Jackdowry.
Dwight Meredith on real class war:
“We are finally in a position we’ve fought more than a decade to reach—a position where we can deal a death blow to the single most important source of income for radical legal groups all across the country,” wrote WLF Chairman Daniel Popeo. Among the foundation’s adversaries in the litigation, Popeo continues, are “groups dedicated to the homeless, to minorities, to gay and lesbian causes, and any other group that has drawn money from hard-working Americans like you and me to support its radical cause!”
—Also, Ignatz.
Barry on the Absent Fatso:
The Absent Fatso reflects a desire to avoid cruelty—the fat character who is there without really being there exists because mocking real people would seem too mean. But in fact, the cruelty is still there, and so are the real-life fat people; they’re just in the audience, rather than on screen. The Absent Fatso strategy doesn’t avoid cruelty so much as it makes it palatable.
—Also, on origami.
Trish Wilson on how, exactly, our family courts are stacked in favor of mothers over fathers:
Debra Schmidt is one such mother. Since Christmas time, 2001, Schmidt has been sitting in a California jail because she refuses to disclose the location of her two daughters, aged 7 and 9 at the time. She is protecting them from their father, Manuel Saavedra, who is a registered sex offender, an illegal alien who has been ordered deported, and an alcoholic. According to a press-release by Stephanie Dallam, research associate for The Leadership Council, the conviction came in the seven-year custody battle “after the judge refused to allow the jury to hear about Saavedra’s sex offense, his status as a registered sex offender, allegations of domestic abuse, or testimony by another ex-wife.”
George Washington on the Bush administration:
All obstructions to the execution of the Laws, all combinations and Associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, controul counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the Constituted authorities are distructive of this fundamental principle and of fatal tendency. They serve to Organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force—to put in the place of the delegated will of the Nation, the will of a party; often a small but artful and enterprizing minority of the Community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public Administration the Mirror of the ill concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the Organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common councils and modefied by mutual interests. However combinations or Associations of the above description may now & then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the Power of the People, & to usurp for themselves the reins of Government; destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.
Boing Boing points us to this Business 2.0 article on our free market at work, yup:
Borders Group used to pride itself on stocking its bookstores with the widest selection possible in a brick-and-mortar establishment. In its cooking section, for instance, there were always more than 10 titles about sushi, including Sushi for Parties, the more supportive Squeamish About Sushi, and The Encyclopedia of Sushi Rolls, a definitive tome that explains, among other things, how to spell your name in makimono.
Now, Borders is planning to yank half of those sushi how-tos from its shelves. Why? In part because HarperCollins, the nation’s third-largest publishing house, told it to.
Welcome to the world of “category management,” a bizarre and controversial place in which the nation’s biggest retailers ask one supplier in a category to figure out how best to stock their shelves. You’d expect HarperCollins to tell Borders which of its own books are hot, of course. But that’s not what’s going on here. Borders has essentially tapped Harper to advise it on what cookbooks to carry from all other publishers as well.
John held up this study for some richly deserved ridicule:
She says the toys preferred by boys—the ball and the car—are described as objects with the ability to be used actively and be propelled through space. Though the specific reasons behind the monkeys’ preferences have yet to be determined, she says, the preferences for these objects might exist because they afford greater opportunities for rough and active play—something characteristic of male play. Also, the motion capabilities of the object could be related to the navigating abilities that are useful for hunting, locating food or finding a mate.
Males, she says, may therefore have evolved preferences for objects that invite movement.
On the other hand, females may have evolved preferences for object color, relating to their roles as nurturers, Alexander notes. A preference for red or pink—the color of the doll and pot—has been proposed to elicit female behaviors toward infants that enhance infant survival, such as contact.
And then there’s Gail Armstrong’s take on the color pink:
I’m sorry, Mr. Kipling, but you just don’t know how to use English.
A bit of whimsy, with coffee.
Parking spots, via Anita Rowland. (Coffee? I meant my coffee. You’ll have to get your own, I’m afraid.)
Pith and pathos.
The Buffalo Beast has a wrap-up of the 18 January march on Washington, DC (and when someone from Buffalo says it’s cold, it’s cold), and in and amongst the wonderfully snarky gonzo metamedia coverage, we get this piercing insight:
The second thing that was striking about this crowd was that, despite the fact that it was comprised of largely middle- to upper-middle class whites, there was no name politician from either major party there to address it. Given that a Pew survey taken this week showed that a majority of Americans (52%) felt that President Bush had not yet made a convincing case that war was necessary, one would have thought that at least some opportunistic politician from the Democratic party would have decided to attach his name to the anti-war effort. But the only politician of any stature at the event was the Reverend Al Sharpton, a doomed candidate for president with too much political baggage to really be an effective champion for anything.
Put two and two together and what you get is the amazing realization that this crowd, perhaps the largest to gather in Washington in the last thirty years, has no political representation whatsoever in today’s America. Almost certainly representing a vastly larger number of people in the general population, the anti-war crowd has simply been excluded from the process. The 80 nitwits at the MOVE-OUT event could reasonably claim one sympathetic US Senator per demonstrator: the 200,000+ at the ANSWER event couldn’t claim even one between them. The only real clout it could claim was its own physical presence at that particular moment.
If you still demand to know why the anti-war folks don’t seem to you to be quibbling overly (but they do, you know, quibble) about marching in a protest organized in at least some small part by what might or might not be a WWP front, well. There you go.
(The rest of you might also want to remember this pith, when 2004 rolls around and you’re scratching your head trying to figure out how the Democrats could have fucked it up again. —I’m just sayin.’)
In other news: Oregon is officially gung ho about the brave new world of massively overmandated states with pathetically underfunded budgets. We are so screwed.
Twenty-first century schizoid man.
Blogging is a fragmentary, contradictory enterprise. (Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.) Even the most laser-like focus can’t help but skip trippingly from this to that to yonder, over there—hold tight, the world spins on a dime and everything’s different tomorrow. (I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.) A blog that’s little more than spontaneous eruptions of verbiage, linchinography on the fly, seems even more addlepated. (Who has done his day’s work? who will soonest be through with his supper?) Morsels of meaning, concatenations of confidences strung like chronological pearls—before swine? Perhaps, but think of Hen Wen—there’s a pretense to or at least an expectation of coherence, of a logical, integral flow, neatly parceled stone to stone from here to there. We may not step in the same river twice, but we at least expect the temperature to be consistent, the bottom to feel much the same, the current just about as strong as it was when last we wet our toes. (Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?)
Last night I howled in outrage; today, I’m looking forward to APE.
If you’re going to be in San Francisco this weekend and you’re at all curious about the current state of comics-as-art (and how comics-as-industry is slowly coming to realize its potential even as it shoots itself in the foot with mad abandon), I humbly suggest you take some time Saturday or Sunday for a trip down to the Concourse Exhibition Center at Showplace Square, 620 7th Street. (I’d be a bit more effusive, but it’s going to be my first trip. But Howard Cruse will be there. How can you pass up the opportunity to meet Howard Cruse? And buy his books?) —Jenn is there to promote Dicebox, and is sharing a table with Bruno’s own Chris Baldwin: Table No. 297, or so I’m told. Back near the restrooms. Look for “Baldwin and Lee” on the exhibitor-list-booklet-map thingie. If she’s busy sketching for fans and he’s busy schlepping his books, I’ll be the guy with the Vandyke and the closely cropped hair telling you in no uncertain terms why reading Dicebox (and Bruno) whenever possible will clear up your complexion, increase the size of your secondary sexual characteristics, and guarantee a crushing defeat for the Bush/Cheney junta in 2004.
—Also: a double handful of Mostly Acquisitions available for sale and, if you’re lucky, personal appearances at the table by Erika Moen and Jen Wang, two of the six of Pants Press.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
Hell.
War is. Is for children. In a handbasket. Freezing over. Fire and damnation. Damn you all to. Fuck it. Maybe it’s the bourbon and maybe it’s my hot head, the one that yells at the television set, and maybe it’s my snarky anti-authoritarian nature and maybe it’s just that I’m a self-hating anti-American objectively Ba’athist Stalinist stooge whose good intentions are greasing the skids down the slippery slope straight to.
I don’t care.
Forget the shameless politicization of an unprecedented terrorist attack. Forget that every informed opinion says that an invasion will trigger reprisals here at home that we are not ready for. Forget the broken promises to firefighters and cops, forget the unnecessary, clumsy, and disruptive invasion of civil rights by the largest and most expensive government ever, forget the staggering arrogance and sobering ineptitude on the international stage. Wipe it all off the table and send it smashing to the floor. I don’t care. Sit down across the now-empty table from me and tell me how on earth I can live with an administration that proposes to do this in my name—
The US intends to shatter Iraq “physically, emotionally and psychologically” by raining down on its people as many as 800 cruise missiles in two days.
The Pentagon battle plan aims not only to crush Iraqi troops, but also wipe out power and water supplies in the capital, Baghdad.
It is based on a strategy known as “Shock and Awe,” conceived at the National Defense University in Washington, in which between 300 and 400 cruise missiles would fall on Iraq each day for two consecutive days. It would be more than twice the number of missiles launched during the entire 40 days of the 1991 Gulf War. [...]
“You’re sitting in Baghdad and, all of a sudden, you’re the general and 30 of your division headquarters have been wiped out,” [architect of “Shock and Awe”, military strategist Harlan Ullman,] said. “You also take the city down. By that I mean you get rid of their power and water. In two, three, four, five days they are physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted.”
Even as they reach out with their other hand to do this—
Weeks before a prospective invasion of Iraq, the oil-rich state has doubled its exports of oil to America, helping US refineries cope with a debilitating strike in Venezuela.
If you use the word “realpolitik” in your explanation, I will hit you.
This doesn’t come as a shock. I almost wish it did. Shock (even awe) would be better than this feeling like I hit a funny bone in the back of my head. I am not surprised by this; and that is almost what I’m angriest about right now.
Hell and destruction are never full; so the eyes of man are never satisfied.
Roast in. Burn in. Rot in. See you in.
Irony’s failing, Captain. Satire’s offline.
You ever read Frank Miller?
Skip DK2. (I did.) Forget all of Sin City (aside from the first, before it was obvious he didn’t get the wickedly bleak joke). Go back to Dark Knight, if you ever liked Batman comics; go dig up some old Martha Washington—not really worth the time and trouble, but it had its moments; go strike the motherload and pick up the bound collection of Elektra: Assassin, which is for my money the best he’s ever done. (Writing-wise. Ronin’s another kettle of fish, and anyway, has no bearing on what we’re about to bring up.)
But if you haven’t read any Frank Miller, then a certain rich load of let’s be charitable and say unintentional humor will—well, it’ll still waft off the upcoming passage, but it won’t pack the same redolent stomach-dropping funhouse what-the-fuck deja vu wollop as it does for those of us who remember all the tough-talkin’ sound-bitten politicos from those ’80s (and early ’90s) comics, back when what Frank was writing was satire, was black comedy, was over-the-friggin’ top, a top which was still a ways up yonder, out of reach. I mean, if you don’t remember his take on the Surgeon General, then this—
Frist: I don’t know how good of a majority leader I’ll be. I just don’t. It would be presumptuous for me to say that. About being tough enough? What I did before coming to the United States Senate was to split people’s chests open, to open the chest, to reach in, operate on the heart, and if that wasn’t the right operation, actually cut that heart out. And go to another individual and open them up and take a heart out and put it in. And that’s not being aggressive, but it basically shows that I want results, I’ll do what it takes to have it done, and at end of the day, somebody is going to have a better quality of life because of it.
Well, you just won’t be able to appreciate it in quite the same way. —Shame, really.
It rather speaks for itself, don’t it?
Folks: the National Geographic swimsuit edition. (Thanks to the Daze Reader.)
You can even select which cover you would have chosen, had you been the art director—and offered only three shots, of women in swimsuits, five minutes before deadline.
(Fret not overly, o androphiles: there’s a bit of beefcake in there, too. —Wasn’t that magnanimous of them?)
Over there.
First a clean line passed; now, a grittily muddy one. Damn. —Bill Mauldin, ladies and gentlemen.
Mixed messages,
or, The incoherent text.
They’re not showing those Hallie Kate Eisenberg commercials before the movies anymore, but seeing a flick in a Portland theater hasn’t gotten any better. You pay your $5.25 (because honestly, who pays full price these days?) and then you sit down for a good six to ten minutes of commercials. Before the previews. And after that interminable waiting period where the screen is filled with slides from local low-budget advertisers (and those inane movie trivia squibs from Pepsi [if you live in a Pepsi town] or Coke [if you live in a Coke town]) and an audio feed is run of recently released pop hits, with the names of the artists, albums, and labels carefully enunciated, should you be moved to swing by the Sam Goody on the way to the parking lot.
And the last couple of times I’ve gone, they haven’t shown those Foundation for a Better Life PSAs, either. Which is kind of a shame; they’re slick and smarmy, yes, but still, it’s better to see a big bald biker shamed (a little, and genially) into being nice to a couple of little old ladies than it is to see the long-form brilliance of that ad for the new Volvo SUV.
Of course, even a simple PSA celebrating gratitude (pass it on!) can be more complex than it first appears:
Accompanying the opening strains of “Born to Be Wild” (a countercultural anthem of the late 1960s, prominently featured in 1969’s “Easy Rider”), the video opens with typical MTV-style of quick, staccato cuts. We see first a longhaired biker, and then a series of bikers, from various angles, hopping on their motorcycles, in front of a 60s-style diner, to the opening lyrics of the song (“Head out on the highway, looking for adventure,” etc.) A large, muscular biker, a skinhead who bears more than a passing resemblance to the wrestler “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, finds that his bike has stalled. Frustrated, he hops off the bike, gestures angrily at it, and galumphs to a pay phone, aggressively digging in his jeans for some non-existent change. Concurrently, on the left side of the screen, two small and elderly black women exit the diner and wobble on down the street. They approach the payphone as the lyrics tell the listener to “take the world in a love embrace.” Just then, the biker turns to them, and peevishly announces that the “phone’s taken,” evidently fearing that these elderly black women are in the habit of using public phones. One of the elderly, bespectacled black women looks at him with obvious concern, and diagnosing the situation, offers up some coins, as her voice creaks out the question, “Will this help you?” To the strains of “we were born, born to be wild,” the biker, a bit startled, examines the coins, and takes off his sunglasses. We see his face slope downward and soften. Softly he says “Hey, thanks.” The two women smile, and as they wobble away, he says, “I appreciate it.” As this biker puts the coins into the payphone, the graphics “Gratitude,” and “Pass It On” appear on the screen with the Foundation’s ID, just as the voiceover reiterates the words on the screen, and the name of the sponsor (The Foundation for a Better Life). Apart from the simplistic moral tale, a number of iconic reinscriptions have occurred here. First, both the denotations and connotations of the song, “Born to Be Wild,” and its most famous setting (in Easy Rider) have been flipped on their “heads.” “Easy Rider” chronicles the life and death of two “long-haired” bikers who take LSD with hookers while in a New Orleans graveyard. They also smoke a bit of marijuana, and as drug couriers, are essentially assassinated by rednecks in the segregationist U.S. southland. The main characters played by Peter Fonda (Wyatt “Captain America” Earp) and Dennis Hopper (Billy) function as iconic magnets for overt conflict over the implicit boundaries of “the American Dream” throughout the film, as they ride from Los Angeles to New Orleans, on their way to Mardi Gras. They are not symbols of unity and social harmony.
Likewise, the “biker’s” skinhead appearance in the FBL’s video gives him an “Aryan Nation” patina. As iconic skinhead, it seems very unlikely that elderly black ladies would approach such a figure. Given the decades of hostility between white supremacists and the black population of the US, a more realistic response would have been to quickly pass by the pay phone, saying nothing. Obviously, that’s not what happens in the video. What occurs is a recoding of these icons and histories into a structural-functionalist consensus (over gratitude and all the other common and desirable virtues). In doing so, they well illustrate Gomez-Pena’s claim about the shape of a corporatist multiculturalism that “artificially softens the otherwise sharp edges of cultural difference.” But why? And, why now?
(Of course, the Volvo commercial is in its own way fun to dissect: note the sexual subtexts in each “sighting”: the young son dreams of escape on the Loch Ness monster; the adolescent daughter dreams of a unicorn; the mother dreams of seeing Elvis driving a convertible down a desert highway [which—tangent—makes me think a) of James Dean, not so much Elvis and b) raises (tangentially, yes; those Harley Earl Buick commercials do it much more directly) the perennial question of why on earth car manufacturers try to sell modern cars by hearkening back to older models that were pretty much without exception better looking]; and the father’s dream is rather notably absent—are his dreams not worth commenting on? [Has he been stiffed?] Are we supposed to make the inference that this new Volvo SUV is his dream—thus, on the one hand, backhandedly remarking on the paucity of his imagination [an impractical thing, suited only for impractical people] while suggesting that only his [practical] dreams are deserving of reification? Are the dreams of the presumed norm, those white, middle-class, family-headin’-up men, to be kept private, hidden, safe, unknown? And whether that’s empowering or disempowering depends on context and strategy, of course [and the commercial rather wisely leaves both entirely in the reader’s hands]. —See the fun you can have before they show the trailer for the latest Jim Carrey vehicle?)
But! It’s the context of Regal Cinemas as digital pipeline snarfed up by predatory Native-American-heritage-drillin’ Qwest-ownin’ Bob-Dole’s-hand-shakin’ evil-white-capitalist guy, to be used to pump heavily coded crypto-fascist feel-good agitprop into the eyeballs of millions of captive moviegoers—it’s that context that makes it so terribly funny (to me, at least) that, when we went to go see The Two Towers last month, before the previews, before the ads and the PSAs, while we were finding our seats and they were showing those slides of local advertisers and inane movie trivia, and playing over the speakers snippets of new releases (artists and labels and album titles carefully enunciated, so you can remember them when browsing the aisles at the Barnes & Noble after the show), and right after the latest smooth smooth R&B sensation, they announce their next song is from a Russian pop duo: “All the Things She Said,” by t.A.T.u. (The generic announcer spelled it out: Tee. Ay. Tee. You. Clearly. Carefully. Although I imagine most people will end up calling them “Tatu.”)
And I’m all mixed up
feeling cornered and rushed
They say it’s my fault but I want her so much
Wanna fly her away where the sun and rain
Come in over my face
wash away all the shame
When they stop and stare—don’t worry me
’Cause I’m feeling for her
what she’s feeling for me
I can try to pretend, I can try to forget
But it’s driving me mad, going out of my head!
Russian lolitapop lesbians in their panties. Pass it on.
—I should maybe provide some context.
Volkova Julia Olegovna and Katina Elena Sergeevna were low-level toilers in the Russian youthpop industry, a sort of second-string mirror of the Disney-Orlando nexus that gave us the boy bands and Brtineys of the late ’90s (like those third-world knock-offs of Guess jeans and Star Wars action figures ) when they were plucked from a cattle-call audition to star in the latest creation of former psychiatrist and advertising executive Ivan Shapovalov (a sort of second-string knock-off of Lou Pearlman ): t.A.T.u. (Also: Tatu, Tattoo, t.A.T.y., and Taty. Since the “oo” sound is figured by “y” in Cyrillic. Comes from tattoos, which are hip. Or an abbreviation of “Ta liubit etu,” a rough transliteration of a phrase meaning “She loves her” or “This girl loves that girl” [I’m assuming some sort of slang or dialect; this doesn’t sound much like what little I remember of my Russian would suggest. “Liubit,” yes (“Ya liubliyu tie,” while it looks awful in Romaji, is one of the more beautiful ways in the world to say “I love you.”—With a good dark rich accent, of course), but “ta”? “Etu”? (Brute?)].)
The basic shtick: Yulia and Lena perform in schoolgirl outfits—kilts, blouses, ties; also, incongruous electric blue kneepads—singing emphatically of freedom and escape and not taking it any more and, well, their love for each other. They usually strip off each other’s kilt and blouse and perform some of the more energetic numbers in matching white T-shirts and underwear. (Also, kneepads.) The highlight of each concert is a kiss, which has started riots. (Also: riots when the kiss has been banned.) They started the band when Yulia was 15 and Lena 16. Lena’s now 18; Yulia’s going to turn 17 in February. They’re the biggest pop act ever to come out of Eastern Europe. They’re angling to hit the American market bigtime. Their video is already in rotation at TRL. And music critics are lining up to lament the fall of Western civilization. (The music? Chirpy Europop. Better in Russian than English, but all cheap pop music is vastly improved by not understanding the lyrics, and singing in phonetic English flattens their voices, which are a bit better than not. Also: they “do” a Smiths cover on the American release. “How Soon is Now.” Just so’s you know.) —My God, they’ve even cropped up in blogtopia.
So I think it’s too late to stop them. If you were so inclined.
And you might well be so inclined: there’s a lot not to like here. This is rank exploitation, by any definition of the word. Should you doubt it: take a gander at the photos they’ve shot for Maxim and Jane, for a neat-enough bracketing of the current scope of the newsstand. —Or go for broke with the stuff done for the Russian Maxim. Go: read the reactions that first popped up on MetaFilter back last summer. They aren’t even “real” lesbians, after all. (Though the epistemological implications of that sentence are staggering, to say the least; one could have a field day writing papers on the warring meanings of the word “lesbian” as used within lifestyle squibs written about t.A.T.u.) —The kisses and cuddles are all an act, put on for the stage and the cameras; some denizens of the bulletin boards insist the two girls really hate each other. (Some denizens insist Elton John wants to adopt the girls. Grain of salt and all that.) The thing is, they’re cheerfully, maddeningly upfront about how it’s a put-on. Sort of. “Everybody thinks we are lesbians,” says Lena. “But we just love each other.” (Keeping in mind that this is translated from the Russian, of course, and that leering Ivan Shapovalov, that cigar-smoking svengali, is hovering in the background, controlling everything they say.) There’s also the boyfriends the tabloids write about and the husbands they want to have one of these days.
So: exploitation; objectification; a manufactured pop phenomenon taking on the trappings of marginalized sexuality for edgy thrills; frat boys giggling over photos of schoolgirl lesbians; nymphettes cavorting on stage in their underwear; a synthesized Europop cover of a Smiths song. Ivan Shapovalov is out to make a buck by any means necessary, and Interscope is more than willing to aid and abet him, and Matthew Yglesias should be ashamed for having been taken in.
But a funny thing happens with pop culture, betwixt cup and lip.
Robin Wood is a film critic who talks about the “incoherent text,” a text that says several conflicting things all at once—his seminal example being Taxi Driver, which at once condemns and celebrates Travis “You talkin’ to me?” Bickle, though he did extend the idea, asserting that the incoherent text was the dominant storytelling mode of ’70s cinema, “full of ideological contradictions and conflicts that reproduce existing social confusion and turmoil.” (And now that I’ve set all my pieces on the table, and am about to try to make a pretty shape out of them, can I just digress a moment to point out that I know about Robin Wood because of Buffy? That he’s a Freudian [and anti-American self-hating leftist socialist, to boot] critic with an abiding interest in themes of repression? That Buffy’s tagline this [it is to be hoped final] season is “From beneath you, it devours”? That the principal’s name [wait for it] is Robin Wood? And you remember how Jonathan was killed? And the principal was the guy who, all as-yet unexplained, dragged his body out of the basement of the school around back and buried it? So tell me, you smart people: why the fuck is a character named for a Freudian critic of horror films repressing the evidence of a horrific sacrifice by burying it? Hmm?) —Ahem.
Where was I?
Oh.
Okay: I don’t want to suggest that crypto-fascist PSAs or faux-lesbian lolitapop stars are deliberately, consciously incoherent texts; the good stuff, the art that is more than one thing, that embodies and takes up on all sides the struggles it’s about. But any time there’s a dissonance between what’s said and what’s read, you have incoherence. (Don’t take that too far; given that no one ever reads even the most didactic piece in the manner in which it was intended, one could then state that every text is incoherent. While this might prove a useful point in a cocktail party donnybrook, it renders the term itself useless, critically speaking.)
The dissonance between what the “Pass It On” PSA says on its surface and how its subtext works, and what we can infer of the intent behind it from the circumstances behind its creation and distribution, sets up an interesting enough incoherence that makes for a diverting field of critical play. (Some might call it hypocrisy and move on, but they’re no fun to play with.)
t.A.T.u. is set up by a leering svengali who cynically pulls every last trick out of the books, and outraged critics (who really ought to know better) are all too eager to fall into line and into their scripted roles, damning the whole concept to the horrible fate of selling millions of records. But to insist that the only way to read t.A.T.u. is as exploitation, as a man’s debased idea of teenaged lesbian love, as Europop tarted up with a tawdry underaged striptease, is to deny the readings of hundreds of thousands of online fans who have found something of value—whether it’s an expression of something they feel themselves (faked or not), or of something they know is in the world and want to see reflected in their music and pop culture, or something more basic, more primal (oh, hush): after all, teenagers directly and unapologetically expressing their sexuality (cleanly, simply, shorn of the cartoonish excesses of Britney and Christina—which are, after all, rather clearly not sex, not as we know it)—that’s a gloriously satisfying fuck you in an age which thinks calling students “sluts” is acceptable sex education. (Certainly, it’s the closest thing to genuine rock ’n’ roll rebellion I’ve seen these past few benighted years.)
“And if the young women of Tatu are genuine teen lesbians, their willingness to delve into matters of homosexuality on a public stage could very well be a source of some inspiration to the many other teenage lesbians out there.” Which is what The Star’s critic had to say. “If they’re merely fanciful eye candy for men who dream of a world where women never wear outerwear and routinely drop giggling to the ground for tickle fights, the high-stakes pop market has hit yet another new low.” —And that’s the rub, isn’t it? After all, why on earth can’t they be both? More or less. Here and there. At one and the same time.
It all depends on who’s reading it, and when, and how, and where. Also, why.
Incoherency.
(Yes, but what about how that rebellion is commodified, packaged, and sold? And how faux lesbianism aside, Shapovalov is trafficking in the images and ideas of girls in emotional distress, marginalized; defiant, yes, but unsure, uncertain, confused; above all, girls who need to be protected? —Oh, shut up. It’s getting late.)
Anyway. That’s why I laughed, when t.A.T.u. started chirping about “All the Things She Said,” before a Mormon PSA designed to gently nudge us all back into a kinder, gentler, less confusing, more coherent Golden Age. Mixed messages. Futility is sometimes terribly funny. (And then, of course, we saw part two of The Lord of the Rings: a story of the importance of mercy and the power of redemption set in a world profoundly and irrevocably split between good and evil.)
—At least, that’s part of why I laughed.
Our liberal media at work.
A comprehensive takedown of the recent waves of RNC astroturf. It goes back further than previously thought, and seeing all of those parroted backpats over and over and over again gets to you, after a while; it all starts to become terribly funny. In an oh-my-God-what-are-we-doing-in-this-mess kind of way. —Via Calpundit.
Interesting.
In case you hadn’t heard, Café Press is trying to debut a print-on-demand service this year. Like the indefatigable Mr. Deppey, I’ll be keeping my ear to the ground on this one. (John? You should maybe listen up, too.)
High road, low road.
Messrs. Capozzola and Deutsch show you how it’s done. This is what Fisking thinks it’ll be when it grows up; this is thoughtfully taking the specific, holding it up to the real, and speculating intelligently about the general shortcomings the specific flaws illumine. (Atrios, on the other hand—)
Stella.
I work in an office that deals with among other things other people’s litigation, so this has been making the email rounds:
It’s time once again to consider the candidates for the annual Stella Awards. The Stellas are named after 81-year-old Stella Liebeck who spilled coffee on herself and successfully sued McDonalds. That case inspired the Stella Awards for the most frivolous successful lawsuits in the United States.
This year’s candidates:
- Kathleen Robertson of Austin, Texas, was awarded $780,000 by a jury of her peers after breaking her ankle tripping over a toddler who was running inside a furniture store. The owners of the store were understandably surprised at the verdict, considering the misbehaving little toddler was Ms. Robertson’s son.
- A 19-year-old Carl Truman of Los Angeles won $74,000 and medical expenses when his neighbor ran over his hand with a Honda Accord. Mr.Truman apparently didn’t notice there was someone at the wheel of the car when he was trying to steal his neighbor’s hub caps.
- Terrence Dickson of Bristol, Pennsylvania, was leaving a house he had just finished robbing by way of the garage. He was not able to get the garage door to go up since the automatic door opener was malfunctioning. He couldn’t re-enter the house because the door connecting the house and garage locked when he pulled it shut. The family was on vacation, and Mr. Dickson found himself locked in the garage for eight days. He subsisted on a case of Pepsi he found, and a large bag of dry dog food. He sued the homeowner’s insurance claiming the situation caused him undue mental anguish. The jury agreed to the tune of $500,000.
- Jerry Williams of Little Rock, Arkansas, was awarded $14,500 and medical expenses after being bitten on the buttocks by his next door neighbor’s beagle. The beagle was on a chain in its owner’s fenced yard. The award was less than sought because the jury felt the dog might have been just a little provoked at the time by Mr. Williams who was shooting it repeatedly with a pellet gun.
- A Philadelphia restaurant was ordered to pay Amber Carson of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, $113,500 after she slipped on a soft drink and broke her coccyx (tailbone). The beverage was on the floor because Ms Carson had thrown it at her boyfriend 30 seconds earlier during an argument.
- Kara Walton of Claymont, Delaware, successfully sued the owner of night club in a neighboring city when she fell from the bathroom window to the floor and knocked out her two front teeth. This occurred while Ms.Walton was trying to sneak through the window in the ladies room to avoid paying the $3.50 cover charge. She was awarded $12,000 and dental expenses.
- This year’s favorite could easily be Mr. Merv Grazinski of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Mr. Grazinski purchased a brand new 32-foot Winnebago motor home. On his first trip home having driven onto the freeway, he set the cruise control at 70 mph and calmly left the drivers seat to go into the back and make himself a cup of coffee. Not surprisingly, the RV left the freeway, crashed and overturned. Mr. Grazinski sued Winnebago for not advising him in the owner’s manual that he couldn’t actually do this. The jury awarded him $1,750,000 plus a new motor home. The company actually changed their manuals on the basis of this suit, just in case there were any other complete morons buying their recreation vehicles.
There’s only one problem—or rather, seven: they’re all utter fabrications.
Beyond, of course, the fact that Stella Liebeck’s being maligned yet again.
If you’ve hung out on any internet forum anywhere, you know how firmly “that lady who spilled the coffee and sued McDonald’s” is entrenched in the popular imagination. A lie, after all, can get halfway around the world while the truth is putting its shoes on, so let’s give that laggard truth a push.
Stella Liebeck of Albuquerque, New Mexico, was in the passenger seat of her grandson’s car when she was severely burned by McDonalds’ coffee in February 1992. Liebeck, 79 at the time, ordered coffee that was served in a styrofoam cup at the drivethrough window of a local McDonalds.
After receiving the order, the grandson pulled his car forward and stopped momentarily so that Liebeck could add cream and sugar to her coffee. (Critics of civil justice, who have pounced on this case, often charge that Liebeck was driving the car or that the vehicle was in motion when she spilled the coffee; neither is true.) Liebeck placed the cup between her knees and attempted to remove the plastic lid from the cup. As she removed the lid, the entire contents of the cup spilled into her lap.
The sweatpants Liebeck was wearing absorbed the coffee and held it next to her skin. A vascular surgeon determined that Liebeck suffered full thickness burns (or third-degree burns) over 6 percent of her body, including her inner thighs, perineum, buttocks, and genital and groin areas. She was hospitalized for eight days, during which time she underwent skin grafting. Liebeck, who also underwent debridement treatments, sought to settle her claim for $20,000, but McDonalds refused.
During discovery, McDonalds produced documents showing more than 700 claims by people burned by its coffee between 1982 and 1992. Some claims involved third-degree burns substantially similar to Liebecks. This history documented McDonalds’ knowledge about the extent and nature of this hazard.
McDonalds also said during discovery that, based on a consultant’s advice, it held its coffee at between 180 and 190 degrees fahrenheit to maintain optimum taste. He admitted that he had not evaluated the safety ramifications at this temperature. Other establishments sell coffee at substantially lower temperatures, and coffee served at home is generally 135 to 140 degrees.
Further, McDonalds’ quality assurance manager testified that the company actively enforces a requirement that coffee be held in the pot at 185 degrees, plus or minus five degrees. He also testified that a burn hazard exists with any food substance served at 140 degrees or above, and that McDonalds coffee, at the temperature at which it was poured into styrofoam cups, was not fit for consumption because it would burn the mouth and throat. The quality assurance manager admitted that burns would occur, but testified that McDonalds had no intention of reducing the “holding temperature” of its coffee.
Sorry to dump the whole mess in your laps like that, but it’s necessary to go through this in some detail so it all sinks in. This was 40 to 50 degrees hotter than what you normally think of as “hot” coffee; just 20 degrees shy of boiling. McDonald’s knew that this practice caused hundreds of injuries. They had no intention of stopping. They offered to pay off Stella Liebeck much as they’d paid off earlier injuries; she said no. A jury awarded her $200,000, reduced to $160,000 because they judged her to be 20% at fault for the accident—and then they added on $2.7 million in punitive damages, a monetary hit designed to convince McDonald’s to stop burning hundreds of people with dangerously, illogically hot coffee. (And guess what? After the verdict, the temperature of coffee served in Albuquerque McDonald’s was around a much more sane 150 degrees.) And even though the punitive damages were reduced to $480,000, less than a fifth the original amount, McDonald’s—rather than accept a judgment which found their conduct reckless, callous, and willful—negotiated a secret settlement with Liebeck.
And yet she’s still the stupid dumbass crazy lady who got millions from McDonald’s for spilling some coffee. —Hell, even the real Stella Awards (an entertaining enough read, which focusses out of necessity on suits filed rather than insane amounts rewarded—you go where the material is, after all) admits her treatment has been grossly unfair. (But: the name doesn’t appear likely to change any time soon.)
This, then, is the atmosphere in which the debate over tort reform swirls. Quite literally: if you go back to the Snopes takedown, you’ll see that the New York Daily News printed a copy of that original, utterly fabricated email back in June of 2002. —Which, I suppose, is funnier to read over coffee than the Center for Economic Justice’s breakdown of exactly how much insurance companies made right after Texas instituted tort reform.
No one likes the idea of (someone else) getting something for nothing. Nor am I trying to deny that there aren’t excesses, fuck-ups, and egregious mistakes. (Though one should always keep Meredith’s Question in mind.) But to impose from the top down a one-size-fits-all solution like this is—leaving aside for the moment the fact that it’s a crooked solution rigged in favor of those with more money and more power—foolish and short-sighted (at best): sending an engineer to fix a problem of bricolage. I’m reminded of another attempt to impose via legislative fiat pre-ordained, one-size-fits-all solutions to complex judicial problems.
I mean—we all know what a great success mandatory minimum sentences have been.
David Chess gave me a word.
Actually, he gave me a bit more than that.
Two and one quarter years ago or so (roughly), something I’d put up whose traffic I was checking desultorily logged a couple of hits from davidchess.com. As you do when you’re checking traffic, I followed the link back and found this engagingly eccentric dailyish journal thing sprinkled with links to whatever had happened to strike his quotidian fancy.
I’d met my first blog-thing.
So I started checking in from time to time and through him met others (Medley, say, or the divine Textism) and through having become familiar with the general concept went on to find yet more without his direct help. And then back on 17 January 2002, I went ahead and started posting hereabouts. (Actually, it was over here, and I really need to clean that up, don’t I?) It’s been a year, I guess, though maybe what with the hiatus from August through November last year and the irregular posting before that, we don’t want to get too rambunctious with the anniversary talk. —Also, considering that I didn’t get around to writing this until the 20th.
I was suitably impressed, then, when he referred to linking to the Kip/Barry/Jenn ontogroup. —An ontogroup being a group or community that agrees on a similar ontology, or so it’s defined by Alamut, a member of Chess’s ontogroup. It’s a neat word, and I like it a lot, and I’m glad it’s in my vocabulary; it’s an interesting way of thinking about how you track thinking about the various groups you run into online and the ways they hang out and interact with each other. Barry and Jenn and I are linked, for instance, because we keep writing about how we’ve known each other for (yikes) a decade and a half, but that isn’t enough, I don’t think, for ontogroup status; that alone isn’t a shared ontology. It’s more the fact that we each take comics seriously (them as practitioners, me as a critic—and I hope by now you’re well enough acquainted with me to realize that’s as questionable as any other genre distinction), and even moreso that we were each molded to one degree or another by Scott McCloud at impressionable stages in our respective developments (for all that we’ve each reacted in different ways and done different things with that molding); that’s the ontology we hold in common—lightly, but. (On the obverse: I would not, say, lump Bruce and John and Ginger and Vince in the same ontogroup, for all that each can wax eloquent on the four stances.)
But ontogroups aside, for the moment: do me a favor and raise your glasses in the general direction of David Chess. To the extent that it’s anybody’s fault, he bears his share of the blame. —Also, be sure to read his post today: it’s an excellent example of his ability to take seriously something that seems whimsical and harmless enough—a sort of cultural reverse engineering that’s at once funny and thought-provoking.
So: thanks. —Onward and upward!
There they go again.
The long memory is the most radical idea in the country. It is the loss of that long memory which deprives our people of that connective flow of thoughts and events that clarifies our vision, not of where we’re going but where we want to go.
Atrios proves once again that he doesn’t just shoot from the hip—he’s got a mean long memory, too. (What? Ten years is an eternity in politics.)
Dittochamber.
Via Skimble (who has a truly creepy piece on “cracker chic”) (and who, granted, got the impetus from Atrios): there’s an echo out there. Seventeen hoodwinked newspaper editors and counting. Not that I have the time, but maybe some enterprising lefty blogger should maybe front and hook up with the RNC’s faxblast-o-rama to give us advance warning? —Think of it as a wildfeed for Fox News.
