The Feast of Decembrion

It's that time again! Time to dust off the blog (or, y'know, excavate it from beneath a cyber-caul of trillion billion fading electrons ... a measly three posts this year and nothing since September? Yeesh.) and talk about 2017: The Year What Was In Pop Culture Experiences! The Decembrion reference goes back to 2013, so if you want to get a sense of how these things usually go you can check out parts one and two from that year, parts one and two from 2014, or the somewhat condensed versions from 2015 and 2016.

Now, without further ado, the Top Ten!

1. Eeriest movie theater experience IT. I went to see Andy Muschietti's film adaptation of Stephen King's IT on opening weekend, so I guess I was part of the overall phenomenon of the highest-grossing horror film of all time? That wasn't what made it particularly eerie, though. I feel like I should establish at the outset that I enjoyed the movie a lot and am looking forward to Chapter Two in 2019. But the feeling of anticipation for the movie, particularly during the final moments sitting in the theater waiting for the show to start, was deeply strange.

Part of that was because, while I do go to the movies more often now than I did when, say, I had babies with erratic sleep schedules living in my house, we are living in a golden age of superhero movies and thus even a half-dozen trips to the multiplex can be, and generally are, wall-to-wall four color comics stuff. (Fair warning: a LOT of items on this retrospective countdown tie into superheroes one way or another.) But more to the point, despite the fact that I continue to and presumably will always identify as a horror fan, it had been an exceedingly long time since I had watched a new-to-me horror movie. So I felt a lot of the same not-entirely-pleasant jitters that I've sometimes felt when I get on a rollercoaster for the first time in a long time: wondering if I actually am about to enjoy the experience, or if it's going to be terror and misery from end to end. Do I like the abstract idea of horror more than I enjoy the rite of parturition of subjecting myself to any given horror gauntlet, especially now that I'm a weary old man instead of a boundary-pushing, thrill-seeking, bullet-proof teenager? And then the movie started, and I went along for the ride, and I gradually realized that the movie was such a faithful adaptation that it lacked any capacity to really unnerve me: I knew every nightmare beat, and I knew who would live or die. So, yes, good movie, overthought it a little bit on the threshold but ultimately would recommend.

2. Best late bandwagoning (third annual!) CRAZY EX-GIRLFRIEND. Once again, I made use of streaming technology to quickly catch up on a tv series that I had heard good things about, and once again, I was not disappointed. I love musicals, as I'm sure I've acknowledged previously, although within that sweeping statement I do have preferred approaches and not-so-muches. I do like musicals where the songs genuinely emphasize and illuminate emotional beats and otherwise inexpressible aspects of the characters' interior lives, musicals where the story is (at least a little bit) larger than life and thus the bursting into song feels of a piece, matching the overall intensity (see: Les Mis, Frozen, etc.). I also like musicals where there's some in-story justification for the music at all, either because it's literally a tale about a musicians who write and perform songs which happen to be autobiographical (see: Hedwig and the Angry Inch) or because the singing and dancing is meant to be metaphorical or otherwise justified in some meta way (see: the musical episode of Scrubs, where a patient has a brain malfunction and hears everything in melody and lyrics, or the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode where a demon's spell did it). I don't particularly care for jukebox musicals, where existing popular songs are shoehorned into a story. This is probably why I never got into Glee at all (well, and I also heard it was kind of a trainwreck of a show more often than not) nor have I ever been much interested in American Idol or The Voice or Insert Show Where Nobodies I Don't Care About Sing Mediocre Covers.

Anyway, I say all of that to say that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend pushes all of the right buttons and none of the wrong ones. It's a story about a woman who upends her life in an impulsive moment and deals with all the instability that follows, both internal and external. There's more than a little suggestion that most (maybe all) of the tune-belting and choreography are just extended fantasy sequences happening inside the characters' heads as they react to what's "really" happening. And the musical numbers themselves often take on completely non-diegetic trappings of different sets and costumes and cinematic styles, because it's filmed tv and not live Broadway and they can do that, on top of which the songs are decidedly not covers but (even better, to a Beggar's Opera fan) pastiches that use pop culture to comment on the story and simultaneously comment right back on the tropes of pop culture. I don't want to give any specific examples, I just want you (unless you hate all things related to musicals, including joy) to check it out if you haven't already.

3. Best "woke" fiction LOVECRAFT COUNTRY. Please note that when I put "woke" in quotes I am in no way, shape or form denigrating the idea of wokeness in general or the specific wokeness of the book in question. I am merely poking at myself and the very notion that I am sufficiently woke. I know I'm not, but I'm trying. It's been that kind of year, one in which (in addition to other actions of a less passive nature) I deliberately sought out stories farther outside my personal perspective, whether it be women or POCs (or both) recounting memoirs or documenting the world around us in essays or expressing inner truths in fiction. Lovecraft Country, by Matt Ruff, was something I approached as a kind of baby step in this direction. It's a novel, and the author is a white dude, and it's about spooky sci-fi and fantasy stuff. But it's about a family of African-Americans living in the mid 20th century, and it does an excellent job (in my humble opinion) of intertwining real and imaginary horrors, the fear that there are supernatural monsters lurking along a country road in the middle of the night rubbing uncomfortably against the fear that there are racist policemen doing the same.

All good speculative fiction should be a metaphor for something (the reigning champ being Buffy, of course) and Lovecraft Country goes all in on this, and then some. There's value in a story like Planet of the Apes where the humans are lorded over and considered inferior by the simians, and it's all a big parable about racism. And then there's a story like Lovecraft Country where ghosts and cosmic gods and blood magic and the like can illustrate various concepts of otherness and power imbalances and, just in case you missed the point, it all happens in the context of our actual ugly history of segregated housing and education, anti-miscegenation laws, white supremacy and more. Plus the whole story wraps up with a punchline that's equal parts laugh-getter and kick in the gut. It is, to me, an exceptionally compelling way to reckon with unpleasant, uncomfortable truths, and a fantastic gateway to an understanding beyond the usual white privilege of SF/F/H.

4. Most exciting yet unsettling development (second annual!) (The Little Guy's burgeoning interest in George R.R. Martin's) WORLD OF ICE AND FIRE. In many ways, I am living my best life, in that I have an amazing wife and three phenomenal children, and am simultaneously enjoying a golden age of television, the renaissance of Star Wars, the still somewhat unbelievable inescapable Marvel Cinematic Universe, and on and on and on. AND - here's the real gobsmacker - my wife and kids and I can all to a large extent share the enjoyment of these pop culture obsessions. My wife and I read N.K. Jemison novels and watch The Good Place and Stranger Things. As I write this, I have just purchased tickets online for my entire nuclear family to go see a Sunday matinee of The Last Jedi. And seemingly every day there's a new way in which my kids are catching up to me on the classics and/or my personal faves, whether it's my eldest working his way through the last couple doorstopper installments of Harry Potter or my daughter expressing interest in checking out this Secret of NIMH cartoon movie I keep talking about. By and large, my wife and I think of ourselves as equal parts curators and gatekeepers for our children. On the one hand, we try to make sure they don't consume anything that's wildly inappropriate, and that we're there for them if they want to talk about anything that scares, confuses or in some way unsettles them. And on the other hand, we try to point them towards the best of the best stuff. Certainly both my wife and I would consider the tv series Game of Thrones and the novels of A Song of Ice and Fire to be good stuff, but just as certainly it is self-evidently a bit much for a nine year old. However, our obsession with all things of Westeros has led to a lot of tie-in accumulation, including but not limited to: art prints of cats as GoT characters on our den walls; Christmas ornaments; action figures and Ommegang beer bottles on shelves; and reference materials such as detailed maps of the fictional realms and The World of Ice & Fire: The Untold History of Westeros and the Game of Thrones. Let's just call that last one TWOIF for short.

TWOIF is an unwieldy oversized hardback. It would be a coffee table book if we had a coffee table. It's one of those things you buy because the sixth novel hasn't come out yet and doesn't even have a release date and it's months until the new season on HBO and you're dying for a fix. And it's got lovely interior illustrations and thus it wasn't completely surprising when the little guy saw this book lying around with a three headed dragon on the cover and opened it up to find more cool pictures inside and then started reading the text. To date, neither I nor my wife have read this book more than glancingly. It's written in a fairly dry and academic style, filling in the backstory of the saga like a history primer. The good news is this means it's much less salacious or otherwise disturbing than the novels themselves, which is fortunate because the little guy has read the book COVER TO COVER. MORE THAN ONCE. He's still very much of the age and very much the kind of kid who enjoys ordered systems and classifications and all that. For me, the convoluted continuity of comic books scratched that itch. For him, lines of Targaryen succession and the sigils on the banners of the great houses do the same. More power to him, though of course this has led to him asking when he can watch the show (which we own on Blu-ray) or read the books (which, again, reside in the house) and we have been putting him off and putting him off and trying to determine what exactly is the minimum acceptable "old enough". It's not 10. It's probably not 18. Narrowing it down more than that isn't easy. Still, it is nice to think that someday we'll be able to share this particular fandom with him, just weird to be getting a glimpse of it so soon. Oh, and lest anyone think we are the meanest bait-and-switch parents in the world, we did get him a copy of A Knight of The Seven Kingdoms for his ninth birthday, which is the collection of Dunk and Egg stories Martin has written. Fiction, more entertaining than invented history, and practically YA, or at least a bit more kid-appropriate than the ASOIAF novels. He's quickly wearing that book out, too.

Incidentally the runner-up in this category was the little guy becoming obsessed with Pokemon and dragging both his siblings willingly along with him. That's a hole 'nother universe of hundreds of characters and rigid rules, and one which I have NO personal experience with. I mean, sooner or later, all of my kids will have interests which are not just recycled Gen X (or older) intellectual properties. But it is a bit odd nonetheless when it happens.

5. Eeriest music-related realization ALT-ROCK IS OLD. OK, maybe this isn't terribly "eerie" per se, but it does have to do with confronting the fact that the march of time is relentless and my mortality is an irrefutable fact, so that's at least unnerving? Anyway, this year my wife got a new car and I got her old car. (My old car was the trade-in for her new one. Circle of life.) My old car didn't have a working radio in it, but around the end of summer I had a new-to-me car and renewed access to the FM dial. And thus it was that I noticed something which may or may not have been true last year, or the year before that, or even five years ago with me not so much paying close attention with pregnancies and babies and all that RealLife stuff.

I basically listen to two local radio stations. One is BIG 100 and the other is DC 101. (This time of year I also listen to 97.1 which is normally adult contempo but plays Christmas music all December.) BIG 100 is a "classic rock" station. That means they play a lot of the music my parents' generation (mostly my dad and uncles) were listening to when I was growing up. DC 101 is a "modern rock" station, which I trust is self-explanatory. The thing is, both of these stations seem to be experiencing time-dilation. When I was growing up, "classic rock" meant the Beatles, the Stones, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd - bands that had been around since the 60's. Big 100 plays all of those bands but also Van Halen, AC/DC, Pat Benatar, Foreigner - bands that were not just still going in the 80's but in some cases at their highest heights or just gaining traction in the 80's. DC 101 plays the Postal Service and the Revivalists and other relevant, reasonably new music. But they also play older stuff sometimes, too, going back as far as the late 80's or so, presumably whenever they started the "modern rock" format which they have remarkably managed to stay consistent with for decades. (Now watch this be the kiss of death that sees them become a conglomerate country music station or something.) Anyway, I kid you not, I was just looking at the online "recently played" pages for both stations to make sure I was accurately representing them in this paragraph, and there was the point I've been driving at: in the past hour BIG 100 played "Stand" by R.E.M. and DC 101 played "It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" also by R.E.M.

It's not just the boys from Athens, either. I've heard Pearl Jam on both stations, and Stone Temple Pilots, maybe even Everclear unless I was hallucinating, and more. Apparently the late 80's and early-to-mid 90's are fair game for either format now. I turned 13 in 1987 and graduated college in 1996 so that's my personal Golden Age/Formative Years. And it was the dawn of alternative rock, still recognized by anyone championing modernity, yet it was so long ago that it's considered classic. Part of me thinks this just means I was very lucky to be born when I was and come of age when I did, but mostly it makes me feel the all-downhill-from-here kind of old.

6. Best throwback comic FUTURE QUEST. So let's talk more about my early 80's childhood instead! Or, to be fair, cartoons from the late 60's that were still getting play when I was an early 80's kid. I grew up a huge fan of the Hanna Barbera adventure cartoons when I was little. The first time I can remember ever wanting my mom to make me a costume for Halloween, because I didn't think it could be bought at the store, it was when I wanted to be Space Ghost. I adored the Herculoids and, come to think of it, maybe the reason why I've indulged my wife in amassing half a dozen pets in our home is because now we're just some blue loincloths and the cats and dogs shooting lasers out their eyes and/or hot rocks out their noses away from living that particular dream.

So, anyway, this year I picked up the first trade collection of Future Quest, which is a crazy mash-up story wherein Jonny Quest teams up with Birdman and meets Mightor and Space Ghost and Frankenstein Junior and is totally bonkers bananapants in the best possible way. It reads a little like fanfic, of course, but I have a soft spot for fanfic and it reads like good fanfic. It was just pure fun and made me happily nostalgic and sometimes that's all it takes to merit inclusion on this year-end countdown, okay?

In the same vein, the best throwback streaming show this year was Parks and Recreation on Netflix. Yes, the show only ended two or three years ago, and that final season was time-jumped forward to 2017 (no holographic phones here in the real version, sadly), but my wife and I loved that show and we miss it and it makes for great dipping-in-and-out-of-at-random because every episode is a delight.

7. Best torch-passing THE INCREDIBLES. I could have mentioned this in passing up above in number four, but I felt like it merited its own entry. I have been trying, unsuccessfully, for years to get my kids to watch The Incredibles. For one thing, it's still pretty much my favorite Pixar movie. For another, my kids have proven oddly resistant to showing any interest in superheroes at all. They never got into Teen Titans GO! The little girl expressed a fleeting interest in DC Superhero Girls and got a Wonder Woman doll, but then she was back to stuffed animals and toy cottages. The little guy read a kid's book about Rocket and Groot but hasn't been asking about Guardians of the Galaxy much at all, even though I'd be more likely to put that movie in the eyeballs of a nine-year-old than Game of Thrones. And countless sets of Legos containing Superman or Captain America or Batman (not to mention the LEGO Batman Movie) have done nothing to light a spark. But maybe, I reasoned, The Incredibles would be a gateway. Whether or not it is remains to be seen, but the fact is while we were at the beach this summer I managed to get all three kids to sit down one afternoon and watch the adventures of the Parr family. And they all liked it! So much so that on a recent December weekend the little girl asked (unprompted!!!) if she could watch it again.

The main thing about being the pop-culture pusher in the family is that I actually try not to push too hard. I suggest things (in super-chill laid-back cool dad mode) and either the kids bite or they don't. The Incredibles felt like an exception to the rule where the kids didn't bite but I kept pushing every now and then anyway. So to have that finally pay off was enormously gratifying.

8. Biggest disappointment ANGEL CATBIRD. One of the books I was really looking forward to checking out this year was Angel Catbird by Margaret Atwood. Margaret Atwood is of course a rightly revered luminary of speculative fiction, and I've been an admirer of hers since college when I read The Handmaid's Tale. I couldn't be happier for the success the television adaptation of Handmaid has garnered. Angel Catbird was Atwood's first stab at doing a superhero comicbook, which of course is my most dearly cherished story genre. It's a standalone work about a superhero who is simultaneously a cat, a bird, and an angel. In other words, it's a bonkers idea, unfettered by any continuity constraints of the existing superhero universes, written by an all-time great, and I was DOWN for that. Except once I finished, I was LETDOWN. It seemed that Atwood decided that superhero comics don't need to make sense at all and took the liberties afforded by the stereotypical idea of comics-as-brainless to throw a whole bunch of incoherent ideas together and call it a day. There's meticulously thought-out bonkers (see FUTURE QUEST above!) and there's disdainful not-even-trying bonkers (see ANGEL CATBIRD). Frustrating.

The runner-up in this category was the NBC sitcom POWERLESS. We DVR'ed it and I gamely watched a few episodes but it never really clicked for me. I think Vanessa Hudgens has serviceable leading lady charms, and Danny Pudi and Alan Tudyk have been involved in some of my all-time favorite shows, and again the whole superhero thing is right in my wheelhouse, including exploring the peripheries thereof, which Powerless promised in setting itself up as superhero-adjacent. I understood that it was always going to be constrained by its own budget, and was going to make that part of the overarching metahumor, where the biggest blockbuster action we were likely to see was a faceoff between Crimson Fox and Jack O'Lantern (and yes, clearly I know the deep backstory of both those fourth-stringer DC Comics characters). And I also understood that another running joke was going to be something along the lines of "Wouldn't it be crazy living as a normal person in the superhero world/Aren't superheroes kind of inherently ridiculous?" What really put me off, though, was the fact that in the end it was a mediocre workplace comedy with a smattering of comicbooky window dressing. As it dawned on me that the plots, and the jokes derived therefrom, could have all the superhero references excised from them and really not change much at all, I realized it really wasn't worth sitting through the stale sitcom jokes (uh oh, somebody is sweating from the strain of keeping up an elaborate cover story to hide a trivially minor problem!) for the occasional none-too-clever Batman Easter egg. Alas.

9. Biggest accomplishment I consume pop culture preeeeeeeeeeetty much like air, food and water. So when I think about accomplishments it's usually in creative terms, like whether or not I sold any short stories this year (which I did!) or finally finished writing a novel of my own (which I did not). To say that I saw something or read something or even learned something is just a natural occurrence, not an achievement. However! Let it be known that 2017 will go down in history as the year that I finally read all three novels of The Lord of the Rings. Growing up as a geek who loved comics, endlessly rewatched Star Wars, played Dungeons & Dragons, and all the rest, my biggest personal gap in first hand knowledge of The Canon was never having consumed Tolkien's trilogy. Everybody has gaps, of course, but it was extra strange that this was mine considering, for example, that my father had read the books before I was born and we had copies of them in the house. Or considering that I had an illustrated storybook and readalong cassette of The Hobbit (based on the Rankin/Bass animated version) which I wore out, and that I did graduate from that to reading the original novel of The Hobbit when I was nine or ten. I tried to move on from there to The Fellowship of the Ring, but I gave up early on because it starts so ponderously. And that was my excuse for years and years: I hadn't read Lord of the Rings though I had tried but couldn't get past the slow beginning. Tolkien's serious-not-for-kids prose was too much not my cup of tea.

Even Peter Jackson's movies couldn't motivate me, though I enjoyed them and felt some measure of satisfaction in finally knowing the majority of the story through their faithful adaptation.

Once again, it all came down to the little guy's burgeoning interests. He read The Hobbit and he (and his siblings) watched the three Hobbit movies, and it seemed logical to move on to Lord of the Rings next. And when I realized it might very well come to pass that my child would have read the trilogy while I still had not, I resolved to finally cross the thing off. So the little guy and I read the trilogy more or less concurrently, passing back and forth the same paperbacks. It still starts off slow! But I powered through, and I'm glad I did. It does have its merits, above and beyond being an ur-text of geekdom, and it is an immense relief to be free from the burden and shame of my prior ignorance. Huzzah!

Notably, this also unlocked the achievement of watching all of Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies as a family. The kids had never seen them, and we went with the extended, four-hours-apiece director's cuts (one at a time, spread out, not some crazy grueling marathon) which even my wife and I had never seen. Everyone enjoyed them, though the bino really wanted more Shelob in the final installment, which is fair.

10. Unfulfilled Ambitions and Anticipations Sometime around the middle of January I set myself a goal of reading 200 short stories over the course of 2017. Between the small press anthologies I try to support, the availability of a decent amount of short fiction one can read for free online, and the fact that I had yet to acquire Stephen King's latest short story collection (Bazaar of Bad Dreams, which came out in 2015!) I thought this was modestly do-able. I fell short by a good bit, though, only logging 124. And I still haven't picked up King's Bazaar. Still, that's ten a month, and I did manage to read Kristen Roupenian's "Cat Person" in the New Yorker, for whatever that's worth.

I don't know if Jordan Peele's Get Out was the most talked about movie in 2017, but it felt that way at various times. I love me some Peele and some subversive horror-comedy, but couldn't make a viewing of Get Out happen. But! I recently DVR'ed it off HBO and my wife has expressed interest in watching it, so that is an oversight I hope to rectify in the very near future.

As far as what I am most looking forward to in 2018, I see no reason to believe the current golden ages of television and movies and pop culture in general are going to come to an abrupt end, so I'm spoiled for choice. But one offering easily stands head and broad, burly shoulders above all the rest: The Incredibles 2!!! June 15 should be a very fun day, especially since it can be a family outing now that I've got the kids on board as fans. Maybe I'll even update the blog again in six months with a review!

Decembrion In Excelsis

As the end of every year draws near (well, ends of 2013 and 2014 and 2015, at least) I compile a very eclectic and personal list of pop culture superlatives. Often this has more to do with my experience with the entertainment in question than the objective quality of same, but that is kind of the whole raison de blog 'round here. So without further ado, the 2016 Year-End Countdown Something Or Other!

1. Best visual pun Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. OK, stay with me on this one. This summer I picked up the first collection of a newish comic book series, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. It is a dark reimagining of the beloved Archie character Sabrina the Teenage Witch, done as overt horror assuming that Sabrina's family heritage of witchcraft involves actual demon worship and ritual human sacrifice and whatnot. It is a HOOT. It's not played for laughs, it's legitimately creepy and pretty far from camp. But there's still an inherent humor to it simply by nature of the premise, taking this innocuous character orginially presented in bright colors with rounded edges and pushing it into nightmare territory, and incongruous juxtaposition which can certainly produce a chuckle or two when things go really over the top. And furthermore, it's all done as a period piece, which allows for certain amusing, historically 20/20 social commentary as well. Quite a bit of the art is at least photo-referenced, using celebrity archetypes from the late 50's and early 60's to drive the point home. So ultimately this leads to a great joke when the characters of Betty and Veronica show up.

And, see, Veronica is a brunette so she gets modeled after a very famous brunette pin-up, with her square cut bangs as a dead giveaway: Bettie Page. Whereas Betty, with the waves in her blonde hair, looks like she's being drawn as an homage to ... Veronica Lake. So Betty is Veronica and Veronica is Bettie! OK, I thought it was funny.

2. Best late bandwagoning (second annual!) Orange Is the New Black. Right about the time that Orange Is the New Black was releasing its most recent season my wife and I decided to finally give it a try. And at this point, really, what is there to say? It's pretty great! We did our version of binge-watching, which means we would watch one episode per night every night, as long as we were home and neither of us was too exhausted and there wasn't something else, like a live sporting event, that we needed to watch more urgently. Some nights we would watch two episodes back-to-back, if we were feeling particularly wild.

We paused after the third season, in an effort to savor the fourth. I know that there are three additional seasons more or less guaranteed, which is great, but of course what will probably happen is that Season 5 will be released right on top of the premiere of Game of Thrones Season 7, #firstworldproblems. (In fact, one reason why we paused OINTB was to re-watch GoT Season 6 when our Blu-ray copy was delivered. Now as we wait to get back to Westeros, we can amble back to Litchfield for a spell, #fantasyworldproblems.)

3. Most problematic recommendation Jessica Jones. See the post from earlier this week for the full explanation as to why I really dug Jessica Jones but find it hard to impress upon other people that they should watch it.

4. Most depressing thing I read The Sun and the Moon. OK, as long as I've re-opened the unhappy box, let me go ahead and get this one out of the way, too. The Sun and the Moon is a fantastic book! It covers a specific moment in American history, basically the summer of 1835 (although it does provide quite a bit of backstory as well), to tell the tale of the rise of city newspapers as a truly populist mass medium, as opposed to a luxury for the upper merchant class. It delves into early 19th century sensationalism, scandals and crime reporting and whatnot, but ultimately explores the production and reception of a series of articles purporting to be authentic scientific discoveries of lifeforms and civilizations on the moon observed by new telescopes. This, of course, was pure science fiction, but well-crafted and presented to stand on its own in such a way that many people believed the hoax until it was revealed to be just that. Along the way the story loops in various American luminaries, several of whom are near and dear to my heart, including P.T. Barnum and Edgar Allen Poe.

So is it depressing to read about people's gullibility? Not really, no, at least not with respect to whether or not winged furry humanoids called Lunarians really exist. What gave me the blues was the fact that the book identified another facet of the ascent of daily newspapers, which served as political mouthpieces often with unapologetically brazen agendas. And in 1835, one of the hot-button political issues in the U.S. was slavery. What was depressing was reading some of the arguments for and against slavery which went back and forth in the pages of the papers. Pro-slavery voices often fell back on the Bible to justify the practice. Abolitionists often pointed out that there are lots of things in the Bible which weren't done anymore, and cherry picking chapters and verses to rationalize crimes against humanity is really not a particularly satisfying answer. This of course went round and round and changed very few minds and accomplished very little, and then we had a bloody war about it to settle things. It's my own fault, really, that like many modern people I think any given phenomenon is something new and unique to our slice of history. And so I was blindsided by this idea that people holding up the Bible to justify trampling others' rights, and people pointing out how inconsistent and hypocritical that was, and people continuing to trample while jamming Bibles in their ears and chanting "Bible! Bible! Bible!" was actually a good hundred and eighty years old. I like to believe things do get better as life goes on, but sometimes I wonder.

5. Biggest missed opportunity Charles Dance as the big bad of the Monsterverse. Right, now, let's talk about stupid monster movies! We added HBO to our cable package some time ago (2014, maybe?) and I often find myself comparing the experience of having it now as a middle-aged parent, after a long stretch where I didn't have it, to back when I was a kid and HBO was one of many perks of living in my parents' house. One of the biggest differences is that, as a child, I often would be flipping around the tv channels, bored, hit HBO to find that a movie had just started, and wind up watching the whole thing. This almost never happens as an adult, for reasons which I assume should be obvious. But it did happen once this past year. My wife and I settled onto the couch after getting the kids to bed, there was nothing we were in the midst of slow-bingeing (see above), and my wife only wanted the tv on as background noise anyway (she had paperwork to do). So I stumbled upon Dracula Untold on HBO and gave it a few minutes; I remembered it had more or less flopped but I wanted to see if it was "so bad it's good" or merely sub-mediocre.

I ended up watching most of it, and I have to say, it might not be much above mediocre, but it's certainly not sub. I admire the ambition of the filmmakers, turning Vlad into this scary-yet-sympathetic-yet-still-really-evil tragic protagonist. They Batmanned the hell out of him, and Luke Evans works with what he's given. Moreover, you might (read: you probably don't) recall that Universal was trying to breed their own cash cow mega-franchise, wherein they would do origin stories for the classic monsters like Dracula and Frankenstein and the Wolfman and the mummy, and then bring them together MCU Avengers-style for a billion dollar blockbuster. Batmanization notwithstanding, turning monsters into superheroes is a bit of a stretch, and announcing the intent ahead of time just seemed like hubris and probably had people rooting for them to fail, but for what it's worth, again, I will not personally crap on someone for aiming too high.

And then there's Undead Tywin Lannister! I had a vague recollection that Charles Dance was in Dracula Untold, and indeed he is, as the ancient vampire who transforms Vlad Tepes, a perfectly good use of Dance's ice cold bastard persona. What I did not know, until I got sucked into the flick and suddenly two hours later found myself watching the epilogue which apparently woudl have set up the modern day crossover, was that Dance was going to be the primary antagonist, being just as immortal as Dracula and having followed him into the present ready to make his life hell. That would have been great! A movie where Dracula, the ghost of Frankenstein, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon have to save the world that fears and despises them might have been dumb as all get-out, but if it had included sufficient supervillain scenery chewing by Charles Dance, I would have been there full price on opening night! Alas, it seems this potential was squandered by middling box office returns. Oh, what could have been.

6. Most surprising use of Netflix stand-up specials. For a long, looooooooong time, way past the period when everyone else shifted over to the streaming model, my Netflix account was used to rent physical DVDs by mail. If you are a long time reader of this blog, you know that's because for years I rode the train and often watched movies or tv shows on the commute, using a portable DVD player and discs, because the rails went through some terrain that didn't have reliable cell coverage and the train didn't have WiFi and blah blah blah. I have since come around and gotten the streaming version myself. But if you had told me, back in 2010 or so, that one of the best uses I would get out of the in-home streaming service was the ability to order up a stand-up comedy special any time I wanted, particularly when my wife and I needed a break from scripted dramas and such, I would have found that pronouncement ... odd. Not unbelievable, I've always really liked stand-up comedy, just not the knee-jerk assumption I would have made. Nevertheless, here we are, and after watching a few online series (in addition to OINTB, we loved Kimmy Schmidt and Stranger Things) and several on-demand movies, the fact that we streamed Aziz Ansari and Ali Wong and Bo Burnham and Jen Kirkman and Donald Glover doing killer comedy is like this crazy bonus jar of funny cherries on top.

7. Best new media audio books of memoirs written by comedians and read by the comedians themselves. Speaking of comedy, 2016 was also the year that I finally gave in to the recorded siren call of audiobooks. I had been of the firm opinion that audiobooks simply don't count, by which I mean of course that everything in my life is some kind of running tally which translates quantifiably into a sense of accomplishment: how many blog posts I make, how many hits my blog gets (obviously I got over both of those this year, too), how many classic movies I've seen (hence my 1001 Movie Blog Club experiment), how many books I've read in a given year (thank you, GoodReads). Reading, to me, feels like an active mental undertaking, while listening to an audiobook seems like more of a passive thing which I wouldn't deserve too much (if any) credit for .

But things change. I don't take a train to work anymore, I drive, and the state police really frown on people reading books while operating a motor vehicle, even in the stop-and-go bumper-to-bumper traffic of peak rush hour I-66! I even went on a few work-related trips this year, and had to drive myself from Virginia to New Jersey and back one weekend. It was on that trip that I decided to finally make use of this Audible membership with monthly free credits I apparently get with my Amazon Prime account. So I downloaded Patton Oswalt's Silver Screen Fiend to my phone and listened to it while driving the leg home, and it was enjoyable enough that it unleashed a flood. (It helps that the radio in my car is totally dead, so it's the apps on my phone or dead silence for those two hours out of every day I'm behind the wheel.) I figured if I'm going to start listening to audiobooks regularly I ought to impose totally arbitrary limits on my consumption! Okay, not really, but I did like that Patton recorded himself reading his own book, because it guaranteed that all the jokes would at least be delivered as intended, and it was kind of like listening to a comedy album, something I assuredly have never had a problem with. I tried, and am still trying, to break things up with an audio novel read by a professional vocal narrator artist type every so often, but mostly I gorged on comedians performing their memoirs: Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Nick Offerman, Aisha Tyler, Jenny Lawson. Really I've found that it's kind of like going on a road trip with someone cool and funny riding shotgun, where the agreed upon division of labor is that I'll do all the driving if they just tell me entertaining stories from their life.

8. Most exciting yet unsettling development the little guy getting ahead of me on Clone Wars. Star Wars has gotten its clutches into my kids in a big way, most especially the little guy, who is now eight years old and absolutely the prime age for it. And of course I am thrilled about this development. I've found myself softening quite a bit on the prequels, because my kids really dig them. The bino (he's three) thinks Jar Jar Binks is funny, thus settling the age-old question as to whether Jar Jar is in fact designed to appeal to children or fails at that and is simply universally reviled, and the little guy really likes the whole Jedi Order and seeing them at the center of the story rather than as abstract background information.

It is strange, in its way, that the little guy is growing up with a different version of what is canon than I had. I had the original trilogy all on its own for a while, although that was fleshed out in little bits here and there by Star Wars comics, novels, role-playing games, video games, and the like. Then came the prequels, which were a mixed bag to adult sensibilities, and then a ton more comics and games and novels and Wookieepedia ... and then Disney bought Lucasfilm and said a lot of that Expanded Universe stuff no longer counted, but also gave us the very good Force Awakens. But before that, I had really kind of drifted away from trying to experience and understand everything about Star Wars. It felt like diminishing returns; the let-down of Episodes I through III predisposed me to think that any further attempts to wring more story out of that particular galaxy was not worth the effort.

Case in point: years ago my sister gave me a DVD for Christmas which was the pilot movie of the Clone Wars tv series. And every year I told myself I should make time to watch it, and every year I failed to do so, and it just sat on my bookshelf, still shrinkwrapped and collecting dust. Then my kids watched all six Star Wars movies and were still hungry for more and I figured, why not let them watch Clone Wars? At that point I had heard good things about Clone Wars, that out of all the ancilliary tie-ins it was definitely at the top end, quality-wise. My own reasons for never breaking the seal had shifted from "eh, I've got better things to do than be disappointed in Star Wars some more" to "I just don't have the free time to invest in this no matter how good it is" but that's not a problem my kids share. Sure enough, they liked the movie and so started watching the series (which, cybersaints be praised, is available in its entirety on Netflix). This is all well and good, except that at this point the little guy has watched something like 38 episodes of the show and I've never seen a single one. He now considers Ziro the Hutt and Captain Rex and Luminara Unduli and Cad Bane big parts of the canon. Technically he knows more about Star Wars than I do! Which makes me happy and proud but also the slightest bit wistful. Passing torches is good, but my torch-hand now feels conspicuously empty. I suppose it's all just part of the whole parenting gig.

9. Best movie-going experience Keanu. When I started compiling notes for this post (months ago, obvs.) I had more or less assumed that this slot would be dedicated to taking the little guy to see Rogue One in the theater. Not only does it tie in nicely to the previous entry, but it raises an interesting tidbit: the little guy has never seen any Star Wars movie on the big screen! He turned down an invitation to see Force Awakens at a theater, but he's a year older now and I do believe he's ready. Or, I did believe. Here's the current logistical considerations: I personally haven't gotten to see Rogue One yet. And since Christmas is about two and half days away, I probably won't until next week. At which point I will see it with my wife, while the kids are at daycare, because Rogue One is rated PG-13 and that at a minimum calls for a pre-screening by both parents to ascertain whether or not we are comfortable with the eight-year-old seeing it. Assuming it passes that test, I can then think about scheduling a father-son outing, but for all I know that might not come together until some time in early January, and this list is supposed to be all about 2016, soooo ...

Keanu was really good! I went into it with fairly low expectations, just bound and determined to support Key and Peele because I loved their sketch show so much. My wife did, too, so it was an ideal date movie (except that it didn't feature any sandal-wearing emo heroes with ripped abs - I'm not going to link to the old posts explaining why that's a running joke, just trust me, I'm hilarious). And we continue to love the local Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, so here, take my money, give some of it to Jordan and Keegan-Michael, and bring me your finest beer and chicken wings. The fact that the movie was LOL-funny was a welcome addition to the overall enjoyment.

10. Mea Culpas I can't think of any other highlights in my year of pop culture, so I'll close with the other things, like Rogue One, which were never in contention for this list because I just didn't get around to them. This year I got into Breaking Bad, but only through Season 1 and a little bit into Season 2, so I understand I still have the best parts ahead of me. I failed to catch Season 2 of Agent Carter, or Season 1 of Preacher, and I gave up on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. I DVR'ed Thor: The Dark World, watched half of it, but have yet to finish it, so that remains the one flick in the MCU I've never seen. I really wanted to see Park Chan-wook's The Handmaiden in the theater, but it got a very limited release and never came to my local Alamo, so I'll have to VOD it at some point. I started reading Justin Cronin's The Twelve about six months ago but never finished it, because I designated it my "read while I'm working out on the elliptical or treadmill" book and, oh man, have I been bad about working out lately. That's a whole 'nother story. (It's a short one, though: I'm lazy AF.) There remains to this day a tiny part of me that longs for an injury or illness which would force me to be on bedrest for three or four weeks, during which time I could read and write and watch tv and movies and just generally have minimal responsibilities and maximal free time. I know that's ridiculous, both because I clearly have a lot of free time to enjoy a lot of things I like, as this post demonstrates, and there are countless scads of people less fortunate than I am in that regard, not to mention the fact that the very responsibilities to which I refer are primarily my wife, my kids, and my cool new job, all of which by an honest accounting make me very happy!

So instead I will simply content myself with having made it to the end of another year, knowing that I have a whole brand new year to look forward to. I will doubtless read more books, see more shows, go to more movies, and do lots of other stimulating, worthwhile things, and I am truly grateful for that. It may not come all at once, and it may in fact come in tiny fits and spurts around the edges of a very full life, but I will never actively complain about that, either.

Line Reading of the Year

In this era of interweb content churn, amidst the current golden age of television, there’s no shortage of people online overanalyzing pop culture and looking for deeper meaning, attempting to isolate and identify the ultimate microcosmic encapsulations of the present moment. And who am I to deny myself the chance to take a stab of my own? Spoilers follow for one of my favorite pieces of entertainment of the past twelve months, Jessica Jones.

(Note: spoiler for the post itself, this is gonna get dark, as I’m sure you can imagine and won’t be surprised by if you’ve already seen Jessica Jones. But on the chance that you haven’t seen but want to hear my thoughts anyway, consider yourself forewarned. Later this week I will do my usual hilarious rundown of superlatives for 2016, if you’d rather read something lighter!)

Jessica Jones was so great in so many ways, and I’m going to drill down with hyperspecific focus on a single one of those elements because of its particular resonance, but I don’t want to give the impression that’s the only good thing about the show. The acting was terrific, especially Krysten Ritter as Jessica but not discounting the entire supporting cast, and the storyline was awesome because it was so different from the usual superhero fare, and the direction was on point and the music was perfect, etc. etc. etc. If you blew past the spoiler warning above despite not having seen the series, seriously, do yourself a favor and watch it.

Although (and here, as we get a little closer to the eventual point of this post, we start to acknowledge how complicated it is to engage with Jessica Jones as a whole) at the same time that I recommend the show so highly there is a major caveat, which is that the emotional heart of the show is really fairly brutal. Jessica Jones takes place in a comic book universe and is ostensibly the tale of a former-and-maybe-once-again super-heroine and her evil arch-nemesis, but that’s a superficial read. What it’s really about is trauma, surviving it and coping with it, or at times spectacularly failing to cope with it well. It’s a superhero story where we come in fairly late in the game and get a lot of info via flashback and exposition-laden monologues, but what’s in the past includes the super-villain getting the best of the heroine in profoundly disturbing fashion for a long time, and the heroine ultimately emerging victorious but at tremendous personal cost. And then, as the series begins, we learn that even that previous defeat of the bad guy might not have been as complete and total as one would hope.

The bad guy in question is a man called Kilgrave, played by David Tennant. He absolutely slays in this role, pun only semi-intended. (I am not a Doctor Who fan - nothing against that venerable franchise, I just never got into it and now it seems like a daunting, enormous timesink I honestly do not have the spare time for. But I am aware of Doctor Who, and aware of its fandom, and aware that Tennant played one of the incarnations of The Doctor. I’m further aware that some DW fans very vocally freaked right the heck out over Tennant as Kilgrave because how dare any silly superhero show sully the good image of The Doctor by portraying him as an unsympathetic irredeemable sociopath? Apparently these people do not understand that actors sometimes take on different roles which are not intended to be commentaries upon one another. Arguably I could have written an entire post about fan entitlement, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about today.) Kilgrave’s whole superpowered deal is that he can control the minds and actions of others simply by speaking to them; if he says “give me your wallet” the person he says it to will happily comply, and if he says “take this gun, put the barrel in your mouth and blow your brains out” the person will just as happily do exactly what he says. He’s utterly amoral and completely insidious and basically unstoppable and Jessica got away from him the first time because he stepped into the street without looking both ways and got hit by a bus. Jessica thought he died in that accident, but it turns out she was wrong. The series hinges on Kilgrave’s return, and his obsession with Jessica and how she deals with all of that.

The show, to its credit, does not shy away from how gross Kilgrave is. It is at times profoundly uncomfortable to watch him move through the world, constantly violating the lives of others. He knocks on strangers’ doors and tells them to invite him in, feed him the dinner they were preparing for their family, let him sit at the head of the table. And they do it. When people make him angry, he tells them to hurt themselves. And they do it. If you have an ounce of empathy, it’s unsettling. Then there’s the sex angle, because let’s be honest here, if you could make anyone in the world do anything you want just by naming it, you’d at the very least be tempted to satisfy various carnal desires, right? Anyone who’s never at least daydreamed about this must have spent puberty in a coma. But to see it play out with a grown man exploiting the fact that people are helpless to resist his superpower is (intentionally) revolting.

Again, the show confronts this head-on, and forces the audience to do the same. And at a pivotal moment in the narrative, when Kilgrave has forced Jessica to spend time with him, not by using his superpower but with old-fashioned extortionate threats (do what I say or I will use my powers to make people you care about do unspeakable things), Jessica unloads on Kilgrave, demanding that he acknowledge what it is that he does, what it means and what the consequences are. She doesn’t use euphemisms. She tells him that he raped her. “You raped me,” she says, more than once. Which he did, of course, and that’s what I was euphemistically referring to above as “the super-villain getting the best of the heroine in profoundly disturbing fashion for a long time”. In the backstory, Kilgrave met Jessica Jones and told her she found him irresistible and wanted to be with him, and she did it. For months or years, she was his companion, arm candy and sex slave, seemingly willingly but in truth totally unwillingly, because that’s how Kilgrave’s powers work. He gets what he wants, despite anything anyone else might think or feel or suffer as a result.

That in and of itself could probably qualify as one of the most important themes to be addressed by a piece of pop culture in 2016. And especially now, as we seem to be at real risk of drowning in the sentiments of a small, crass, disproportionately amplified segment of our society whose credo is “we want what we want and we don’t give a fuck who that hurts or who else stands to lose”, it feels pretty goddamn prescient. But what really struck me in that scene, and what I imagine will haunt me for years and years to come, is the contrast between what Jessica is saying (and Ritter’s powerful, unflinching delivery of it) and Tennant-as-Kilgrave’s reaction.

I tried, I really did, to find a screencap or an animated gif of the exact moment, but no luck. I shall have to fall back on description. In the scene, Kilgrave is slouching in a chair while Jessica stands across the room enumerating his sins. She says “You raped me” and the camera cuts to him. He sneers and rolls his eyes. He shifts his weight in the chair with visible discomfort. And he grumbles, mostly to himself, “Gah, I hate that word.”

There it is, folks, that’s my nominee for 2016-in-a-nutshell, first prize. This past year has frequently felt like one big long fight, specifically a fight where both sides are playing by different rules and aiming for different things. On one side, people who recognize injustice and want to force others to acknowledge it so we can all move on and do something about righting the wrongs. On the other side, people who refuse to engage, who deflect by focusing on (a) terminology, (b) the ways that the argument itself makes them feel bad, which is far more important than whatever the argument is actually about, or (c) both. All of our cultural struggles writ large are present in that aggrieved, dismissive redirection. It’s the prime tactic for today’s bad guys. An athlete kneels during the national anthem to protest police brutality? That’s disrespectful to our armed forces, and I think that guy should just be thankful he lives under the freedoms they fought and died for, and he should show his gratitude by shutting the hell up! A presidential candidate brags about sexually assaulting women and getting away with it because he’s rich and famous? That’s just locker room talk and people are way too oversensitive these days! Man-made climate change is a serious problem we need to take concrete steps to solve immediately? If it still gets cold enough to snow in the winter, then “global warming” is a hoax, and I’m not giving up my 6 mpg truck! I could go on and on, except it took me like an hour to force myself to type out those three examples and if I try for four I think I might kill myself.

(And yes, I am well aware that this sometimes cuts both ways - liberals defending Roe v Wade who think the most important thing is to rebrand the “pro-life” movement as the “anti-choice” movement, or those who get caught up in arguing whether or not safe spaces are good ideas or trigger warnings are valuable while ignoring the root causes, and so forth. But my point stands that litigating semantics and/or obtusely changing the subject are both dick moves no matter which side employs them as tactics. Like a great many wrongheaded impulses, from gerrymandering to genocide, it’s a bad idea no matter whose idea it is.)

Some things - perhaps most things - which are genuine problems with demonstrably harmful effects are difficult to talk about. They make us uncomfortable, as well they should, whether it’s some form of guilt that we caused them or made them worse, through action or inaction, or just the fact that they skeeve us out. Nobody willingly grapples with pain and death. But sometimes the only way forward, the only way to make things better, is to do things unwillingly, not because they’re pleasant but because they’re right. And talking about things, honestly seeing things and calling them what they are, is the bare minimum first step for that. And yet we’ve reached the point where people balk at even that. A word makes them twitch and they somehow channel that into an indignation which gives them every right to refuse to engage, full stop. It’s appalling. And writing a supervillain who is genuinely appalling is a high achievement within the genre! But when that appalling super-villain resonates so very deeply, it’s time for all of us to take a long, hard look in the mirror and figure out if we’re going to make our feelings paramount at the expense of our future.

Might be

If you've ever been sued by the federal government for housing discrimination ... you might be a racist.

If you've ever been quoted as saying "I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control." ... you might be a racist.

If you've ever taken out a full page ad to advocate for the death penalty for black teenagers accused of rape ... you might be a racist.

If you stuck to your guns on that whole thing 27 years later even after those men had been exonerated by DNA evidence and had their convictions vacated ... you might be a racist.

If you've ever insisted that an American judge of Mexican descent can't be impartial in hearing your case because you're "building a wall" ... you might be a racist.

If the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives has ever characterized your remarks about that judge as "the textbook definition of a racist comment" ... you might be a racist.

If you think all minorities live in squalid conditions in the inner city ... you might be a racist.

If you think Black Lives Matter is a hate group ... you might be a racist.

If you've ever told rally crowds that "other communities" are trying to steal the election, and urged people to go to the polls and watch for trouble ("you all know what I'm talking about") ... you might be a racist.

If you've ever tweeted out a graphic that claims, under the heading USA Crime Statistics 2015, egregiously false stats like "Whites killed by blacks - 81% Blacks killed by blacks - 97%" ... you might be a racist.

If you won't disavow the support of David Duke, who is a white nationalist, antisemitic conspiracy theorist, Holocaust denier, and former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan ... you might be a racist.

And if you would elect, as President of the United States of America, someone who has done all of the above ... you might be a racist, too. Or, maybe, just maybe, you're not racist ... it's just that you're white and you're not really affected by racism and don't think it's that big a deal and you're willing to give a guy a pass on all that stuff because you're more concerned with other things. But that's hardly any better.

Ill Logic

So hey, did you all know that this is a presidential election year in the U.S. of A.? It's true! Much has been made of the fact that the two R/D choices available to voters in November are both sub-optimal. Some people see this as one candidate being flawed but acceptable, and the other being irredeemable. And some people see it ... in exactly the same terms, but with the descriptors flipped for the respective candidates. All of which is pretty much par for the course for partisan American politics in the 21st century.

(For the record, I'm With Her, for three reasons: her platform is one I very much agree with; her opponent's platform is one I very much disagree with; her opponent is a giant lump of orange dickcheese masquerading as a human in physical form but failing every conceivable test of having a human soul.)

And then there are some other people who insist on trying to slip between the horns of the dilemma, and full-throatedly back a Third Party Option. It seems like 2016 in particular has brought out a lot more of these folks than usual, or maybe has brought out the usual ranks more loudly than usual. Maybe it's just that this is the first prez-cycle during which I've been connected to Facebook. Maybe it's just been long enough since Nader in 2000 that the pendulum was due to swing again, or maybe it's not so much the pure passage of time as an unavoidable side-effect of eight years of relatively successful Democratic control of the White House and the potential for four more.

And I don't discount the undeniable influence of the major party candidates themselves. They sure are unpopular! If either one were running against almost anyone else, we'd be gearing up for a historic landslide, and if neither were running, it would likely be the same old, same old ho-hum party line voting. But with both in the mix, a large number of people are generally put off and discouraged, which does present a particularly opportune-looking moment for a third party to seize.

Don't get me wrong, I said "opportune-looking" for a reason. Looks can be deceiving. A third party is not going to win the Presidency; a third party most likely won't win a single electoral vote. Nevertheless, the neither/nors are whooping it up this year, convinced they have a real shot if only the sheeple would wake up and do the right thing!

In particular, I am of course talking about the Libertarians, and I have noticed a distressing trend amongst them (by which I mean, in the Facebook feeds of people I know who are All In For Johnson): they seem to spend less time touting the virtues of their candidate than in loudly declaiming that both R/D candidates are equally bad (which is absolutely absurd on the face of it by any rational metric) or going even further and asserting that SHE is even WORSE than HE is (which, see previous aside, times a million).

And how do they back up these specious claims impugning the Democratic candidate? Basically by regurgitating every piece of Republican mud-slinging, rumor-mongering, paranoia-stoking agitprop of the past 25 years.

How to account for this? The way I see it, there are two possibilities:

ONE: For all their smug boasting and bragging about how they are all fiercely independent free-thinkers and not mindless drones like the sorry two-party-system supporters, Libertarians are actually pretty stupid. They see multiple congressional inquiries yielding up absolutely nothing not as exoneration, but as proof that "something fishy is going on with that woman". The decades-long existence of the witchhunt proves that the witchhunt absolutely needs to exist. It seems strange that someone who was not already devoutly, rabidly Republican would latch onto this as an irrefutable truth, but I can't say it beggars belief. Libertarianism is political philosophy for babies. It requires a solipsistic worldview and a fundamentally backwards belief that, after two world wars and decades of cold war and the (not so much) recent global war on terror, the U.S. can just go back to international isolationism with no consequences whatsoever. It is the belief that life will be best for everyone if everyone can do whatever they want and no one is ever forced to help anyone else in need and all disputes are settled by the invisible hand of the free market. It's kind of cute when an eighteen year old discovers and embraces Libertarianism, but one would hope that a certain combination of empathy and pragmatism would eventually win out. For someone to be thirty- or forty-something and Libertarian just strikes me as pathetic arrested development. So yeah, maybe that contingent is incapable of critical reasoning, and ripe for the brainwashing by Republican oppo "research".

TWO: Libertarians are actually super-geniuses! They are deeply cynical master manipulators playing three-dimensional chess and thinking seventeen moves ahead. They realized all along that it's mathematically impossible for a third party to get even a plurality of votes when 35 - 40% of people are hardcore Dems and 35 - 40% of people are hardcore GOP and only 20 - 30% of the votes, tops, are actively in play. They further realized that the only way to increase the free share was to knock down the Big Two; it really is a zero-sum game in that sense. And on top of all that, they realized that HIS campaign was always smoke and mirrors and would eventually implode, so they strategically focused on knocking HER down as many pegs as possible. They see right through the bullshit that the Republicans have been peddling since the 90's but they also recognize that it has a certain hypnotic power through repetition, so they took hold of it to wield at will in their effort to level the playing field. So in the end, Libertarians are just another flavor of politicians, playing the same games, devoid of principles, defining truth as "whatever benefits me most in this election", and desperately hoping no one notices. That's not even a put down, really, it just is what it is, human nature when people jockey for power.

As I said, this all occurs to me because of specific things I've seen posted on social media by specific people, people I consider friends. And I honestly don't know which explanation would make me sadder.

Shit I Chose Not to Post on Facebook This Week

This was a trying week, where the news was depressing and people's reactions to the news ranged from heartening to dispiriting (if they were indifferent) to infuriating (if they were lining up on the same side as lunacy). Many, many times I wanted to post something on Facebook, not that I thought I could change any minds but because sometimes it matters just to stand up and be counted among the opposition. But ultimately I decided that Facebook was not the optinal forum for it, and would just create more drama and lead me to ever more depressing places. Still, my mind kept composing these sick burns and epic trollings, and I had to put them somewhere. And I remembered I have a blog!

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I can't count how many times growing up I heard "the great thing about America is that we don't have a class system, we don't have arbitrary restrictions on what people can do with their lives, or even who gets to be in charge. Anybody can do anything in America. Anybody can grow up to be President!" Then we elected a black man President and half the country lost their goddamn minds.

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You can argue that turning away Syrian refugees is the correct thing to do because it's being done in the name of saving American lives, that despite the intensive vetting process there still might be some lucky terrorist that gets in pretending to be a refugee and later goes on to claim even one American life in an act of terror, and that is unacceptable. You can leave it as unspoken and implicit that this means saving one American life is more important than saving numerous Syrian lives. Just know that if you do, you are ceding the moral high ground. No more "Americans are the good guys". No more "America is the world's moral compass". No more "shining city on the hill", no more "land of the free, home of the brave". Because telling Syrian refugees that we can't take the risk of granting asylum effectively makes America "land of the privileged and closed off, home of the scared shitless."

Oh and P.S. no more "America is a Christian country founded on Christian values." Turning a blind eye to the needy is the exact opposite of Christ's most explicit admonitions. Just FYI.

So by all means, stand up proud and tall and shout from the rooftops that taking care of yourself and taking care of your own is paramount. I can't say that you're wrong. I can't say that feeling that way, thinking that way, and insisting we decide on our national policies that way makes you a terrible human being. I can't even say that I don't understand where you're coming from. I do. But just know that it shows your true colors, and it paints America as a cowardly 900-lb gorilla that can do whatever it wants but chooses not to lift a finger to help the weak and powerless and desperate, because it's just a big dumb self-interested animal after all.

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This a country of 300 million people with a vast multi-faceted system of government aid programs and private charities. I think we can do something to help Syrian refugees and also help homeless veterans or whatever other cause you happen to think is more important. One doesn't cancel the other out.

+++

You know what you sound like? You sound like that asshole who has something massively wrong with his house, like an actual hole in the roof that has a Hefty bag stapled over it but still lets in rain and bugs. And you never do anything about that stupid hole in your roof, you just kind of accept it like "oh well, what can you do". And then someone says, "Hey, can you help me move?" And you're like "What the hell??? I've got problems of my own! Have you seen the hole in my roof???"

Two weeks later your friend will have moved, one way or the other, and you won't have done a damn thing about the hole in your roof. But at least it will still make a nice convenient excuse the next time someone asks you to do something you don't want to do.

+++

The same goddamn people who think it's unpatriotic to criticize America, because America is the greatest and best country in the history of everything ever, are the people saying we have waaaaaay too many problems in America, like homeless vets and children, to be bothered to think about the humanitarian crisis of Syrian refugees. So somehow we all live in the most perfect paragon of democracy and opportunity and freedom and equality in all of human civilization, and every other country in the world should look up to us and fall in line whenever we tell them what to do, except we all live in this horrible barren hellscape which has been ruined by a Kenyan Muslim socialist dictator for the past seven years and requires a serially bunkrupted real estate mogul in a made-in-China trucker cap to "Make America Great Again". Got it.

+++

ISIS attacks Paris.

A certain Republican presidential candidate tweets that it probably happened because France has strict gun laws and only the bad guys were armed. The implication seems to be that such could never happen here, all praise to our sacrosanct Second Amendment.

Uncowed, France announces they will accept 30,000 Syrian refugees.

No ISIS attacks on U.S. soil.

Republicans vote in lock-step to pause U.S. admittance of Syrian refugees by needlessly complicating the existing vetting process, because of the slight risk of a terrorist getting through.

Soooo ... moratorium forever on the "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" jokes about France, right?

+++

Politician logic, post-Newtown: Look, occasional domestic terrors like the slaughter of a couple dozen six year olds in an American elementary school is simply the price we have to pay for living in a civilized, enlightened society that is forever dedicated to upholding the basic right of all people to own as much of the latest most technologically advanced personal murder tools as they like. Stricter gun control laws are not the answer! If we enacted them, they would only constrain the law-abiding citizens who have the greatest right to personal arsenals in their basement. Criminals would by definition ignore the laws and nothing would be accomplished. It's complicated, but basically there's nothing we can or should do.

Politician logic, post-Paris: The hypothetical possibility of the death of even one American on American soil at the hands of a jihadist terrorist is utterly unacceptable. Refugee control IS the answer! We MUST alter our already strict refugee vetting process which takes 18 to 24 months and make it even more rigid to the point where it effectively strangles refugee inflow to nil. Only that will stop terrorists, who were exclusively planning on using our legal methods of entering the country, from broaching our shores, and thus guarantee the safety of our own citizens. We have no other choice but to take this action. Please hold your applause, we're only doing our jobs.

+++

Future President Trump,

On more than one occasion a Christian has murdered an abortion doctor for religious reasons. Since the actions of individual extremists effectively taint entire faiths and all their millions of adherents, can we please issue ID cards to all American Christians for monitoring against threats of violence? Thanks!

+++

Rep. [Redacted],

I am writing to let you know that in voting in favor of H R 4038, the American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act, you have failed to represent my will as your constituent, and failed a very basic test of decency. Your vote saddens and sickens me. You have aligned yourself with the panicked pandering that we desperately need our leadership to resist. Syrian refugees are not our enemy, ISIS and other terrorists are our enemy, and by confusing and conflating the two you have made a bad situation worse. We are in no danger from people who want to come to America for a better life, we are in danger from people who hate our way of life. The American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act goes one step further to ensuring not American safety in the short term, but that many more people will hate us in the long term.

You are on the wrong side of history, and you are on the wrong side of humanity. I look forward to doing everything in my power to work against your re-election next year.

(NB: I actually did send this letter to my representative in Congress, and also seriously considered copying it to Facebook.)

+++ We are never going to beat the terrorists by sinking to their level. We can only beat them by actually being better than them. I know a lot of people find it compelling to repeat "violence is the only thing these brutes understand." That may be true. It probably is, I believe it, too.

I'm not some hippy-dippy idiot. I'm not saying that if we meet a horde of violent, desperate zealots who have nothing to lose and offer them hugs and flowers, we're going to melt their hearts and get the whole world to sing in harmony and share a Coke. I think war is terrible - and find it troubling that the same people who think one civilian dying at the hands of an ISIS terrorist is flatly impossible to contemplate, also think sending our ground troops of young men and women to face ISIS where some percentage of them will surely be killed is so unexceptional as to pass without comment - but for the sake of argument let's say I'm already convinced that we're already at war with ISIS, they started it, and we need to finish it in the conventional manner. Fine. Engaging on the battlefield, blowing up their oil fields, drawing the ISIS fighters back to Syria to defend their front rather than letting them run around attacking domestic targets worldwide, those are viable tactics. That's how we win short-term. I've seen shock and awe, I know that it works, short-term

But winning long-term matters, too, yes? Arguably matters more? Guys, we JUST FUCKING WENT THROUGH THIS like ten or twelve years ago. There's winning the shoot-em-up, and then there's winning hearts and minds. Last time we succeeded at the first and utterly fucking pooched it at the second, and it wasn't because we weren't even thinking about "hearts and minds". That phrase got bandied about a lot.

"Bombing the shit out of ISIS" can't be our entire strategy. Supporting and encouraging everyone else who ideologically opposes ISIS has to be part of it, too. It's actually crucial. That means welcoming those running as fast as they can away from ISIS. Those people are caught in the middle, with ISIS on one said saying "submit to brutal subjugation or be killed" and the U.S. on the other side saying ... well at the moment we're saying "drop dead for all we care". We SHOULD be saying "come, be part of our pluralistic and inclusive society. It's not just 'join ISIS or die'. There's a third choice, which is live free among us." Every military victory we rack up will be meaningless if we're simultaneously pushing people who don't want to die into ISIS's waiting arms.

I know it's viscerally satisfying to focus on the "blow 'em up good" stuff. But I also think how glorious it would be to defeat ISIS by building a better, inclusive, enlightened world that marginalizes them completely because they refuse to engage with it. And when they are sitting amidst the smoking ruins, abandoned and forsaken and defeated, they'll say to themselves, "We used violence and they used violence, how did they defeat us? I don't understand, I don't understand." Because they'll still be blind to that other half of our efforts. THAT will be satisfying. Difficult and uncomfortable, maybe even counter-intuitive for some. But worth it.

Yippee-ki-yin-and-yang (Mad Max: Fury Road)

Last night a couple of buddies and I went to see Mad Max: Fury Road. I thought it was great. After several weeks of people hyping how amazingly mind-blowing it was, in terms of everything from color palettes to practical effects to gender politics, I think it suffered a tiny bit from overinflated expectations, which is really unfair to lay upon the flick itself. I enjoyed every minute of the viewing experience. (Well, almost, but we’ll get to that.) I would (and probably will) watch the movie again.

At the risk of saying that which goes without, this post will include some SPOILERS. Although to a certain extent a movie like Fury Road is almost spoiler-proof. Even if you haven’t seen it for yourself yet, you may have heard that the whole movie is one big long extended chase scene-slash-battle sequence, which kind of obviates the need for any major plot twists. It is more or less self-evident that Max (Tom Hardy) survives to the end of the movie, because they’re already talking additional sequels. It is also more or less self-evident that Furiosa (Charlize Theron) survives, third act feints notwithstanding, because chances are the movie wouldn’t have disturbed and discomfited the MRAs quite so much if Furiosa had wound up ultimately victimized in some way. Still, there’s a couple of minor things in the movie which did surprise me, both for the fact that they happened at all and the fact that I hadn’t heard anybody else talking about them online. A couple of things having to do with a minor character, really. So, spoilers, K?.

Let’s talk about Splendid.

A quick overview for those coming in late: in the movie Max gets captured by some members of a pocket civilization in the wasteland called the Citadel, where a tyrant called Immortan Joe controls the populace by controlling the water supply. Max, it turns out, is a universal blood donor so he is forced to become a human blood bag for one of Joe’s many warboys. A routine supply run bound for Gas Town and the Bullet Farm goes rogue, and the warboys and Max are dispatched to bring it back. Turns out the big rig from the supply run, driven by Imperator Furiosa, has smuggled out Joe’s five favorite wives (which is a bit of a misnomer, they’re more like breeding concubines), with Furiosa intending to deliver them to the freedom of the Green Place. That setup is the most complicated part of the movie and gets laid out in the first fifteen minutes or so. The rest is just Joe and the bad guys chasing Furiosa and the wives and stuff blowing up for like an hour and a half. And it is glorious. Max escapes his blood bag imprisonment eventually and joins up with Furiosa, but it’s not inaccurate to describe that as incidental. Max also has the big idea that (pretty dang literally) pivots the movie around the midpoint, but it’s one of those things that oddly enough works well for the overall character arc Max has in the movie but also could have been excised with little or no repercussions, simply by having Furiosa come to the same realization herself.

So, honestly the aforementioned color palettes in the film are amazing, probably worth the price of admission in and of themselves. And the stunt work of the practical effects, all the high-adrenaline acrobatics and high-speed crashes and high-octane fireballs and so forth, also totally top notch. Which leads us to the gender politics, and please don’t get me wrong, those are solid. But when we start talking about them, we necessarily go from the level of describing the world of the narrative, what happened and did it make internally consistent sense and was it entertaining, up to the level of reflecting on the world in which the audience watches the movie, and what does it all mean, man. Not that that’s a bad thing, I’m just warning everyone to hold on.

There’s a strange combination of considerations here with what everyone has been talking about (or at least the slice thereof that has intersected with my awareness, maybe I'm wrong and other people have addressed the same things I want to, in which case I'm still happy to add my voice to the chorus) regarding the outright feminism of Fury Road. Like on the one hand it’s great, most people love it, and those who hate it are being rightfully scorned and mocked. And on the other hand, it’s a little bit sad that everyone’s flipping out about it so much, because overt feminist heroes are so rare. But by and large, either way, people are talking about Furiosa. And that’s fair because she’s a fantastic character and Theron’s performance is all of the awesomes. And it really is her movie, and now I get to go super-meta because I will make that statement but also say it’s not only her movie. I believe a lot of the mouth-breathers who were offended by everything about Fury Road based a lot of their objections on the fact that what was supposed to be Max’s story gets sidelined as another character - a woman! - takes center stage. But I think that really misses the point. Max is an anti-hero; Furiosa is a hero. Max has his own arc to cover in the story, and Furiosa has hers. They intertwine and reflect each other in interesting, sometimes brilliant ways, but just by the intended nature of their respective stories, Max needs to be more passive and peripheral and Furiosa needs to be more proactive. It’s still Max’s movie, but it’s also Furiosa’s movie. There is room for both to be true. And isn’t that fundamentally what a lot of the debate (though it hurts my head to even type that word and acknowledge that dispute even exists) about feminism comes down to? People who are anti-feminist think that it’s all a binary system or a zero-sum game, that to allow anything for women means to disallow it for men, to hold women up is to hold men down, to give to women is to take away from men, &c. &c. Which is such utter bullshit, as Fury Road elegantly demonstrates. People feel like a Mad Max movie was taken away from them because Furiosa hijacked the story, but that’s simply not true. Max and Furiosa are equally important. Deal with it.

I confess, as I did last night to my buddies, that I’m not the world’s biggest Mad Max expert. Far from it. I’ve never seen Mad Max or The Road Warrior, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen Beyond Thunderdome all in one sitting (though thanks to its frequent plays on HBO when I was a kid, I’m reasonably sure I’ve absorbed the whole movie, in bits and pieces here and there). But, according to my buddies, Max’s storyline in Fury Road isn’t even all that different from the first three movies. He’s always been the reluctant hero, the man mainly focused on his own survival and only responding to injustice when it backs him into a corner. It will be interesting to see how Max’s philosophical evolution is portrayed in the inevitable follow-up installment(s), now that he’s been shown the kind of altruism and idealism Furiosa embodies.

But I said I wanted to talk about Splendid! Which is the character played by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, the de facto leader of the wives. (I know technically the character’s name is Angharad, formally The Splendid Angharad, but it seemed like everyone was calling her Splendid and that’s what I’m gonna keep doing.) And as I mentioned, I know she’s a minor character compared to Furiosa and Max, and I know that Huntington-Whiteley is not remotely in the same league, acting-wise, as Theron. I think she acquits herself well enough, though, with the material she’s given. And that material is totally suffused with some next-level envelope-pushing stuff.

Splendid is pregnant, visibly so, and given clues revealed late in the movie maybe about six or seven months along. That seems like a standard action movie plot point, at the outset; damsels in distress, children in peril, a young pregnant mother-to-be conveys all of that at once! And as if the idea of the wives deserving freedom from Immortan Joe on their own merits were not enough, the fact that Splendid is great with child provides additional incentive for Furiosa to get her out of the Citadel, so that the innocent unborn can live a different, better life. Which is all fair enough as far as the tropes go. But when was the last time you saw an action movie where any pregnant woman voluntarily uses herself as a human shield?

Can we take a moment to let that sink in? Immortan Joe demands the return of his wives and his unborn child unharmed, and Splendid knows this, so when the big rig is speeding along and warboys and Joe himself are lining up Furiosa behind the wheel in their sights, Splendid positions herself in the way so that the bullets will have to go through her first. And given that Joe is an evil psycho, it’s not as foolproof a plan as it may seem, though it does work. For a little while. Then things escalate (seriously, it’s amazing how things constantly escalate over the running time of the movie; it’s rare that I actually experience the sensation of begging for mercy over what a story is doing to my heart, but Fury Road got me there) and Splendid falls off the rig. And gets run over by the pursuers. The others get away, but still. When I said I enjoyed almost everything in the movie, I was referring to how hard Splendid’s death hit me. It wasn’t done in a gross, exploitative way, but it was not fun to watch. (And now I’m pretty sure I have guaranteed my wife will never want to watch this movie, and … fair enough.)

Furiosa has a buzzcut and is missing half an arm, replaced by a post-apocalyptic junk-prosthetic, and covers half her face in black grease and wears cargo pants and combat boots and drives a big rig. She is a Strong Female Character very much in the mode of “anything boys can do, girls can do too” and she is almost entirely devoid of superficial femme signifiers. There’s nothing wrong with any of that, and I have no problem calling the character a role-model, but what really fascinates me is that there’s more than one way to skin a cat. A woman like Furiosa can equal a man by presenting as “masculine” but a woman like Splendid can equal a man while presenting as archetypically feminine, and the pregnant fertility goddess with long blonde hair and gauzy white attire is hard to top in that category. Splendid’s all-too-brief moments of courage and will are thrilling on a lot of levels.

And while I’m on a roll here, of course it’s impossible to overlook Immortan Joe howling at Splendid, about the child in her belly, “That’s my property!” And it turns out Splendid didn’t immediately die when she was run over, though she did suffer mortal injuries. Joe’s personal doctor tries to save her, but she’s too far gone. So Joe orders the doc to save the baby, and he obligingly cuts Splendid open, only to find the baby (boy) isn’t quite viable, which all stokes Joe’s rage to new heights. There is zero chance that there’s not a metaphor about reproductive rights lurking not very far below the surface here. There’s no way to read Splendid’s facial expression as she puts herself and the baby at hazardous risk as anything other than “my body, my choice”. There’s very little interpretive wiggle room beyond concluding that if you think the final decision over how and why women have babies belongs to anyone other than the women themselves, you are this guy:

And nobody wants to be that guy, right?

I've been thinking lately that a statement like "I am a feminist" should be about as controversial as "I am not a racist", and maybe almost as unnecessary. It would be nice if the default assumption upon meeting people was that they were not judgmental, prejudiced jerks. Some people would go right ahead and prove otherwise, but still. It'd be nice. And if a movie like Mad Max: Fury Road, with various characters male and female all fighting together but also all fighting for themselves on their own terms, gets us a little closer to that state of enlightenment, that works for me.