Tuesday, July 19, 2016
Safety lights are for dudes
I saw the new Ghostbusters earlier tonight and, I got to say, I enjoyed the hell out of it. It's not a great movie, in terms of the storyline or the set-up or the transitions between scenes or really even in the clarity of what was going on, but the effects were fun, the leads filled the screen with fun and joy, and seeing Kate McKinnon kick ass in that fight scene was worth the price of admission. It's hard to overestimate how pleasurable it is to see a group of women doing things (like fighting ghosts, as with these four, or making amazing music, as with the Dixie Chicks, who I saw a few days ago) that you usually only see men doing, but it's not only pleasurable. It's also shocking, and then it's surprising to feel that sense of shock. It's like not knowing you've missed something until you see it right in front of you and you think, "wow, I don't usually things like this. This is something different. And I like it." Yes, the male characters were caricatures, but unless you also bitch and moan every time a woman has had to fill that role in almost every single other action-type movie, then I just don't want to hear it. It's funny to see men in those roles, not because it's fun to demean men, but because it's funny to see someone who isn't a woman in that position. It shows how often women are the ones being demeaned, and how much we take it for granted that a woman should be in that role, and how the entertainment value of the Chris Hemsworth character comes from both his obvious pleasure in that role and in the direct contrast it provides to all the other movies where a lady filled that position. The pleasure is in the contrast. And in seeing the big marshmallow man get zapped in the 'nads.
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
Write your way out
When I was in New York a few weeks ago, I saw Hamilton (the Musical). Although I bought the tickets months ago, I made it a point not to listen to it before I actually saw it in person. I'm not sure why - it wasn't exactly about "spoilers," because, well, I know what happens in that story. I think it was more wanting to try to see it without all the hype pushing in and, for the most part, I think it was a good decision. I enjoyed the show - it's smart, and impressive, and tear-jerking, and thought-provoking, and brave, and a little bit weird.
But, I think I'd like to see it again, somewhere in the distant future, when it feels less like an event and more like something I can relax and enjoy. For one thing, the audience seemed to be older and wealthier than most other shows I have seen. My impression is that Broadway audiences tend to skew a bit older in general, I imagine because of cost, distance, and other issues involving access. Given the intense popularity of Hamilton, all of these issues seemed to be exacerbated and the audience was definitely older, and whiter, than a lot of other shows I have seen. Those things aren't necessarily a problem, but they are particularly noticeably with a show like Hamilton, that itself is so diverse, and young, and "scrappy."It made it feel more like a see and be seen kind of thing, rather than an experience with an audience that was really loving it.
Also, it was hard to enjoy it outside the hype, despite my efforts to the contrary. I'd waited so long, and heard so much, and I was just trying to soak it in and experience it all. That type of pressure makes it difficult to be transported by the performances, no matter how great they were, The immediacy, the music, the small audiences, the intense emotions - all of that is often conducive to the kind of rapture I want from musical theater. And some moments in Hamilton got me there, most noticeably in the songs from the Schuyler sisters. and in the whole Unimaginable sequence. Overall, the second half affected me a lot more than the first, though again, the whole thing is very impressive. I think it just got me more on a cerebral level, which I enjoyed, but which didn't transport me the way it has many other people.
That said, I've been listened to the music the last couple of days, now that it is available through Amazon Prime, which has only confirmed my initial impression that it is the most textual musical I can think of, especially in that second half. There are numerous references to both the prodigious amount of writing that Hamilton produced (the Federalist papers, the Reynolds pamphlet, his work as Secretary of the Treasury), Hamilton's compulsive need to write "as if he is running out of time," and Hamilton's fixation on his own legacy. As he puts it,
I wrote my way out of hell
I wrote my way to revolution
I was louder than the crack in the bell
I wrote Eliza love letters until she fell
I wrote about the Constitution and defended it well
And in the face of ignorance and resistance
I wrote financial systems into existence
And when my prayers to God were met with indifference
I picked up a pen, I wrote my own deliverance
Here, writing is both public and private, something that defines Hamilton in all the spheres of his life. In fact, the above song "Hurricane" is prompted by Hamilton's own impending personal scandal. His response? "I'll write my way out."
Most interesting to me, however, is his wife's response to this Reynolds Pamphlet. Eliza sings "Burn," where she too acknowledges both the seduction of writing -
You and your words flooded my senses
Your sentences left me defenseless
You built me palaces out of paragraphs
You built cathedrals
And it's potential for betrayal -
You published the letters she wrote you
You told the whole world how you brought
This girl into out bed
Eliza's response? In contrast to her earlier plea "to be part of the narrative," she now refuses not only Hamilton, but future historians, access to her body, her feelings, her thoughts, by refusing them access to her own writing:
I'm erasing myself from the narrative
Let future historians wonder how Eliza
Reacted when you broke her heart
She burns Hamilton's letters as a response to both his desire for a legacy and the present's prurient desire to know the most intimate details of the lives of public figures. In other words, she refuses writing, or more precisely, refuses to be written (even, of course, as we are enthralled by Miranda's writing here and throughout the musical).
What really got to me, however, was when writing went from something to be refused to something inadequate (even, again, as that inadequacy is evoked through song) in "It's Quiet Uptown." As that song starts,
There are moments that the words don't reach
There is suffering too terrible to name
And from there, concluding with the female survivors taking the reins of the narrative in which masculinity generally dominates the story. There, at the end, Eliza and Angelica write the story of Hamilton - here, Eliza says that she put herself "Back in the narrative" - even as the refrain of "who lives, who dies, who tells your story" echoes. It's an interesting irony, because even though the dominant theme seems to be asking us to think about who tells the story, the song itself starts off with reminding us that we have "no control" over that story-telling. So, we might wonder who tells "our story," but really, that narrative is beyond us; we'll all be written by someone else, regardless of whether, like Hamilton, we are writing like we're running out of time.
But, I think I'd like to see it again, somewhere in the distant future, when it feels less like an event and more like something I can relax and enjoy. For one thing, the audience seemed to be older and wealthier than most other shows I have seen. My impression is that Broadway audiences tend to skew a bit older in general, I imagine because of cost, distance, and other issues involving access. Given the intense popularity of Hamilton, all of these issues seemed to be exacerbated and the audience was definitely older, and whiter, than a lot of other shows I have seen. Those things aren't necessarily a problem, but they are particularly noticeably with a show like Hamilton, that itself is so diverse, and young, and "scrappy."It made it feel more like a see and be seen kind of thing, rather than an experience with an audience that was really loving it.
Also, it was hard to enjoy it outside the hype, despite my efforts to the contrary. I'd waited so long, and heard so much, and I was just trying to soak it in and experience it all. That type of pressure makes it difficult to be transported by the performances, no matter how great they were, The immediacy, the music, the small audiences, the intense emotions - all of that is often conducive to the kind of rapture I want from musical theater. And some moments in Hamilton got me there, most noticeably in the songs from the Schuyler sisters. and in the whole Unimaginable sequence. Overall, the second half affected me a lot more than the first, though again, the whole thing is very impressive. I think it just got me more on a cerebral level, which I enjoyed, but which didn't transport me the way it has many other people.
That said, I've been listened to the music the last couple of days, now that it is available through Amazon Prime, which has only confirmed my initial impression that it is the most textual musical I can think of, especially in that second half. There are numerous references to both the prodigious amount of writing that Hamilton produced (the Federalist papers, the Reynolds pamphlet, his work as Secretary of the Treasury), Hamilton's compulsive need to write "as if he is running out of time," and Hamilton's fixation on his own legacy. As he puts it,
I wrote my way out of hell
I wrote my way to revolution
I was louder than the crack in the bell
I wrote Eliza love letters until she fell
I wrote about the Constitution and defended it well
And in the face of ignorance and resistance
I wrote financial systems into existence
And when my prayers to God were met with indifference
I picked up a pen, I wrote my own deliverance
Here, writing is both public and private, something that defines Hamilton in all the spheres of his life. In fact, the above song "Hurricane" is prompted by Hamilton's own impending personal scandal. His response? "I'll write my way out."
Most interesting to me, however, is his wife's response to this Reynolds Pamphlet. Eliza sings "Burn," where she too acknowledges both the seduction of writing -
You and your words flooded my senses
Your sentences left me defenseless
You built me palaces out of paragraphs
You built cathedrals
And it's potential for betrayal -
You published the letters she wrote you
You told the whole world how you brought
This girl into out bed
Eliza's response? In contrast to her earlier plea "to be part of the narrative," she now refuses not only Hamilton, but future historians, access to her body, her feelings, her thoughts, by refusing them access to her own writing:
I'm erasing myself from the narrative
Let future historians wonder how Eliza
Reacted when you broke her heart
She burns Hamilton's letters as a response to both his desire for a legacy and the present's prurient desire to know the most intimate details of the lives of public figures. In other words, she refuses writing, or more precisely, refuses to be written (even, of course, as we are enthralled by Miranda's writing here and throughout the musical).
What really got to me, however, was when writing went from something to be refused to something inadequate (even, again, as that inadequacy is evoked through song) in "It's Quiet Uptown." As that song starts,
There are moments that the words don't reach
There is suffering too terrible to name
And from there, concluding with the female survivors taking the reins of the narrative in which masculinity generally dominates the story. There, at the end, Eliza and Angelica write the story of Hamilton - here, Eliza says that she put herself "Back in the narrative" - even as the refrain of "who lives, who dies, who tells your story" echoes. It's an interesting irony, because even though the dominant theme seems to be asking us to think about who tells the story, the song itself starts off with reminding us that we have "no control" over that story-telling. So, we might wonder who tells "our story," but really, that narrative is beyond us; we'll all be written by someone else, regardless of whether, like Hamilton, we are writing like we're running out of time.
Saturday, July 25, 2015
The Islands
So, I am sitting in my hotel room in Honolulu. The windows are shut, air con on. I am wearing a hotel robe, munching on dried seaweed, responding to portfolios. My luggage is back on Kona, though I am on Oahu. My driver's license is back at the Macy's in Sherman Oaks, though I fortunately had my passport. My credit card is also at that Macy's, but that's okay, because a few days earlier, someone in Canada stole it and began their lifelong dream of committing fraud to shop at Wal-Mart and McDonald's. Oh, and my luggage is on Kona because the plane taking me from LA to Honolulu blew an engine in the middle of the ocean and so had to chug it's way to the nearest stop (sorry, Kona!).
It's been a day.
But it's my first time in Hawaii. As I like to tell friends/family/random people, it's one of the five states I have left to visit. It's also a state that has moved across my imagination from time to time in various and oddly juxtaposed ways: most of my immediate family has been here (without me), which is a bit of a twist; the fourth chapter of my dissertation focuses on a text (Juliana Spahr's The The Transformation) that is partially set here; Dog the Bounty Hunter took place here. I'm not even joking about that last one - what shows like Dog and Storage Wars and Parking Wars all have in common (for me) is that they show how the "reality" of a place is far more than it's postcard promise. It's the same pleasure I get from crime novels: these are what the streets actually look like, these are how the people actually live, this is what it means to actually survive. All kinds of texts give us that "actually," but not all occur on places that are seemingly so at odds with the mundanity presented. Storage Wars in California is interesting, but in Texas, not so much. And Dog the Bounty Hunter fell flat when he went on the hunt in Colorado, but in Hawaii, I was intrigued.
So, now that I am in Hawaii, I have that so-called realism echoing around the back of my head (the meth, the repeat drug offenses, the glimpse of indigenous people living and working and navigating the complex colonial history of Hawaii as it plays out in tourism and drugs and poverty) combined with Spahr's own haole anxieties about academia's (and language's) colonizing force combined with my family's simple, nostalgic love for what truly is a beautiful, foreign and familiar place (and which, of course, is not without its own colonizing effect).
In her essay "In the Islands" from her collection The White Album, Joan Didion talks about coming to Hawaii with her husband in lieu of getting divorced. They stay at The Royal Hawaiian and she looks at the other rich people (the people "like her") feeling disconnected from them and herself. She then gives an account of the hotels history before moving onto a discussion of a cemetery for the dead from first WWII and then Vietnam. The essay, though, is really about how people own places through language, how certain places are forever associated with the writer who gave them life (she lists Hemingway, and Faulkner, and, in reference to Hawaii, James Jones).
I think she's right, in her way, because many of us do associate places with writings about them. One of my favorite habits is to read a crime novel in the place I am visiting. I like the kind of ownership those books display about a local place and that I can then vicariously feel. But I also think Didion's "being right" is also what makes Spahr and even Dog (the show) "right" - Hawaii is a place taken over (for me and for, I would imagine, most of its visitors) by all the forces that have permeated it over the last century, so much so that the only reference to native Hawaiians I encountered today was in the numerous complaints people made about the difficulty in pronouncing the street names.
It's been a day.
But it's my first time in Hawaii. As I like to tell friends/family/random people, it's one of the five states I have left to visit. It's also a state that has moved across my imagination from time to time in various and oddly juxtaposed ways: most of my immediate family has been here (without me), which is a bit of a twist; the fourth chapter of my dissertation focuses on a text (Juliana Spahr's The The Transformation) that is partially set here; Dog the Bounty Hunter took place here. I'm not even joking about that last one - what shows like Dog and Storage Wars and Parking Wars all have in common (for me) is that they show how the "reality" of a place is far more than it's postcard promise. It's the same pleasure I get from crime novels: these are what the streets actually look like, these are how the people actually live, this is what it means to actually survive. All kinds of texts give us that "actually," but not all occur on places that are seemingly so at odds with the mundanity presented. Storage Wars in California is interesting, but in Texas, not so much. And Dog the Bounty Hunter fell flat when he went on the hunt in Colorado, but in Hawaii, I was intrigued.
So, now that I am in Hawaii, I have that so-called realism echoing around the back of my head (the meth, the repeat drug offenses, the glimpse of indigenous people living and working and navigating the complex colonial history of Hawaii as it plays out in tourism and drugs and poverty) combined with Spahr's own haole anxieties about academia's (and language's) colonizing force combined with my family's simple, nostalgic love for what truly is a beautiful, foreign and familiar place (and which, of course, is not without its own colonizing effect).
In her essay "In the Islands" from her collection The White Album, Joan Didion talks about coming to Hawaii with her husband in lieu of getting divorced. They stay at The Royal Hawaiian and she looks at the other rich people (the people "like her") feeling disconnected from them and herself. She then gives an account of the hotels history before moving onto a discussion of a cemetery for the dead from first WWII and then Vietnam. The essay, though, is really about how people own places through language, how certain places are forever associated with the writer who gave them life (she lists Hemingway, and Faulkner, and, in reference to Hawaii, James Jones).
I think she's right, in her way, because many of us do associate places with writings about them. One of my favorite habits is to read a crime novel in the place I am visiting. I like the kind of ownership those books display about a local place and that I can then vicariously feel. But I also think Didion's "being right" is also what makes Spahr and even Dog (the show) "right" - Hawaii is a place taken over (for me and for, I would imagine, most of its visitors) by all the forces that have permeated it over the last century, so much so that the only reference to native Hawaiians I encountered today was in the numerous complaints people made about the difficulty in pronouncing the street names.
Saturday, June 13, 2015
My Grandparents' House
The house my grandparents' lived in for over 70 years has been sold. My grandmother died in January and, as my grandfather has been gone a few years now, maintaining the house, located as it is in rural Missouri, isn't the most sensible thing to try to do. So, my mom and aunt decided to sell, a decision I know has been difficult, as my mother spent her childhood and then a good amount of her adult years in that house. It's quiet there, rural, along a gravelly-road, and it has been the only place I've ever known my grandparents to be. There's a lot of memories: my grandfather making breakfast; my sister and I walking with him out in the woods; my nephew and I picking blackberries, hearing grands and grandma in their bedroom, talking softly at the end of the day; all of the times they welcomed so many people into that quiet space.
Now, with the closing in less than a month, we've been trying to go through the house. It has 70 years of memories, which means it also has 70 years of things. Some of it is amazing, like the trumpet my grandmother played in middle school or the black and white pictures of my grandparents, and of their parents and grandparents, going back at least 100 years. Some of it is touching, like the drawers of unused cards that my grandfather kept around to make sure he didn't miss any occasion. And some of it is like stepping back in time:
What gets me about this cabinet is not so much the fact that my grandparents kept black pepper and tumeric for decades. It's that these aged spices weren't crowded out by newer replacements. There are not rows upon rows of tumeric and salicylic acids, hoarded away. There's just these one or two containers (with maybe a few other types of acid). But there isn't the present-day accumulation crowding out and overwhelming these relics of the past. There's just this small collection of spices - and kool aid? - from decades ago.
I like that it feels like a snapshot in time, but it also feels a little ghostly. Removing clothes, going through papers, sorting through photographs - all of that is sad, and emotional, and difficult to do. But going through the kitchen, with its half used products and familiar breakfast dishes and echoes of so many meals spent around that table? That feels like saying goodbye.
I've been thinking about that more lately, what it means to say goodbye or to keep saying goodbye. A few weeks ago, I stopped by the cemetery where they are buried. I debated whether I would stop there from pretty much the time I went through Springfield. The cemetery is not far off I-44, but I wanted to get back to OK before it was too late. I also wasn't sure exactly why I wanted to stop: I don't believe my grandparents are there in any spiritual sense, I don't believe they can see or hear me, I don't believe my stopping there does anything for them. But I did stop, because I felt like I should and I felt like I wanted to. And, as I sat there alone, I sensed that being there did bring me closer to my grief, even if it didn't bring me closer to my grandparents themselves.
I was in Oklahoma when my grandmother died in her hospital room in Missouri, Although it was already late, my sister and I drove up there. That was another moment I wasn't quite sure why I was going somewhere, to see someone who no longer could respond to being seen. I knew I wanted to go up there for my mother, who had spent so much time and love caring for first both my grandparents and then my grandmother, and who now would be without them both. But why did it matter to see grandma? I don't know. It feels wrong, disrespectful to talk about seeing her body, still in her pajamas, still with her nails painted, and it saddens me to think of her last days being in a cold, sterile hospital room. But I think that maybe, in those last few moments before the funeral home took her away and the business of burial began, being there felt like keeping a promise, that even with them gone, they wouldn't be left alone.
Which is all to say that grief, unsurprisingly, is selfish. From my grandmother's death to the graveside visits to the clearing away of their beloved home, it's all about how I say goodbye, or let go, or come to terms, or feel crushingly sad, about their deaths and all the deaths that their deaths make me consider. And, surprisingly to me, that grief rose to the surface in opening a cabinet to find a row of spices that no one had used in many, many years.
Now, with the closing in less than a month, we've been trying to go through the house. It has 70 years of memories, which means it also has 70 years of things. Some of it is amazing, like the trumpet my grandmother played in middle school or the black and white pictures of my grandparents, and of their parents and grandparents, going back at least 100 years. Some of it is touching, like the drawers of unused cards that my grandfather kept around to make sure he didn't miss any occasion. And some of it is like stepping back in time:
What gets me about this cabinet is not so much the fact that my grandparents kept black pepper and tumeric for decades. It's that these aged spices weren't crowded out by newer replacements. There are not rows upon rows of tumeric and salicylic acids, hoarded away. There's just these one or two containers (with maybe a few other types of acid). But there isn't the present-day accumulation crowding out and overwhelming these relics of the past. There's just this small collection of spices - and kool aid? - from decades ago.
I like that it feels like a snapshot in time, but it also feels a little ghostly. Removing clothes, going through papers, sorting through photographs - all of that is sad, and emotional, and difficult to do. But going through the kitchen, with its half used products and familiar breakfast dishes and echoes of so many meals spent around that table? That feels like saying goodbye.
I've been thinking about that more lately, what it means to say goodbye or to keep saying goodbye. A few weeks ago, I stopped by the cemetery where they are buried. I debated whether I would stop there from pretty much the time I went through Springfield. The cemetery is not far off I-44, but I wanted to get back to OK before it was too late. I also wasn't sure exactly why I wanted to stop: I don't believe my grandparents are there in any spiritual sense, I don't believe they can see or hear me, I don't believe my stopping there does anything for them. But I did stop, because I felt like I should and I felt like I wanted to. And, as I sat there alone, I sensed that being there did bring me closer to my grief, even if it didn't bring me closer to my grandparents themselves.
I was in Oklahoma when my grandmother died in her hospital room in Missouri, Although it was already late, my sister and I drove up there. That was another moment I wasn't quite sure why I was going somewhere, to see someone who no longer could respond to being seen. I knew I wanted to go up there for my mother, who had spent so much time and love caring for first both my grandparents and then my grandmother, and who now would be without them both. But why did it matter to see grandma? I don't know. It feels wrong, disrespectful to talk about seeing her body, still in her pajamas, still with her nails painted, and it saddens me to think of her last days being in a cold, sterile hospital room. But I think that maybe, in those last few moments before the funeral home took her away and the business of burial began, being there felt like keeping a promise, that even with them gone, they wouldn't be left alone.
Which is all to say that grief, unsurprisingly, is selfish. From my grandmother's death to the graveside visits to the clearing away of their beloved home, it's all about how I say goodbye, or let go, or come to terms, or feel crushingly sad, about their deaths and all the deaths that their deaths make me consider. And, surprisingly to me, that grief rose to the surface in opening a cabinet to find a row of spices that no one had used in many, many years.
Friday, December 19, 2014
The 100: On Sympathy and Torture
End of the year post:
1. I've migrated my teaching thoughts to a different, semi-anonymous blog. Check out facebook for that info if you're interested.
2. I'm going to keep this blog going, as a personal, living with my parents in Oklahoma in one of my childhood bedrooms, and hey-I-watch-a-lot-of-TV type blog. I have a lot of thoughts about things I'd like to write about, and not a lot of ideas about what's really worth putting out there. It seems like personal blogs often end up being more of a diary, which might not be the worst thing in the world, but also seems a bit navel-gazing. Still. I'd like a place where I can write about TV and life without feeling like it should be super researched (which tends to be my go-to with writing).
Towards the end of the semester, I caught up on Parenthood and Supernatural. Few things are as satisfying as getting caught up on that last one - it's just so daunting, with all the episodes, and the drama, and the occasional foray into talking dogs. But, it's ride or die at this point with those boys - I need to track down this season's eps and then I am totally living in the present.
I am, in fact, up to the present on The Vampire Diaries and, from where I'm sitting, it's still solid. I'm an easy mark for the Damon/Elena love drama and you can't beat Bonnie in the other dimension alone, decorating that Christmas tree in an empty parking lot, with the flashbacks to happier, pre-vampire times, and the newest, twin-merging villain is, for a reason I can't figure out, more disturbing than anything I've seen on this show. Maybe because he's a legit sociopath, without a redeeming love, or injury, or redemption arc. So far, he's an honest-to-goodness asshole, but without feeling flat or one-dimensional.
Also - the main point of this post - I watched the first season of The 100 and I dig it. The first few episodes feel kind of cheesy and derivative - part of that is the by-now very familiar Vancouver outdoorsy locations, part is the rotating Vancouver actors, and part is the obvious influence/homage/ripoff of Battlestar Galactica and, to an extent, Lost. But. At about episode 4, the show starts to hit its stride.
Bear with me for a moment on this one: I was watching The 100 right as the report on the CIA's use of torture came out and the show was surprisingly resonant with that cultural moment. A lot of TV shows deal with torture - as Eric Deggans points out here, TV has primed us for thinking that torture works, especially when Kiefer Sutherland is trying to save the world from a ticking time bomb. The 100, however, foregrounds the fact that torture actually doesn't necessarily work, because people either get pissed or just will say anything to make the pain stop. The show is not super sophisticated in its delivery of that message - one of the grounders is being tortured into giving up info on his people, but that info is only forthcoming when the torture stops and the Ark-survivors show some kindness and mercy. But what made it stand out to me is that our sympathies are not necessarily with the survivors, despite the fact that the whole premise of the show is based on following their return to Earth. Yes, we go along with them as they leave the Ark, return to Earth, and try to make a go of it, 100 years post-apocalypse. But whereas BSG put us right with the survivors as they were attacked by an invading force (and thus walks us slowly through the questions of us and them that tend to structure moments of violence), The 100 shows us people who were destroyed by their own hands. We don't know why the war or the nuclear attacks happened, or who was to blame; the survivors don't even seem to be carrying any internal divisions based on that blame. So, they aren't a ragged group of "innocent victims" who attack the Grounders out of feelings of revenge. Rather, they are a multi-national group of English-speaking people who, because of imminent threats to basic biological survival, have to return to the place they themselves destroyed. Thus, when these Ark-people do return, they are the invading force; contrary to their assumptions, there are humans (the Grounders) who have survived and continue to survive on Earth, humans who, quite understandably, react to these people from space with anger, suspicious, and violence, which the Ark-people instigate as much as the Grounders do. In fact, the band of survivors from space justify their own violence, not through an ethical imperative or righteous revenge, but with a much more base appeal: kill or be killed. To them, it's a question of basic, bare-bones survival, despite the fact that there is evidence to suggest a more peaceful route is possible.
So by the time we get to the torture scene midway through the first season, our sympathies are already divided between the protagonists of the story (Finn and all the other teen hotties from the Ark) and the Grounders (in their more mature, physically-perfect glory) and these divided sympathies make those torture scenes seem gratuitous and more about ego and power than truth and justice. What made this stand out even more to me was the fact that, as I finished the torture episode, BBC America just happened to be playing the BSG episode in which Kara torture Leoben. While BSG does an excellent job of twisting up the definitions of friend and enemy to such an extent that no strict delineation holds, at this Kara/Leoben point in the narrative, our sympathies are still fully with the humans as they struggle to find the skin-job cylons hiding in their midst. Here, it seems like a perfect example of the ticking time bomb against which torture so often achieves its justification and even later, after so much of the clear right and wrong disappears, these humans are still the ostensible heroes of the narrative, and the narrative structure still conditions us to go along with their actions, even when they seem ill-advised. With The 100, however, the "heroes" of the story - even the sainted leader Finn - jump straight to torture without doing much work to make us believe they are in the right. So, yes, The 100 is another post-apocalyptic teen drama, but with a critical spin on questions of war, survival, and otherness that took me by surprise; I respect the fact that it didn't try to make torture palatable by encouraging me to sympathize with the perpetrators, nor did it suggest that only the truly evil would use torture. Instead, torture is used by these kind of messed up people, with whom I can kind of identify and thus critically engage, but without so much identification that I emotionally cave to their unethical action. Maybe these thoughts will change with Season 2 (which I haven't seem), but for now, it has me.
I also started American Horror Story: Coven. I'll talk about that later - only one episode in, but I can't mainline it the way I do some many shows. It has to come in small doses.
1. I've migrated my teaching thoughts to a different, semi-anonymous blog. Check out facebook for that info if you're interested.
2. I'm going to keep this blog going, as a personal, living with my parents in Oklahoma in one of my childhood bedrooms, and hey-I-watch-a-lot-of-TV type blog. I have a lot of thoughts about things I'd like to write about, and not a lot of ideas about what's really worth putting out there. It seems like personal blogs often end up being more of a diary, which might not be the worst thing in the world, but also seems a bit navel-gazing. Still. I'd like a place where I can write about TV and life without feeling like it should be super researched (which tends to be my go-to with writing).
Towards the end of the semester, I caught up on Parenthood and Supernatural. Few things are as satisfying as getting caught up on that last one - it's just so daunting, with all the episodes, and the drama, and the occasional foray into talking dogs. But, it's ride or die at this point with those boys - I need to track down this season's eps and then I am totally living in the present.
I am, in fact, up to the present on The Vampire Diaries and, from where I'm sitting, it's still solid. I'm an easy mark for the Damon/Elena love drama and you can't beat Bonnie in the other dimension alone, decorating that Christmas tree in an empty parking lot, with the flashbacks to happier, pre-vampire times, and the newest, twin-merging villain is, for a reason I can't figure out, more disturbing than anything I've seen on this show. Maybe because he's a legit sociopath, without a redeeming love, or injury, or redemption arc. So far, he's an honest-to-goodness asshole, but without feeling flat or one-dimensional.
Also - the main point of this post - I watched the first season of The 100 and I dig it. The first few episodes feel kind of cheesy and derivative - part of that is the by-now very familiar Vancouver outdoorsy locations, part is the rotating Vancouver actors, and part is the obvious influence/homage/ripoff of Battlestar Galactica and, to an extent, Lost. But. At about episode 4, the show starts to hit its stride.
Bear with me for a moment on this one: I was watching The 100 right as the report on the CIA's use of torture came out and the show was surprisingly resonant with that cultural moment. A lot of TV shows deal with torture - as Eric Deggans points out here, TV has primed us for thinking that torture works, especially when Kiefer Sutherland is trying to save the world from a ticking time bomb. The 100, however, foregrounds the fact that torture actually doesn't necessarily work, because people either get pissed or just will say anything to make the pain stop. The show is not super sophisticated in its delivery of that message - one of the grounders is being tortured into giving up info on his people, but that info is only forthcoming when the torture stops and the Ark-survivors show some kindness and mercy. But what made it stand out to me is that our sympathies are not necessarily with the survivors, despite the fact that the whole premise of the show is based on following their return to Earth. Yes, we go along with them as they leave the Ark, return to Earth, and try to make a go of it, 100 years post-apocalypse. But whereas BSG put us right with the survivors as they were attacked by an invading force (and thus walks us slowly through the questions of us and them that tend to structure moments of violence), The 100 shows us people who were destroyed by their own hands. We don't know why the war or the nuclear attacks happened, or who was to blame; the survivors don't even seem to be carrying any internal divisions based on that blame. So, they aren't a ragged group of "innocent victims" who attack the Grounders out of feelings of revenge. Rather, they are a multi-national group of English-speaking people who, because of imminent threats to basic biological survival, have to return to the place they themselves destroyed. Thus, when these Ark-people do return, they are the invading force; contrary to their assumptions, there are humans (the Grounders) who have survived and continue to survive on Earth, humans who, quite understandably, react to these people from space with anger, suspicious, and violence, which the Ark-people instigate as much as the Grounders do. In fact, the band of survivors from space justify their own violence, not through an ethical imperative or righteous revenge, but with a much more base appeal: kill or be killed. To them, it's a question of basic, bare-bones survival, despite the fact that there is evidence to suggest a more peaceful route is possible.
So by the time we get to the torture scene midway through the first season, our sympathies are already divided between the protagonists of the story (Finn and all the other teen hotties from the Ark) and the Grounders (in their more mature, physically-perfect glory) and these divided sympathies make those torture scenes seem gratuitous and more about ego and power than truth and justice. What made this stand out even more to me was the fact that, as I finished the torture episode, BBC America just happened to be playing the BSG episode in which Kara torture Leoben. While BSG does an excellent job of twisting up the definitions of friend and enemy to such an extent that no strict delineation holds, at this Kara/Leoben point in the narrative, our sympathies are still fully with the humans as they struggle to find the skin-job cylons hiding in their midst. Here, it seems like a perfect example of the ticking time bomb against which torture so often achieves its justification and even later, after so much of the clear right and wrong disappears, these humans are still the ostensible heroes of the narrative, and the narrative structure still conditions us to go along with their actions, even when they seem ill-advised. With The 100, however, the "heroes" of the story - even the sainted leader Finn - jump straight to torture without doing much work to make us believe they are in the right. So, yes, The 100 is another post-apocalyptic teen drama, but with a critical spin on questions of war, survival, and otherness that took me by surprise; I respect the fact that it didn't try to make torture palatable by encouraging me to sympathize with the perpetrators, nor did it suggest that only the truly evil would use torture. Instead, torture is used by these kind of messed up people, with whom I can kind of identify and thus critically engage, but without so much identification that I emotionally cave to their unethical action. Maybe these thoughts will change with Season 2 (which I haven't seem), but for now, it has me.
I also started American Horror Story: Coven. I'll talk about that later - only one episode in, but I can't mainline it the way I do some many shows. It has to come in small doses.
Wednesday, November 5, 2014
And so it goes
2 things.
1 is that there were elections yesterday, something that feels far removed from my life here. Part of that sense of displacement comes, I think, from the fact that I spent the last ten years living in Madison, which is more politically active than here. No, that's not quite what I want to say. Even as I wrote that sentence, the claim that Madison is more political doesn't feel right to me, because Oklahoma is every bit as political as anywhere else. It just masks its politics under claims of common sense, family values, small government, and old-fashioned values, or under the misguided belief that it is somehow separate from national politics.
In fact, more times than not, I tend to feel overwhelmed with just how political Oklahoma is. But being here, rather than Madison, does feel different on the day after an election. An awareness of the political stage, both local and national, and, more importantly, an awareness of how deeply politics is embedded in our everyday lives, was more present in a place like Madison, and I am definitely feeling that lack right now. My inadvertent (on my part) disenfranchisement has probably also contributed to these feelings of distance - I hadn't planned for Oklahoma's 24 day cut off period for registering to vote, so by the time I sent in my info, that deadline has sailed right by. No voting for me!
But, as I said to a number of people, it's not like my vote would have mattered here anyway, which I think is more at the core of my feelings about election day. On the one hand, I have often felt that my vote in this overwhelmingly right-leaning state has little to no chance of being cast in favor of a candidate who will win. Much as I would have liked to see Fallin go, it never seemed a likely proposition. In fact, voting in Wisconsin always gave me an extra thrill, because it was the first place where it felt like my vote really contributed to a result.
But, on the other hand, I am a bit disgusted with the sense of pointlessness and apathy that I brought to this election, try as I did to register. Does voting only matter when you have a good chance of winning? It seems like there is something in the process that should matter, that there is something that *matters* by just showing up, even if (or perhaps even more so when) you know the candidates you support are not going to win.
But that sense of importance gets dampened when, in the course of my day, the people I often encounter don't seem interested in or motivated by the issues that seem so desperately important in another places. Of course, all of those issues trickle down and circulate around Oklahoma, but the shield is pretty thick. And, to be honest, I imagine I don't seem particularly motivated either, outside the bickering I do with family members over things we will probably never agree on.
2nd thing. This first semester is almost over, so much so that I am trying to plan, and replan, by calendar for next semester. I'll be teaching 5 Comp II course and 1 American Lit course, so there's a lot of book-ordering and schedule-revising to be done. The biggest challenge right now is figuring out the role of research and the research paper in my Comp II class. I don't really like how the research paper has gone. I feel like my students benefited from early exercises in exploring research in the world, and research with the OED, and even the annotated bibliography and oral presentations on the information they found. I am less convinced, however, of the benefits of the traditional research paper itself, though whether that's a failure of teaching or of learning, I don't know. I imagine it's both. But I am increasingly aware that this particular brand of paper writing is not the best use of time and energy in a one semester class, even if there are some arguably transferable skills. So, the question is, what do I do instead? A research paper is a required component of Comp II here at TCC, though what exactly "paper" means is not specified. I am thinking I might go back to the journalistic mode I used the last time I taught composition at UW, but that needs to be tweaked.
Other than that, the classes are going generally well. The retention difficulties and lack of completion is new to me, but it is generally understandable. It's a challenge, but, given all the factors affecting community college students, withdrawing from a class is not the worst thing to do.
1 is that there were elections yesterday, something that feels far removed from my life here. Part of that sense of displacement comes, I think, from the fact that I spent the last ten years living in Madison, which is more politically active than here. No, that's not quite what I want to say. Even as I wrote that sentence, the claim that Madison is more political doesn't feel right to me, because Oklahoma is every bit as political as anywhere else. It just masks its politics under claims of common sense, family values, small government, and old-fashioned values, or under the misguided belief that it is somehow separate from national politics.
In fact, more times than not, I tend to feel overwhelmed with just how political Oklahoma is. But being here, rather than Madison, does feel different on the day after an election. An awareness of the political stage, both local and national, and, more importantly, an awareness of how deeply politics is embedded in our everyday lives, was more present in a place like Madison, and I am definitely feeling that lack right now. My inadvertent (on my part) disenfranchisement has probably also contributed to these feelings of distance - I hadn't planned for Oklahoma's 24 day cut off period for registering to vote, so by the time I sent in my info, that deadline has sailed right by. No voting for me!
But, as I said to a number of people, it's not like my vote would have mattered here anyway, which I think is more at the core of my feelings about election day. On the one hand, I have often felt that my vote in this overwhelmingly right-leaning state has little to no chance of being cast in favor of a candidate who will win. Much as I would have liked to see Fallin go, it never seemed a likely proposition. In fact, voting in Wisconsin always gave me an extra thrill, because it was the first place where it felt like my vote really contributed to a result.
But, on the other hand, I am a bit disgusted with the sense of pointlessness and apathy that I brought to this election, try as I did to register. Does voting only matter when you have a good chance of winning? It seems like there is something in the process that should matter, that there is something that *matters* by just showing up, even if (or perhaps even more so when) you know the candidates you support are not going to win.
But that sense of importance gets dampened when, in the course of my day, the people I often encounter don't seem interested in or motivated by the issues that seem so desperately important in another places. Of course, all of those issues trickle down and circulate around Oklahoma, but the shield is pretty thick. And, to be honest, I imagine I don't seem particularly motivated either, outside the bickering I do with family members over things we will probably never agree on.
2nd thing. This first semester is almost over, so much so that I am trying to plan, and replan, by calendar for next semester. I'll be teaching 5 Comp II course and 1 American Lit course, so there's a lot of book-ordering and schedule-revising to be done. The biggest challenge right now is figuring out the role of research and the research paper in my Comp II class. I don't really like how the research paper has gone. I feel like my students benefited from early exercises in exploring research in the world, and research with the OED, and even the annotated bibliography and oral presentations on the information they found. I am less convinced, however, of the benefits of the traditional research paper itself, though whether that's a failure of teaching or of learning, I don't know. I imagine it's both. But I am increasingly aware that this particular brand of paper writing is not the best use of time and energy in a one semester class, even if there are some arguably transferable skills. So, the question is, what do I do instead? A research paper is a required component of Comp II here at TCC, though what exactly "paper" means is not specified. I am thinking I might go back to the journalistic mode I used the last time I taught composition at UW, but that needs to be tweaked.
Other than that, the classes are going generally well. The retention difficulties and lack of completion is new to me, but it is generally understandable. It's a challenge, but, given all the factors affecting community college students, withdrawing from a class is not the worst thing to do.
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
Why I Am Blog-Blocked and What I am Watching
Oh blog, I haven't forgotten you. I just don't know quite what to do with you. These are my hangups:
1. What do I even talk about? Do I talk about work? Family? Students? Daily life in Broken Arrow? I'm don't know what to focus on and, when I do think of something, I end up being conflicted about whether it is appropriate to write about it all, whether that is due to privacy issues (students/teaching), professional concerns (community college, never-ending admin stuff), or kindness worries (how does anyone ever publish a memoir without pissing off everyone they know?). So, I think about things, and then I let them slide out of my brain as I rush off to watch my nieces at gymnastics practice.
2. I don't know how to write about things without a text in front of me. I need a text in front of me in order to feel qualified about making any claims. I wonder about things I see, situations that seem particular to the community college experience, or to the Oklahoma-life experience, but I can't help but feel...uncomfortable about making any broader claims based on those first hand experiences, or even knowing exactly how to articulate them as experiences, without attempting to put them into a context, or get some background info, or compare them to a greater statistical sample. I guess that's just my training.
3. I'm trying to figure out a way to bring these two issues together, or at least use the second issue to address the first. I mostly keep thinking about "coming home" texts I could analyze. There could be an entire Bruce Springsteen Day! And weeks upon weeks about Dr Who! More on that later, I hope.
As for now, I figure I might as well jump into the TV pool. I made it, what? 4 posts. Longer than I thought I might. So, here's what I'm watching/preparing to watch:
1. The Good Wife - strong opener, fast-paced (maybe a little too much?), still one of the strongest examples of how to construct a good narrative on conventional TV (or any TV, really)
2. Castle - I love it. I don't care if its groundbreaking TV (though there is a paper to be written there). A little concerned about the new showrunner, but I gotta believe.
3. Forever - watched an ep tonight. Liked it. Will watch again.
4. Dr Who - I am out of control into it. Why did I wait so long? I am so in love with River that everything else kind of takes a backseat. Tbh, I am still working my way through the seasons. Despite everything I believe in and hold dear, I haven't watched the episodes in order. I watched the first season, then jumped into the middle of the Matt Smith years, and I am now watching the Tennant and Capaldi eps alongside each other. It'll eventually all join up in the middle, much like the relationship between 11 and River, but hopefully without the epic heartbreak. There's something about the relationship that both River and 11 have to death and to finitude that I just can't shake. I'll do a whole post on it this weekend, I think.
I like Tennant a lot, increasingly so, and I think Capaldi is terrific (Listen was a great episode), but 11 is my doctor. And those Ponds! They got me with that group.
5. Started Season 3 of Damages to watch on the treadmill. Still interesting, can't-turn-away TV.
1. What do I even talk about? Do I talk about work? Family? Students? Daily life in Broken Arrow? I'm don't know what to focus on and, when I do think of something, I end up being conflicted about whether it is appropriate to write about it all, whether that is due to privacy issues (students/teaching), professional concerns (community college, never-ending admin stuff), or kindness worries (how does anyone ever publish a memoir without pissing off everyone they know?). So, I think about things, and then I let them slide out of my brain as I rush off to watch my nieces at gymnastics practice.
2. I don't know how to write about things without a text in front of me. I need a text in front of me in order to feel qualified about making any claims. I wonder about things I see, situations that seem particular to the community college experience, or to the Oklahoma-life experience, but I can't help but feel...uncomfortable about making any broader claims based on those first hand experiences, or even knowing exactly how to articulate them as experiences, without attempting to put them into a context, or get some background info, or compare them to a greater statistical sample. I guess that's just my training.
3. I'm trying to figure out a way to bring these two issues together, or at least use the second issue to address the first. I mostly keep thinking about "coming home" texts I could analyze. There could be an entire Bruce Springsteen Day! And weeks upon weeks about Dr Who! More on that later, I hope.
As for now, I figure I might as well jump into the TV pool. I made it, what? 4 posts. Longer than I thought I might. So, here's what I'm watching/preparing to watch:
1. The Good Wife - strong opener, fast-paced (maybe a little too much?), still one of the strongest examples of how to construct a good narrative on conventional TV (or any TV, really)
2. Castle - I love it. I don't care if its groundbreaking TV (though there is a paper to be written there). A little concerned about the new showrunner, but I gotta believe.
3. Forever - watched an ep tonight. Liked it. Will watch again.
4. Dr Who - I am out of control into it. Why did I wait so long? I am so in love with River that everything else kind of takes a backseat. Tbh, I am still working my way through the seasons. Despite everything I believe in and hold dear, I haven't watched the episodes in order. I watched the first season, then jumped into the middle of the Matt Smith years, and I am now watching the Tennant and Capaldi eps alongside each other. It'll eventually all join up in the middle, much like the relationship between 11 and River, but hopefully without the epic heartbreak. There's something about the relationship that both River and 11 have to death and to finitude that I just can't shake. I'll do a whole post on it this weekend, I think.
I like Tennant a lot, increasingly so, and I think Capaldi is terrific (Listen was a great episode), but 11 is my doctor. And those Ponds! They got me with that group.
5. Started Season 3 of Damages to watch on the treadmill. Still interesting, can't-turn-away TV.
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