, very soon... ...It's slightly libidinous." 

It is very, very hot. And while there is a bit of that "I don't want to give in and yet I will, what is also there is this power, this recognition that as much as she is going to give in to this love and this libidinous experience, so will he. Because she's that good. And there's about 5 different ways that's awesome.

Then there was a revelation on Bill Moyers' program The Journal. Like many of the programs I wish I actually watched, I generally catch Bill via podcast and so sometimes it is a while before I get around to listening to him. In honor of Lincoln's birthday, Lincoln was the topic. And the guy who wrote one of my history texts for my college Civil War class, Eric Foner, was one of the guests. His postulation, that progressives of the early 20th century

"saw Lincoln as, you might say to go back another couple of generations, a combination of Jefferson and Hamilton at the same time. In other words, Lincoln is a man who believes in Jeffersonian ideals and equality, of democracy, of the government by the people. He's not an elitist in the way of Hamilton, who wanted a monarchy basically. On the other hand, he believes in a powerful government, like Hamilton did and Jefferson did not. He believes the government can be an agent of social change and social reform and improvement."

Lincoln, a combination of two of my favorite revolutionary/post-revolutionary figures!

The last thought is that there are some truly gifted poets out there, and Bill Moyers presented me with one I have not heard before. Nikki Giovanni seems like one of the coolest people to have ever lived. Just listening to her speak on The Journal was like listening to a free form poem. She was entrancing and funny and witty and brilliant. One of my favorite moments was when she said,

"I've always been amazed that you can break up with somebody, and somebody will say to you, 'Well, if you leave me I'm going to kill you.' Now, logic says, if I'm dead, you still don't get me."

I also loved when she said,

"girls are always sitting around listening to stupid things that boys say. And girls, you know, half the games girls play, Little Sally Walker, what is she doing? She's rising to the east, looking for the one she loves the best. What did - what's her name? - Snow White. And she's going to go to sleep until "one day my prince will come". You get sick of that. You got a girl who can spin flax into gold, and her father, "The Miller's Tale", which became "Rumpelstitskin", her father then takes her up to the prince to say, "You should marry my daughter. She can spin flax into gold." What does she need with him? If I can spin flax into gold I would - I mean, she didn't need the prince."

My favorite line, though, was this:

"life is a good idea."

And to end this, the first poem I heard by her on The Journal:

"Bicycles"

Midnight poems are bicycles

Taking us on safer journeys

Than jets

Quicker journeys

Than walking

But never as beautiful

A journey

As my back

Touching you under the quilt

Midnight poems

Sing a sweet song

Saying everything

Is all right

Everything

Is

Here for us

I reach out

To catch the laughter

The dog thinks

I need a kiss

Bicycles move

With the flow

Of the earth

Like a cloud

So quiet

In the October sky

Like licking ice cream

From a cone

Like knowing you

Will always

Be there

All day long I wait

For the sunset

The first star

The moon rise

I move

To a midnight

Poem

Called

You

Propping

Against

The dangers

Women Don't Need Real Food - We're Good With Gum

I hate this commercial, and I'm pretty sure everyone else in the world should as well. Why? Well, watch it.

Let's see; it has a skinny woman who can't have that white chocolate macadamia nut cookie because she "caved" on eating that brownie yesterday. Her internal battle is between that bad craving, and her "good" self that really doesn't want to do anything that might jeopardize her skinniness. So what does she do? Well, she does what any smart woman who wants to be good does: she eats a piece of gum instead. Right, that isn't at all problematic.

The fact is, women should not feel like they've been bad for eating a brownie, or like they can't eat that cookie even though they've done some cardio. The fact is, self-denial in pursuit of bodily perfection does us no good. The fact is, this form of food-consumptive shaming has been going on for too long. We should not be congratulating the woman in the video for resisting her wish for a cookie. The woman in the video should not consider it a battle won that she not consume that cookie. This should not be held up as a triumph. It should not be held up as triumph because eating one cookie (or even 3) is not the end of the world or a negative action. Eating a sweet is not a bad thing, and it is continually depressing that women are taught and told to believe that it is. A while ago on Feministing, this very thing was highlighted by Courtney on her Ten Things I Could Do Without list; clocking in at number 5 was:

"Hearing my otherwise enlightened girl friends say they're "bad" because they just ate dessert."

Samhita responded with Ten Things Samhita Can Do Without. At number 3?

"Having my weight scrutinized by friends and family on a regular basis even though I am a grown ass woman and it is none of your business."

And it is present in the story told by Darla on We Are The Wave, when her mother gladly bought her diet microwave dinners to eat and took pride in her daughter's weight loss.

Weight loss or gain is only morally good or bad if we find something deficient in those who actually want to do that crazy thing called eating. Sure, there are people who overeat. But too often, we feel ashamed that we have these cravings at all, that we truly want that piece of chocolate or that brownie or that cookie. And that shame and that denial is not healthy. It does not lend to a healthy relationship with the food we eat, or the shape our bodies take. We shouldn't have to work out as penance for doing so, as though those extra fifteen minutes on a treadmill "make up" for that deviation the night before.

I eat. I personally don't eat a hell of a lot; and because of my hypoglycemia I have to be careful of my intake of sugar, lest I pass out and freak out those around me. I do eat what I want and generally when I want, though again the hypoglycemia leads to a somewhat more structured meal routine if I want to remain upright and cognizant. If I want a cookie, I have a cookie. I just make sure it's close enough to bed time so when I start getting dizzy I'm already laying down. I learned long ago that denying myself something I wanted - be it sweets or books or CDs - just meant that I would later binge on that very thing; which, by the way, is how I end up with things like Scott Weiland's solo CD. That still doesn't stop my some of coworkers from commenting about "how much" I eat and what I eat and how one day my metabolism will stop working for me and I'll have to be "good" like most of them. But I don't want to be. I want to be active; but I want to be active for the sake of being active, and not as a kind of Hail Mary when I do something like eat a piece of cake. And I want my cake, sans guilt. I want to not see commercials on my television set informing me that good girls and women chew gum after agonizing for dozens of seconds about whether or not they could rationalize actually eating something. I want a world in which women are considered good for actual acts of goodness, instead of self-denial. I want a world in which weight is no longer a measure of a person's moral worth. And I want a world in which people chew gum because they honestly want to, and not as a substitute for something else.

A Series of Questions, And Answers

I'm stealing this idea from Fourth Wave, because I liked it. Like Aviva, I answered the questions on the website itself, but my answers were ridiculously long so I brought them here. The first set of numbered questions come from Jaclyn from Bitch Ph.D., and the second set of lettered questions come from Aviva of Fourth Wave. The questions from the Jaclyn are italicized, and the ones from Aviva are bolded, just to make things that much more complicated.

1) Did you watch? What did you think?
I liked it; I have hope that the good/great parts will continue, and that what I see as the philosophical thread carrying over from his previous works continue to be, well, carried over. The pilot gave me a lot of hope and a lot of food for thought.

2) Were you as psyched as I was to see that Mutant Enemy tag at the end?
Hells yeah.

3) How did you feel about Eliza D as Faith in Buffy? How have you felt about everything she's done since Buffy? What did you think about her performance as Echo?

I hated the character of Faith. Madeline Kahn in Clue, "flames on the sides of my face" hate. Plus, I've never seen the range or talent. Which may be partially because I don't see the infamous chemistry with everything and everyone.

ADDED FOR HERE (cuz there's stuff I forget to say): I haven't actually seen Eliza in anything post-Buffy except for Bring It On (don't judge - too harshly), and there I wasn't impressed. I also wasn't highly impressed with Echo, but am hoping that changes.

4) Why the hell did Joss agree to work with Fox again? Or ever?
(Because I'm a Whedonite): Joss wrote the show to highlight Eliza Dushku's (questionable, for me) acting talents and range. Because Eliza is contracted to work for Fox, Fox is where he would have to go to make the show. And he sort of compromised in the whole "oh, it's run by different people now", and that may be why he agreed to work with Fox again. But the reason I've heard as the catalyst for why Fox is to work with Eliza.

5) Um... are there still no people of color who want good roles in Hollywood? It's a real problem, isn't it? How on earth can we fix it, so that all the producers and directors aren't forced to only cast white people all the time? (Yes, there's Harry Lennix as Echo's handler, but a) that just makes him the token and b) Driving Miss Daisy, anyone?)

I have no idea. I think this is a definite area where Whedon falls down on the job, and then down some stairs.

ADDED FOR HERE (cuz, again, I forget stuff): Although there are still a dominance of white actors on the show, I do think Whedon did slightly better this time around by casting Dichen Lachman, a woman of Tibetan-Australian descent, as one of the other Actives to be highlighted and Tahmoh Penikett, who is part Native-Canadian (or rather, part of the White River First Nation) as the FBI agent. Not great, but better.

6) Ditto fat people, people with physical disabilities, people who aren't freakishly pretty, etc.?

Same as 5, minus the stuff about Tahmoh and Dichen.

7) Did they really have to start with the girl-is-broken-due-to-sex-abuse-and-requires-the-intervention-of-a-kind-man-to-seek-redemption plotline? Why is that never the secret weak spot for male action stars, huh?
While I would love it if a woman could be strong and capable and want to achieve something without having been scarred in the past making it logical or acceptable in a way men never need, the plot didn't bother me personally in this instance - partially because I saw it as a continuation of the idea of using people as objects. The man who called himself a "ghost" was treating the young girls as objects, the guy who was trying to get his daughter back was content to use Echo-as-Eleanor as an object, and while the person who made up Eleanor was destroyed by it because she "couldn't get away from him", Echo/Eleanor are destroyed because everything is taken away from them. I expect that this theme will become stronger (or at least, I hope it does) based on the fact that it was a key component of BtVS and River's story (and the crew's) in Firefly/Serenity. All that being said, I think there had to be a better way of going about it, because just because its Whedon and it fits the theme doesn't mean that it doesn't still fit a larger problematic narrative that women can't be successful and can't be driven unless they have been in some way broken or damaged. I don't know whether or not to give Whedon half a pass because he prefers to have all of his characters in some way broken or damaged.

8) If Person A is desperate and out of options, and is coerced into fully giving up her agency and identity, and if, after making that one decision, Person A no longer has any meaningful ability to consent to anything, nor does she have the ability to withdraw her consent from the original agreement -- under those circumstances, if Person C pays Person B money to have sex with Person A, is that really prostitution, as Joss and Eliza have said it is? Or is that sexual slavery?

Slavery. My thing is that the slavery on Dollhouse is not just sexual. Eleanor didn't do anything sexual with Gabriel, and still her part in the whole operation was not on the up and up and Echo/Caroline are still enslaved. Same thing if she has to break in somewhere. The persona embodying Echo may think that this was her idea, but it still is (theoretically) not something Echo/Caroline would do, and the owners of the Dollhouse are still using her body for their own purposes. I find that horrific, whether it is sexual or not.

9) Can someone tell me that Joss is going somewhere good with this? I want to believe...

I think so. I think he is converging on a couple of different themes here, including his ever present (or at least, to me ever present) idea that the greater good cannot be achieved through nefarious means; that a world or a government is not of greater worth than its individual citizens, and that as soon as you begin disregarding the sanctity of human autonomy and human life, you lose. He did it with Angel in season 2, he did it with the Operative in Serenity, he did it with Dr. Horrible in that work, and he did it (kind of backwards, in that Buffy rejected that premise outright) in BtVS' season 5 finale The Gift.

I also think, in conjunction to that, he is examining his theme of "women treated as objects". It fits into the above, but it is a subset theme of that with a feminist bent where he seems to show how society devalues women and uses them - or allows them to be used - and then has those women claim their autonomy back. The Slayer was considered nothing more than an object to be used for the greater good in BtVS, and River was considered an object to be used for the greater good in Firefly/Serenity, and Echo and Sierra seem to embody that same space. And I think through that creation, Whedon is both commenting how women are more likely, given our culture, to be treated as objects and highlighting how wrong that is. At least, that is where I think he's going with this.

And now for Aviva's:

a) Can a disturbing premise be mitigated by the subjugated character developing agency and control over her oppressors? If so, to what degree? Does she need to escape? Seek retribution? Take over?
I think a disturbing premise can be mitigated if it means to be disturbing, and means to address that which makes it disturbing. By that I mean a misogynistic work is different than a work that examines misogyny in our culture. I think that Dollhouse is of the latter category rather than the former, especially since they were (heavy handedly) discussing 'regular' human trafficking as well as being an evil that needs to be stopped. I think the show already wants its viewers to equate the two.

That being said, I think one of the ways Dollhouse will explore that disturbing premise is by having Echo fight for and achieve agency, much in the way other characters of Whedon's have done. I don't know if she should gain control over her oppressors. Rather, I think that would just create a second inverted power system - and I think that may be where they're going with that creepy guy at the end, the one who was mailing a picture of Caroline to Paul Ballard. Taking over will still basically be working within the system. What I think needs to happen is for the system to be dismantled, and for those who were working toward the 'greater good' by violated the autonomy of those involved to be punished.

And I do think she needs to escape. She needs to not be rescued by Paul or a conscience-plagued Boyd. She needs to do it, herself, for herself. She needs to take back her own control.

b) How long can a show like Dollhouse continue on with this same "she can be anything you want her to be" shtick before something has to give?
I'm going to go with a while. ...I don't need to fall in love with Echo; I can root for her without her developing a personality, because I believe that what happened to her was a violation and because I believe her lacking any distinctive personality does not mitigate the awfulness of what her situation is. Also, I think that as long as the other characters - good and evil and amoral - become more developed, Echo's development can be slower. If they give me something meaty with Boyd and Paul and Adelle and Topher and Claire, I should be okay. I especially think Boyd is important here, though, because his concern for Echo's welfare - even if it is only within the confines of the established Handler-Active relationship 'allowed' within The Dollhouse - allows the audience emotional access to a character that basically has none - until she begins to develop one.

c) Is it possible to maintain narrative interest if Echo escapes or if Dollhouse (the place, not the show) is shut down? If so, how? If not, then doesn't the continued need for the Dollhouse as an element of narrative interest necessitate the continued exploitation of the "actives" for our viewing pleasure?
I think if Echo escapes, the narrative interest could remain in her trying to figure out who she was and if she can get back to that person - and if she even wants to. I doubt Dollhouse will truly be shut down until the ending season (whether or not Joss Whedon gets a full run is a toss up, and I'm going with a big "no"), but even if it does, I think Whedon can take the show in the direction of where the Actives can go, who they are, and exploring the Dollhouse from the perspective of its consequences on its Actives and what the void it left is filled with.

If The Dollhouse is not shut down until the end, then I think continued exploitation for the dolls on the inside will be necessary for maintaining its evilness - and I think the show has to exist on a razor's edge to maintain that feeling of "this isn't alright" and moving the recognition of that forward while utilizing the flexibility of the wiped for stories. I'm not a writer, so I don't know if that is truly possible. But then again, maybe there won't be on-screen exploitation. Maybe after a certain point, the emphasis will be on who Echo is outside The Dollhouse and her efforts to shut it down. This is the one that I honestly on which I waffle the most.

An Exploitive Show Vs. A Show Examining Exploitation

"I've had a relationship with the group Equality Now since its inception; and I was visiting the New York offices, which I hadn't been in, right after I had pitched the show. So I decided, just off the cuff, to sit everybody down and tell them what I was going to do, because I figured I would never have a tougher room than that. And I think the reactions were mixed. Some people thought there's a discussion going on there, and it's interesting and it's worthy. And some people thought it sounds just like glorifying human trafficking, which is something they particularly fight against. And so, you know, it was sort of a harbinger of what was to come, which is that this show is going to get some very mixed reactions, and I think it is going to make some people who are fans of my political stance probably angry; some others not, I think. But the idea was to open a discussion, and I think now there may be some shouting during it."

-Joss Whedon, on NPR's Fresh Air.

There's this thing floating around about Dollhouse, that it is somehow incongruent with Whedon's feminism, that it somehow detracts from his feminist cred card. It is there when Jacki Lyden, of NPR's All Things Considered, says, "I have to say looking at it, it looks to me and feels to me like the ultimate misogynistic male fantasy". I don't think that is entirely correct. If the show turns out to only be about the ultimate misogynistic male fantasy, if it is titillation and little else, then I think it would be a valid critique. However, just the first episode reflected some of the themes Whedon has penned before. When Paul says, "If the only way to imprint a human being with a new personality... ...is to remove their own, completely, we're talking about people walking around who may as well have been murdered. Which, to me, sounds pretty bad", it mirrors Simon telling the crew about what the government had done to River, and when he discovered they stripped her amygdala. When Topher tells Echo that Sierra is undergoing a treatment and that they are making her better, it conjures Mal's soliloquy about how the ruling body will "swing back to the belief that they can make people... Better. And I do not hold to that". When the allusion is made to human trafficking when discussing The Dollhouse operation, the misogynistic male fantasy side of the equation drops down a bit, I believe.

What seems to be overlooked in this particular criticism of Dollhouse is that there is a key difference between an exploitive show and a show examining exploitation. There is a key difference between a misogynistic show, and a show that examines misogyny.

The world Dollhouse inhabits may have misogynistic themes and tendencies; it may be a sexist world. But so is our own. The Dollhouse and the Actives that are housed within it may merely be exaggerations of this life we live. And by doing that, by exaggerating and making more prominent these parts of society that Whedon is disgusted by or intrigued by, and watching how he attempts to reconcile Echo's eventual reclaiming of her life and her autonomy, Whedon may further his feminist message. When Lyden asks, "She's not in any sense in control of her own life, so why present that type of main female character?" she is doing Dollhouse wrong. Because the show isn't about a Buffy character (who, incidentally, was trapped in the same basic premise as Echo is, being used by an organization larger than she who believed her to be a worthy object but not an actual autonomous being); Whedon has already given us a Buffy - and a Zoe, and a River, and a Willow, and a Kaylee, and a Cordelia and the list goes on and on. He has already purposefully created a feminist icon; several, in point of fact. But the question becomes who am I most like? Who are most women like? What do most women have to deal with? I'm not really a Buffy no matter how much I want to be, even though part of my philosophy is made up by the phrase "What Would Buffy Do?" to the point where I had it on a key chain in a town where the prevalent thought was "What Would Jesus Do?" I'm more of a Willow (circa seasons 1 through 3) than probably any other Whedon character. I have to be vigilant when alone; I am not a force the demons fear; I cannot take back the night on my own. But there is a part of Buffy in me; at least, I hope there is. And in Echo, we have the opposite of Buffy, because all of us are, in some way, Echo. All of us are - in some way and some more than others and some less, some all in some ways and some all in others - marginalized, voiceless, objectified, used, weak, powerless; just like all of us are - in some way and some more than others and some less, some all in some ways and some in others - strong, powerful, commanding, charismatic, self-assured, self-centered, autonomous, righteous, wonderful, capable, kind, in control. When Joss Whedon says about River that "She is the monster. She is the damsel. She is the action hero", he is describing all of us. And Buffy represents one track of who we are and what kind of life we can live. As a feminist icon, Buffy kicks ass. But while she is also "the monster" and "the damsel" and "the action hero", she is least often the damsel. Echo is for those of us who are often, even when we don't want to be, the damsel, taken to the extreme partially so she can fight back and become more fully actualized and partially to demonstrate how damaging this particular track actually is and what it does to every one of us.

This particular show isn't about giving us a heroine from the onset to root for and who is immediately awe-worthy. It is about us, and how we feel and what makes us sick. And while Whedon's focus of the show is on a woman, and while that may allow him to examine themes he finds most interesting and may bring to life what parts of the general culture he feels are most dangerous to women, the show as a whole seems to be about not just how society treats women but how we treat each other. Whedon apparently wants to examine "what we want from each other sexually, how much power we wanna have over each other". His primary focus is going to be a woman, possibly because tangentially, based on their position in society, women get hit with this sort of thing more often than men do (and also, Whedon seems drawn to exploring the lives and the trials and triumphs of women). But the overall theme of identity and how morally or ethically bad or good or indifferent an organization like The Dollhouse is goes beyond misogynistic fantasy and into how we interact and see other human beings - if we recognize, as Paul does, each human being's right to autonomy, or if we fall into the trap of using them as objects to fulfill our own pleasure without a care about them or their own.

That isn't to say that there isn't some valid criticisms of the way the show is going about portraying its eventual message about feminism or human trafficking or identity or autonomy or human worth. Aviva at Fourth Wave and Jaclyn at Bitch, Ph.D. asked some of those questions, and David BM Cooley on NPR's Fresh Air did as well; the most compelling question for me came from Aviva, when she asked,

"...doesn't the continued need for the Dollhouse as an element of narrative interest necessitate the continued exploitation of the "actives" for our viewing pleasure?"

That is, for my money, a great question. At what point does watching the exploitation of the Actives in the series become too much like the torture porn of the movie Captivity that Whedon himself railed against? At what point is there no intellectual value in watching the main premise of "these people are wiped and have to be a whole bunch of other people"? I don't have an answer for it. But I do have answers for some of the others, and those will be coming in a separate post on the subject.

Ridiculousness in Bridal Mags

I have not been good at posting clips of my favorite people. I missed a whole bunch of Chris Hayes on Countdown (which I'll probably be posting later, because even though they're kind of outdated I still like 'em), I haven't been demonstrating my love for Jay Smooth quite as much as I would like, and to top it off, I totally missed Jessica Valenti's new 12 Second Musing. I feel less bad about that one, because she hasn't updated in a while, and I was getting bored of going and checking and not seeing anything new. But she did make a new one on February 9th, and so for your viewing pleasure:

Being horrified by wedding mags on 12seconds.tv

There's no face here that reminds me of my favorite philosophy professor as there have been in the past; but I find her observation, especially near Valentine's Day, to deserve highlighting anyway. I'm nowhere near getting engaged or married, even as several feminists I follow are (and congrats!), and possibly as a consequence I'm pretty much wholly uninterested in the wedding hoopla. But this is still ridiculous.

A Post In Which I Review "Ghost", and Dollhouse

Dollhouse has the worst theme. Ever. Well, possibly not ever. The theme for 7th Heaven wasn't exactly winner material. But it is pretty damn bad. Out of my Whedon themes, it comes in dead last, so far down that it hasn't even managed to cross the line yet (my theme list, in case you're interested, goes Buffy, Firefly, and then Angel; there used to be more of a gap between Firefly and Angel, but Dollhouse has made the Angel theme all the more endearing to me). This really has little to do with the actual show, but it is a weakness.

Overall, I thought that the first episode Dollhouse was good. "Ghost" suffers from many of the same problems that plague other pilots in that it did not feel as though it had completely gelled yet. It also didn't feel like classic Whedon writing, but there was enough signature lines and enough of the Whedon humor that I was unbothered. After all, Firefly has a whole different vernacular and verbal style than Buffy the Vampire Slayer; and although I like BtVS' verbosity better for day to day quotage and it can consistently give me a writing high (it also highly influenced my own vocab, sadly enough), Firefly's distinctive style was seamless in terms of what it was representing in-show. And with lines like:

"Stroke of midnight."

"Midnight?"

"End of the ball."

"Dude, it- it's like, 5."

And:

"Something fell on me."

"I bet it was something great."

And:

"Make sure the ladies at my table have everything they need, huh? The champagne never stops flowing - the good stuff. (pause) The first few bottles, the good stuff. After that, the house is fine."

And:

"Find out who's connected to the Dollhouse, the Borodin family won't be touched, and you'll never see me again."

"I haven't seen you yet."

I'm not worried about the writing having its very own style that fits with Whedon's overall idiosyncratic personality.

Likewise, I'm not worried that the characters we have been introduced to did not, as a whole, have glaringly obvious and distinctive personalities and reasons as of yet. This is a new show, and part of its purpose is an examination of identity. I'm not surprised that we don't know Topher or Boyd or Adelle or Paul as well as we knew Buffy and Willow and Xander and Mal and Inara and Kaylee yet. What we have been shown is intriguing.

That being said, there are some weak points to the show, and unfortunately, one of them is Eliza Dushku. There was too much Faith in her opening characterization, when she looked bedraggled and was being consigned into Dollhouse service. There was too much Faith in her first motorcycle-riding, fun-dancing, sexy-rope-using persona. There was too little oomph in some of her other scenes. Part of my problem stems from the fact that I've never been all that impressed with Eliza Dushku's acting, and although I've been told many times that she could create chemistry with a log I've never been one to see it. I have to hope she gets slightly better at speaking zombie post-wipe Echo lines, because right now it is slightly painful for me. There were also some poor plot points. I had to wonder, during Sierra's initial wipe, why Topher or Adelle (or anyone, for that matter) would house that particular room in that particular location, where the ensuing light show would be (and was) more than visible to anyone down below. And if they had decided that location was the best for that room for X,Y or Z reasons, why no one would think it important to lock the door. Echo wandering in (along with the cringe-worthy "She hurts") was something that induced heavy eye-rolling. Another blinking red light moment for me was during Eleanor Penn's 'treatment'. There was no real reason given for why Topher decided to not wipe her, unless I missed it completely.

And yet, the list of things right with this show far outweighs those two points right now - and given that the show focuses on Eliza, that is saying something. Every other actor is phenomenal. Fran Kranz makes Topher human, unlike Adam Busch's evil Warren and Tom Lenk's amoral Andrew (he is too unlike Jayne at the moment for those two amoralities to be adequately compared). Kranz's reactions to Echo and Boyd, his thoughtful articulations of what Dollhouse is and what a person is made up of, is incredibly engaging. He is amoral, and I suspect he is crafted to be seen as amoral; but even with that knowledge, Whedon has taken the trick he employed most effectively in Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog and made Topher someone the audience can connect with even as they are (potentially) disturbed by that bit of enjoyment and understanding. Harry Lennix as Boyd is another perfect fit. One of the complaints I've read about the show is that if Echo is almost wholly without her own personality, the audience is left unable to connect to her. Lennix's Boyd provides the easy answer; we are connected to Echo's story because Boyd is connected to and concerned about Echo. Even if we cannot fully recognize who Echo is due to Echo herself not being privy to that information, we can connect to Boyd's empathy for her, and his own attachment to her. Olivia Williams is yet another bit of inspired casting. I want to know what makes her tick, why she believes Dollhouse is a force of good.

The parts of the show itself that are good are fantastic; the entire premise of the Actives on engagement creates a strange sense of vertigo; Eleanor Penn (the persona we spend the most time with in "Ghost", the persona whose narrative is responsible for the title of the very episode) is not, conventionally, real. The experiences she draws upon to form her opinions and her own idea of who she is and how she has come to be are not, technically, her own. The years that she has spent studying psychology and forensic science, profiling from former instructors at Quantico, being licensed for seven years, handling 12 negotiations, the very things she offers up as reasons to trust her never truly happened to this one person. And yet, for her, they have and they did. That disconnect between what we normally experience as reality and Eleanor Penn's vision of reality is what creates friction between this woman who is innocently unaware of the underlying tension and the man who paid for an Active from Dollhouse. When this scene goes down:

ELEANOR PENN: You have to trust that I've done this many, many times.

GABRIEL: I have to trust that, right. Yesterday you weren't a nurse or a clown in the circus.

ELEANOR PENN: What?

GABRIEL: You're the best. The best one they could send. Why is that? What makes you so good at this?

ELEANOR PENN: I don't have any hobbies.

GABRIEL: No, no, no. You have to do better than that. You have to make me believe. Believe like you believe.

the tension inherent in the scenario where one person knows about a game being played the other is completely in the dark about creates a dynamic scene. Because Gabriel is describing the world of Dollhouse, and Eleanor isn't an Active. She doesn't know what Adelle and Topher have done to make her the best, because for her, she wasn't made. She just is. And so when Gabriel demands that she has to make him believe, like she believes, she is automatically at a loss. Because she doesn't just believe it; she has memory of living it. She knows it. And that is part of what makes the very set up of the show tragic, what we witness first hand in Eleanor Penn. She (and every other Persona) is at an immediate disadvantage, partially because she is the paid for in any of these situations, but also because she is lacking the fundamental knowledge necessary to properly interact with the people in question. And yet, she (and every other Persona) cannot have that fundamental knowledge if the house of cards is to remain standing.

What stems from that is the question of the authentic experience. One of the people who made up Eleanor Penn was sexually abused by the man Eleanor comes into contact with while trying to ensure the safe release of Gabriel's daughter. Her reactions are of someone who was truly abused; but she - at least in this way - had not been. That history never existed. Unfortunately for Eleanor, she never spoke a truer word than when she told the man that he couldn't hurt her, that you can't fight a ghost. Because that is essentially what Eleanor is, someone who lived on the world for a while, but never in it. Someone who could remember people who had never met her, or abused her. In the end, Eleanor gets the girl back, but she still doesn't win. And neither does Echo. They are both erased, used by a larger organization that cares very little about them and their authentic lives.

The show also managed to explain the functionality of the premise well. The expositiony dialogue was less jarring and boring because it was tangled up in the philosophical thoughts of Topher. When Boyd questions making Echo nearsighted, Topher manages to explain why the personas are never going to truly be Superman, and yet also manages to heighten the intrigue into his very own character. In a truly captivating bit, Topher explains the process of creating an identity as

"You see someone running incredibly fast, the first thing you gotta ask is are they running to something or are they running away from something. The answer is always both. These personality imprints, they come from scans of real people. I can create amalgams of the personalities, pieces from her or there; but it's not a greatest hits. It's a whole person. Achievement is balanced by fault, by a lack. Can't have one without the other. Everyone who excels at something is overcompensating. Running from something. Hiding from something."

Since Topher himself excels at something, and since he seems to have universalized his own experience, the question immediately becomes what is Topher running from? And yet, now we know more about the Actives themselves. The thing that separates Joss Whedon's sci-fi/fantasy writing from so many others is that the exposition is oftentimes just as much about the immediate story and the characters as it is about granting those of us in the viewing audience access to the necessary road maps. It very rarely actually feels as though Whedon is pointing to a Yellow Brick Road and telling us where he wants us to go and what he wants us to know. It is just a natural evolution of the 'verse itself.

Saturday Sesame Street

I want a gimmick, a gimmick I can keep up with and that is strangely alliterative and that makes me incandescently happy. This is that gimmick. Saturday Sesame Street:



I love how you can see the early stages of Herry Monster here, and how it's Jim Henson doing the voice instead of Jerry Nelson - and how it is one more example of how well Jim Henson and Frank Oz play off of one another. Plus, this is one of my favorite songs off of my (very well-worn) Sesame Street Gang record.

"Am I Real? Am I Anything?"

In the fifth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the title character gains, rather suddenly, a 14 year old sister. That sister presumes she has lived all of her 14 years with Buffy and her mother, and Buffy and her mother and her friends presume that she has as well. The reason why everyone acts as if Dawn not only belongs in Sunnydale, in the Summers' residence, but also like they all have established relationships with her is because they remember her being there. Monks, in an effort to thwart an angry hell goddess from her goal of returning to her hellish dimension and killing all other worlds in the process, not only made Dawn into a 14 year old girl but also created memories and familial ties to go along with it. Dawn's creation and her forced inclusion in the lives of Buffy, her mother, and her friends is a violation of their autonomy and the sanctity of their memories. And Buffy feels that violation when she is confronted with the truth:
MONK: For centuries, it had no form at all. My brethren, its only keepers. Then the abomination found us. We had to hide the Key, gave it form, molded it flesh. Made it human, and sent it to you.

BUFFY: Dawn.

MONK: She's the Key.

BUFFY: You put that in my house?

MONK: We knew the Slayer would protect.

BUFFY: My memories... my mom's?

MONK: We built them.

BUFFY: Then unbuild them! This is my life you're -

MONK: You cannot abandon.

BUFFY: I didn't ask for this! I don't even know... What is she?

MONK: Human. Now human. And helpless. Please. She's an innocent in this. She needs you.

BUFFY: She's not my sister.

MONK: She doesn't know that.
What becomes clear is that Dawn herself is also a victim, perhaps even moreso, because she is the thing constructed.

In Dawn, there is a wrong being perpetrated against the other characters. Because of Dawn, there are no easy or right answers for how to handle that wrong. The characters have to live with that violation and within the 'verse and memories that violation has constructed. Anything less would be to willingly abandon an innocent 14 year old who had done nothing to instigate her creation. When Dawn discovers this, she begins a season-long downward spiral, and mixes that liberally with an existential crisis. And although there had been questions of identity before in Whedon's work, how we become who we are, what forms us, and what informs us, Dawn is really the first radical examination of how identity is constructed and what memory means. Dawn is the first character built on illusion, whose backstory - the very thing that informs her make up - is false. What the fifth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer validates is Dawn's place in the world; the end of the season culminates with the idea that even though Dawn is unusually constructed, she is still human, she is still a person of worth, and she is still worth fighting for and dying for. What came before does not erase what is present in the moment; and when Buffy chooses to sacrifice her own life for the sister she hadn't had 9 months previous, what is emphasized is Dawn's own right to life.

What will be interesting about Dollhouse is that Echo and Echo's predicament is in essence an inversion of Dawn's situation. Dawn was constructed, her memories were constructed, and so who she is and what she does is built upon what many would consider a fabrication. Echo has the opposite problem. Echo will have real experiences she will not remember; Echo will have real thoughts she won't be able to recall; and Echo will have real learning experiences that at the end of the day will be stripped from her. And even though the pilot did not have that moment of forced revulsion Buffy's moment with discovering the truth about Dawn articulated for the audience, I think the premise of Echo's life is meant to cull up a feeling of disgust. From the opening moments where we see Caroline's somewhat coerced volunteering, to watching her memory wiped from her and the remnant token of the night's activities slip through her fingers, to watching Echo's Miss Penn dealing with the memory of an assault she never experienced, the creep-factor is there - and we are meant to recognize Echo's wiped existence as being a fundamental violation of her personhood, of her own self, as well as noting the strangely false authenticity that her different personas embody. What is perhaps all the odder is that it is not just Caroline we see erased, but every single persona Echo is implanted with as well. Eleanor Penn may have been an amalgam of different people, but for the time she existed within Echo, she was a person - she had experiences; she had faults; she had a backstory. Miss Penn died once Echo was erased, just like the motorcycle girl we never truly met died once the engagement is over. Every episode of Dollhouse will be a funeral procession of sorts - which is oddly perfect for Whedon, a man who never seems fully satisfied unless several of his characters are dead.

The very question of identity and what is an authentic and meaningful one is already in full swing in Dollhouse due to those factors. The question regarding Miss Penn's existence, if she was truly "a person, actual and whole" or if the inauthenticity of her memories made her okay to wipe in a way Caroline was not, is already out there, written into the very DNA of the show. Especially considering who came before her in the Whedon canon of characters. Because if Eleanor Penn's wiping creates no ethical quandaries or moral ambiguities, then what we learned from Dawn's existence is placed back in peril. If Eleanor is prime for being scrubbed out because the basis of her existence was not in the strictest sense true - if that contributes to her not equalling a full and adequate human being, then some of Dawn's own personhood becomes chipped away as well. But I'm inclined to believe that Whedon recognizes the inherent unfairness of the Dollhouse system for not only Caroline and Echo and Sierra, but also Eleanor Penn and the myriad of other people who are created and then erased from existence. Although it is more subtly hinted than the works before, there is the sense that something is rotten in the state of Denmark. And although I fully expect issues of agency and feminism and the nature of the greater good versus the rights of the individual will play a full and robust role here in Dollhouse (if the show progresses that far), I also believe that this question of what makes someone a person is the prevalent theme for the series. It just also nicely ties into the other issues present.

Why I'm Not Going To Be Around

I'm totally reneging on my "I'm going to post about Whedon every day", but I have a valid excuse. First, it is my sisters' birthday today, and second, my Uncle Jerry died. Between the two, things have been a little hectic. My Uncle Jerry was best known for three things, those being looking vaguely like Waylon Jennings:

<--------(Uncle Jerry)   (Waylon Jennings) ----->

Witnessing his older brother (my grandfather - who looked vaguely like Willie Nelson) getting jumped by some neighborhood kids, running home to get his metal roller skates, and then beating those kids with the skates at the age of six; and for subjecting my family to one of the worst family reunions ever.

He'd been working as a handyman at an Irish resort in upstate New York, and decided that since the bar was well-stocked and he had a trailer all to himself that he would organize for the rest of the clan to come. And we did come. And the first afternoon, it was alright. Sure, each individual family changed rooms around three times before succumbing to the realization that the rooms weren't going to get any cleaner - or look any less like they'd been decorated in the mid-70s at the height of the orange and brown revival. But the place also had an Olympic sized pool and as much dangerous playground equipment as any family could ever possibly want (which was a lot). And the bar was well stocked, so that was something. But then a rain storm rolled in and refused to roll out, the power went out, and the only emergency generator was hooked up to the bar. Which is where a majority of my family stayed. For four days. The other place we all gathered was the cleanest room, which happened to be my family's. It had several perks: it was closest to the bar, it was on the ground floor (which was convenient for when people were stumbling back from the bar), and it had a trash can. The trash can was important because we had to manually flush the toilet, and pouring water into the back of the tank was the preferred method. This was also the summer several of the younger members of my family were being potty trained, and they were horrified and confused at the lack of flushability the toilets offered. We finally all abandoned the reunion when the from Ireland parents of one of my cousin's husbands called him in a panic, ranting about the "shanty Irish" and to get the whole family out of there. Since the rain hadn't let up and the bar money was running low, most of us took their advice and got out. For those too young to drink (like me) the whole long weekend is burned into memory. For those who were old enough to drink, most of the long weekend seems to be a blur. What we learned, though, is that about forty of us can live in one room for four days without fighting; many of us felt closer after the weekend, and some of my family members feel like Uncle Jerry just proved how well we are all able to get along. I learned that you can make a quick buck walking by a drunk relative with someone else's kid, because that drunk relative (especially if it is my Uncle Eddie) will help himself to someone else's bar money to pay for babysitting - much to the bewilderment of the person the bar money originally belonged to, especially if the kid in question wasn't his or her own. So, all in all, what Uncle Jerry gave us all were stories, and a lot of them. And in my family, that is the greatest achievement.

I Have a New Love

It's Coldplay. And all because of this one interview:

Watch CBS Videos Online
I generally find Coldplay's music boring - a fact that stunned and concerned my parents, since they find most of the music I like boring. Given that, I'm not really sure why we stayed for the interview; I imagine it had something to do with the fact that there was only about 15 minutes left in the hour, which left precious little time for something else, and my parents wanted to catch Andy Rooney, who wasn't on last night anyway. So we sat and watched, going into it vaguely cynically. With that being the case, it is surprising how fast I fell. I felt kind of like Renee Zellweger; they had me at "The other reason that we do well is because U2 are still on holiday." - "They come back in March." - "They're back in March, so as soon as they come back, we drop down the ladder a bit." Well, it was between that and the "If you see people's silhouettes in the exists, it means you're probably not playing the right song. 'Cause, a lot of people are going to get a hot dog or whatever". Absolutely freaking adorable.

So, I stole my sister's Viva La Vida CD (actually, I asked for it nicely and returned it promptly, but stole sounds better), loaded it on my iPod, and I'm going to give Coldplay another shot. All because Chris Martin and his band are so earnest and self-effacing and quirky.

"We're Making A Better World"

In Joss Whedon's work, there is a pervasive theme of a constant conflict between those who operate within an official capacity to govern a society, and those who exist as individuals within that society. This is a theme that ties directly to Whedon's feminism, but for the purposes of this post I am going to attempt to stick to the differing philosophies espoused in Whedon's work among his heros and antagonists - and at times his wayward heros. The title of the piece comes from The Operative, a character present in the movie Serenity who is embedded in the government of the Alliance, the ruling body of the Fireflyverse. For Whedon, governments and governing systems are almost inevitably drawn to working toward the greater good (that is, if they aren't working for a greater evil, like Wolfram & Hart was), while his main characters - those who mostly exist on the outskirts of their societies - are most likely to be maimed in the realization of that philosophy and who are themselves representatives of a more individualistic philosophy.

The Alliance, The Watcher's Council, and The Initiative fall under that faulty belief that the individual life is worth sacrificing if it means ensuring the prosperity and safety and stability of the many. The individual pieces are less than what makes up the whole, and the whole is worth preserving. This is why the Alliance is able to justify adding Pax to the air of Miranda, and why they are able to justify, if only implicitly, its use in the first place once events go horribly wrong and destroy a planet. "We meant it for the best" becomes an absolving statement, wiping away any guilt or hint of wrong-doing. Killing 99.9% of a population on a planet and turning the remaining tenth into sadistic, mindless killing machines is forgivable if it was the unfortunate conclusion of a noble experiment. "We meant it for the best" allows for any number of actions, because if the goal was to "make people safer" any series of experiments or threats against individuals becomes understandable. If condemning one girl at a time to a short and violent life of demon fighting protects the rest of the populace, then that one girl is to be sacrificed so the rest of humanity does not have to be disturbed by thoughts of vampires or demons or wars. If ignoring one girl's humanity is necessary in order to turn her into an "instrument by which" an unaltered body fights a war, then that body of Watchers can feel justified doing so. If the Alliance needs to take a girl-genius and strip her of her humanity and her sanity in order to combat a threat they accidentally created in the march toward achieving the greater good, then they can create a certain righteousness around the task. If the government wants to create a program meant to create the perfect hybrid warrior, a warrior made from various bits of demon and technology, they can wipe their hands clean on the thought that they were seeking to prevent unnecessary deaths in the preservation of their country when the whole thing comes crumbling down with a 40% casualty rate among soldiers unfortunate enough to get caught in the crossfire.

But again and again, Whedon stresses that the path of working toward a greater good is not the correct path; that going down that path just ends in the destruction of innocents, of individuals that make up that state. Again and again, he points to the comforting thought of working toward that greater good when disaster strikes to be a cold one. He does this by first and foremost making his main characters those who end up on the short end of the above policies. We don't see those people whose lives are made better by pursuing the greater good. We don't follow those who live the privileged life of not being interfered with or trampled upon. We are instead privy to the trials and tribulations and tragedies of those adversely affected, and those who are directly utilized for the pursuit of that greater good. We see people like Buffy Summers, and River Tam, and Malcolm Reynolds. And we see the journeys of those individuals who decided to put that greater good above the individual. In Serenity, the Operative's life revolves around his philosophy that he is a monster, but that his monstrous, evil, deeds are necessary in order to create that better world, that world without sin. He doesn't expect to live there himself, because he understands that there is no place for him there. He becomes a changed man, a broken man without a personal philosophy, once he is shown what kind of world is created when individuals act to create a world such as the one he envisions. We see it in the journey of one of Whedon's errant heros, when Angel decides that in order to win, he has to shed the rules by which he has lived by, when he decides that winning is more important than the individual good. Angel fails to rid Los Angeles of evil because he doesn't get it, until the point he does. Until the moment of his epiphany, he isn't truly a hero, because he isn't fighting the good fight because it is one worth fighting; instead, he is fighting "for redemption, for a reward, finally just to beat the other guy". Once he recognizes that redemption and reward will only be possible if he isn't fighting for himself but for something greater than himself - when he isn't fighting for selfish reasons but because it is the right thing to do - and that winning the larger war is not only not probable but not wholly possible, he turns himself around from the darker path. His epiphany, articulated as:

In the greater scheme or the big picture, nothing we do matters. There's no grand plan, no big win... If there is no great glorious end to all this, if nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do. 'Cause that's all there is. What we do, now, today... All I want to do is help. I want to help because I don't think people should suffer, as they do. Because, if there is no bigger meaning, then the smallest act of kindness is the greatest thing in the world.

is the enduring and most prevalent theme of Whedon's work (and it is perhaps my favorite line of any show ever, even though it is present in my least favorite Whedon work). There is no big win, and the so the individual - and the individual act - becomes tantamount. The individual pieces are are greater sum than the society they make up; and because of that, the society cannot be made better or greater at the expense of those pieces. Individual rights and freedoms and individual autonomy and respect is what makes the greater picture. It means that we cannot sacrifice the individual, because if we do then our society is worth less.

And some characters never have to be an Angel or an Operative in order to fully get it; they do not need the epiphany. Malcolm Reynolds doesn't, in either Firefly or Serenity. Mal fights the Alliance as a Browncoat because he believes that the freedom allowed without the totalitarian rule is worth the sacrifices that have to be made. After the Alliance wins, we see that although the Central Planets are prosperous, the Outer Rim planets are still destitute and, as Mal says, the ruling philosophy seems to be "unite all the planets under one rule so that everybody can be interfered with or ignored equally".  It is Mal who fights the Alliance and the Operative once they want River, because he has the "theory that [she's] a person, actual and whole" - and that River, as broken and insane and potentially dangerous she is, as broken and insane and potentially dangerous as the Alliance made her, deserves to live and to be free; that River has worth in and of herself because she is a person, that she is and should be recognized as something more than simply a weapon or an inconvenience. And then there is Buffy, who is both an individual who has been interfered with in pursuit of the greater good and the one who has to fight to preserve the world - and who has to make decisions from time to time about sacrificing the individual in order to ensure the continued existence of the world. In The Gift, Buffy is faced with the prospect of killing her sister in order to prevent an apocalypse. She isn't as poetic as Angel, when he has his epiphany, possibly because for Buffy there is no epiphany; there is just this unarticulated belief about the workings of the world, what is right and what is wrong. When she says, "I don't understand. I don't know how to live in this world, if these are the choices, if everything else just gets stripped away. I don't see the point", she may just as well be asking if the world is worth saving if actively killing an individual is the price. She seems to, rudimentarily, be grasping toward the idea that what makes the world worth saving are the individuals present within it; and though they may die in the name of its protection, like Larry the football player did and as Anya will and as Buffy herself did, killing someone she has sworn to protect in order to protect some other people is in violation of that code. For Buffy, she doesn't fight to save the world because the world is inherently worth saving, but because those who occupy the world are. The individual lives are of greater importance than the whole.

Within that belief is the belief in equality, is the belief of human rights, is the recognition of the importance of feminism. And the tension between the two beliefs, the belief in the needs of the society above the needs of the individual, seem to be inherently present in Dollhouse as well. In Dollhouse, Echo is just an object to be used, to be utilized by the shadowy society she exists within. And since Joss Whedon has said that part of the show is Echo questioning who she is, and what she is made of as an individual entity, I suspect this theme may be even more blatantly exercised in Dollhouse than perhaps anywhere else; since there will be conceivably less of Echo in the beginning than of River or Buffy, the idea that even her individual personhood should not be made submissive to the needs of her society will offer an even more concrete rule - that no matter what, the individual is an entity unto themselves, even if they can't remember exactly who they are.

(Cross-posted at WitWar.)

Joss Whedon Week

In celebration of Dollhouse premiering at 9 on friday, February 13 - and yes, I'm aware the premiere date doesn't really do much to alleviate the slight feelings of foreboding a Whedon show on Fox, on fridays - I'm going to try to make this week here Joss Whedon Week. I'm going to examine Whedon's work and what I see as his most prevalent philosophies and issues; thoughts about feminism, existentialism, individualism, family, and what that may or may not mean for Dollhouse. I'm also interested in seeing where Whedon falls down, where he could improve, and maybe compile a checklist of things I want to see and don't want to see on Dollhouse. These will hopefully be interspersed with posts about nonWhedon things, but I can't make any promises. Joss Whedon has hijacked my brain, and I'm so revved up for friday and my extremely tiny watch party I'm worried that not much else will permeate the cloud of euphoria.

Seriously though, mark those calenders. I don't want my cloud of euphoria pierced by the dagger of cancelation. Let's keep this one on the air, people.

Redefining Black Masculinity: "Barack & Curtis"

Got ten minutes? Good; watch this documentary about Barack Obama and 50 Cent, and what each says about black masculinity:


What I find interesting about the video is the conflict of not only the two shoots of manhood that are symbolized in these two different men, but the two narratives of the nature of 50 Cent's manhood - and how those two narratives are both in some ways contradictory and at the same time are also complementary.

Writer/educator Matt Birkhold says,

"We as white men who very seldom have any real relationships with anybody who's not white, particularly black men, right, believe that black men are what we see in movies. We believe that black men are 50 Cent. 50 Cent is a man who controls people by fear. This is the man we are all supposed to be afraid of. 50 Cent will come up in here and shoot all of us, talk all the valuables in the house, um, take whatever money we have on us, credit cards, cell phones, all of that, right? This is how 50 Cent makes his living.

Black gangster masculinity does the work of white supremacist patriarchal capitalism. All it requires, in order for you to be promised that you'll get rich, is that you're willing to verbally commit black-on-black murder, control black female bodies, all in the name of getting paid. The black gangster masculine figure employs the exact same logic as the people who started the slave trade."

Historian Jelani Cobb's narrative places the employment of this figure of black masculinity upon the white supremacist first and foremost, saying:

"I think 50 Cent represents a brand of black masculinity that dates back to the old post-slavery era. During the slavery era, you have the stereotypes of black men that we were happy-go-lucky, mostly lazy, individuals who really needed the benign tutelage of the slave institution. After slavery, in order to justify the physical violence that would be required to prevent us from exercising our rights, that stereotype changed into the lawless, dangerous buck. That was the idea that was placed on black men. It was almost like a template that they shaded in and said, 'This is what black men will be now'."

I think both are correct; Cobb is right to point out that the first imagining of the violent and untamable black man was the creation of the white man, of white men like the ones present in To Kill A Mockingbird, the ones who cynically fell upon "the assumption, the evil assumption, that all Negroes lie, that all Negroes are basically immoral beings, all Negro men are not to be trusted around our women". Cobb is right that this template was first employed - and continues to be employed - as a way of maintaining white privilege and status in society, as a method of making it clear in the minds of the citizenry that African-Americans were simply undeserving of being thought of as or treated as equal to whites. Also, as an aside, it was unnerving to me and slightly horrifying that many in my college Major Authors: Mark Twain class didn't know how the stereotype of African-Americans had shifted when we were discussing Pudd'nhead Wilson. That template is present in Birkhold's own argument, when he presents the idea that most of our popular image of black masculinity comes from the media that continues to facilitate that image.

But I also believe that Birkhold has something when he points out that the template of black masculinity that was fostered upon African-Americans after the end of slavery has also become a reflection of the white patriarchal culture that uses it to maintain its own privilege. That the hypermasculinity does create an environment of violence against women and encourages seeing women as objects to be used. Because black masculinity has become associated with "how many women you have". In that way, the oppressed pull from the tactics of the oppressor to create a hierarchy within the oppressed community.

Which is why the most intriguing point for me on the piece doesn't have much to do with black masculinity and how Barack Obama changes the perception of black masculinity for men, how he "is exploding the very facile and simple notions we have of what it means to be a black man in this society. Whose intellect is one of the foremost things that you notice about him, who is the antithesis of the angry, out of control negro", but instead of what Barack Obama's emergence means for black women. Esther Armah contends,

"The beauty of the presence and emergence of Barack Obama isn't Barack Obama. It's Michelle Obama. Because in Michelle, for black women there was an affirmation of, their strength could still find them a great guy."

And while I found the whole of Barack & Curtis to be incredibly thought-provoking and interesting and well worth watching several times to get the quotes right, I want to see that documentary, about what Barack Obama means for how black women see themselves and how their perception of how their community sees them may change. How Michelle, and Barack's attraction to her and love for her and dependence upon her - and her attraction to him and love for him and dependence upon him - could change the pervasive notion of how this specific community and the greater society imagines male-female relationships. How Barack Obama's obvious respect for his wife may translate into less women like Michelle being considered bitches, or angry. That would be another documentary I'd be interested in seeing.

Can We Talk? I Don't Know.

This week's My Turn in Newsweek is a piece called "Less Shouting, More Talking", a sentiment that I am at most ambivalent about because while I love talking, shouting has its place as well. What makes me more ambivalent about the idea is what its author, Richard Mouw, wants to talk about. He wants to talk about sexuality; he wants to bring the different sides of the gay marriage debate to the table, and converse about it. The issue for me, though, is that it seems like it is going to be a disingenuous argument from the start - potentially from both sides. Talking it over would signify hope for the potential of a greater understanding, possibly some common ground in regard to the issue. I doubt for many of the people Mouw walked by on the way to the polls "carrying signs" that "mostly say 'Hooray for our side" the potential would ever be even there, let alone brought to fruition. And that stems from something rather simple, something Mouw erroneously - possibly ignorantly - states in the very beginning:

"I voted for the ban. As an evangelical, I subscribe to the "traditional" definition of marriage, and I do not want to see the definition changed. Does that mean I want to impose my personal convictions on the broader population? No."

But, in reality, that is exactly what a vote for Prop. 8 meant. It meant that not only did Mouw decide that gay marriage was wrong for him, but that it was wrong for everyone else in the state of California as well. And in reality, this imposition of personal convictions on the broader population is what a no vote meant as well - that the voter not only decided that s/he personally thought that gay marriage was a pretty okay thing, but that the entire population of California should have to recognize it as a legal reality. Hell, when I voted for Barack Obama, I was voting to impose my personal conviction on the broader population as well; I was voting for Obama because I believed in him and his ideas, and also because I didn't want to be imposed upon by the other guy (or more accurately, the other guy's VP... ...who won't go away!). The only way Mouw would not have been imposing his personal convictions on the broader population is if he chose not to vote at all on the proposition. Going to the table with that disingenuous reality married with the possibly authentic belief that false reality was in fact true is no way to start any kind of true discussion. Because there is no way to argue against such a falsehood.

One of the problems for me in the arguments presented by the religious right for the fear that they are being or will be marginalized is that this concern seems to ignore what has been fostered upon those who have been oppressed in the past and those who still make up a marginalized group. I don't know if their fear of marginalization stems from the lurking idea that they have done something wrong, that the privilege they exhibit in their interactions with the world - or rather, certain segments of the world - could very well become inverted with themselves on the bottom of a new hierarchy they recognize as profoundly unjust and shaming. I don't know if they don't recognize the similarities between what they fear and what they perpetuate, and their worries stem from a different source of martyrdom entirely. What I do know is this: the whole thing makes me see red. Like this sentiment:

"For many of us, 'normalizing' same-sex marriage comes down to deep concerns about the raising of our children and grandchildren. What will they be taught about sexual and family values in our schools? How will they be affected by the ways the entertainment media portray people with our kinds of views?"

Does Mouw not recognize that the gay community is living and has lived with the reality of those fears for decades? Does Mouw not recognize that gay youths and children of homosexual parents are being affected - and have been affected - by what they are taught regarding sexual and family values in our schools? Does Mouw not recognize that gays and children of homosexual parents are being affected by the ways the entertainment media portray them and their loved ones? If he doesn't, he is being willfully blind.

The thing about Richard Mouw's article that makes me see red more than any of the lunatic rantings found on my newspaper's opinion page is this: Mouw seems authentically calm, and hurt and interested in a discussion. But that doesn't make him any less immobile than someone like Michelle Malkin or Rush Limbough. He just puts a kinder, sweeter, more literate grandfatherly face on the debate. When he asks, "What is it about people like me that frightens you so much?", I want to ask him why I shouldn't be. Why my gay friends shouldn't be. The fact is that gays are a marginalized group, and people like Mouw - and heck, Mouw himself - are part of why they are marginalized. Why shouldn't a marginalized group, when faced with someone who supports their continued marginalization, be frightened? Why shouldn't they be angry? It doesn't matter that Richard Mouw is an evangelical Christian who believes in racial justice and gender equality and peacemaking and caring for the environment. Well, it does, but not here. Here and now, there's this. In terms of rights for gays, Mouw is still in a position of power and he is working to maintain that position. He is working for his religious belief to be the rule governing all. That is why I fear people like him. Because he can be sweet and kindly and he can fight for gender equality and the environment, but at the end of the day he is still a man who sees nothing wrong with continuing an inequality that - even if he does not condone it, even if he does not consider it, even if he has never even thought it - contributes to not only the marginalization a group of people but systemic violence toward that group of people.

Mouw "refuse[s] to go to the margins". What he doesn't recognize is that he and those who take the same sort of position he has taken have relegated a whole host of others to those margins. And I have very little tolerance for that. What he doesn't recognize is that positioning himself as someone who could one day become potentially marginalized is actually rather insulting - at least to me, as someone who has been marginalized and ostracized by those with his religious beliefs. It is insulting to be presented this potential world where his children and grandchildren may not be portrayed in a flattering light, where the beliefs he considers essential to family values are not included in the school curriculum, when I live in the real world where my loved ones and people of my belief (or lack of it) are not portrayed in a flattering light, and where a book about two daddy penguins starts an uproar. I don't know if it is possible for Mouw to recognize that, to recognize how what he fears is reality for too many. What I do believe is this: until that is recognized, any national conversation with any hope of succeeding is probably an unrealistic expectation.

Happy (Belated) Birthday, Tommy Smothers!

It was Tommy Smothers' birthday on monday, turning the ripe old age of 72. Tommy Smothers and his brother Dick had a profound place in my childhood, right up there with This Old House, Sesame Street, Winnie the Pooh, and bass fishing (hey, when you're only allowed to watch PBS, you take what's on - and around two decades ago that was sometimes bass fishing).

Some may have known Tommy Smothers, of The Smothers Brothers fame, first through The Smothers Brothers Show and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. Known for their left-wing political views as much as their humor, they fit right in with my parents' mindset. But that isn't really how I know of the Smothers Brothers. See, I primarily know them from a little something called Yo-Yo Man:

I must have watched that 30 minute video a dozen or so times. I laughed at the jokes I didn't get, and I tried out the tricks I never mastered. Part of that was due to the fact that I started watching Yo-Yo Man when I was still too small to properly wield a yo-yo. Oh, I tried a couple of times. My dog walking was pathetic. My 'round the world was dangerous. Loop the Loop was also a bad one. Eventually, my mother "lost" my red yo-yo, much like she "lost" my Free to Be... ...You and Me cassette tape and "misplaced" my Sound of Music VHS tapes. She also - though she denies it to this day - broke my Was (Not Was) Walk the Dinosaur 45. She eventually - like decades later - replaced them all with CDs and DVDs, but she never got me another yo-yo - not that I blame her.

So, happy (belated) birthday, Tommy Smothers! May you live to yo-yo for many more years!

The Day The Music Died

50 years ago today, the plane carrying Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Richie Valens crashed near Clear Lake, Iowa. It has come to be known as The Day The Music Died. Although he only recorded for a year and a half, Buddy Holly recorded so many songs that his record company was able to release new songs up to 10 years after his death - something I find amazing for the short span of time he was actually in the public eye. So here's some Buddy Holly for your February 3rd morning:

Crazy Internet!

Posting will probably be scarce in the next few days, due to the fact that I'm attending a UConn Women's College Basketball game tonight and the fact that my internet has decided to wonk out randomly after only a couple of minutes of workability. Sorry!

Sunday Morning Turns 30 Years Old

For many people, sunday mornings are a time to go to church, to sit in pews and to listen to the sermon - and perhaps sing a hymn or two. In a recent CBS poll, about 30% of Americans say they go to religious services at least once a week. Aside from Catholic kindergarden, where I was in church at least once a week (and getting yelled at for touching the holy water with my left hand), I have never been of that group. For much of my life, my sunday mornings have had a different ritual - in some ways a secular but sacred ritual. I watched CBS' Sunday Morning, first with Charles Kuralt and later with Charles Osgood. It was, for the first 6 or so years of my life, the only program outside of Connecticut Public Television that was really ever on while I was in the room. My parents' rule about commercial television did not extend to this quiet, languid news program that highlighted - among other stories - a bike messenger in New York City, and a guy who spent his days waving to passersby and wishing them a good day.

Sunday Morning has been on the air for 30 years today. Over time, its format has changed very little; it is still a calm port in the excitable news channels. When it premiered, there was no Fox News, no MSNBC, no C-Span. Now, its slow pace is an even more enjoyable aspect. Its style is more in line with those PBS shows, like the NewsHour. And the hour and a half program always ends with a shot of nature. In many ways, Sunday Morning is as regimented for me as church going is for others. There are times I have strayed. In college, a friend and I would attempt to get up on sunday mornings in order to watch Sunday Morning, because she had the same familial experience. We failed, more often than not. And I don't remember both of us staying awake during the broadcast on the mornings we made it. But Sunday Morning is there, comfortable and familiar. And so, I am glad it has been a constant in my life, and hope that it continues to be a constant in the years to come.