So, if you haven’t heard, Obama’s drinking Bud Light at tonight’s “Beer Summit,” which brings together Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cambridge Sergeant James Crowley in an attempt to seize a “teachable moment” on race relations.

Unfortunately, if this moment is teaching us anything about race in America, it’s that we don’t know how to talk about it and don’t really want to talk about it (Stephen Colbert made this point with his usual brilliant satire). Oh, and that the right-wing reactionaries in America still love to exploit all that unease (Joan Walsh has the best take on Glenn Beck and company).

The real “teachable moment” here is the opportunity to show what a screwed-up relationship Americans — especially American men — have with beer. And how easy it is to fix that relationship — by staying local and trusting craftsmanship over marketing.  I’ve said this before.

And Obama is just the one to do it. He has already showed his preference for microbrews — at parties and at the White House. And he clearly has a sophisticated palate — considering his favorite restaurants, chefs and foodie friends as well as the people he has chosen to take the lead on food policy (especially USDA Under Secretary Kathleen Merrigan).

And he chooses Bud Light? Pandering would be an understatement. Some image maker appears to be telling him he needs to up his NASCAR-Dad credentials. How sad. I really didn’t plan to have to say that about Obama — at least so soon.

For your information, Bud Light receives a D- from Beeradvocate.com and is in the “0″ percentile (that would be out of a 100) on the ratebeer.com scale. Of course, Red Stripe (Gates’ choice) doesn’t fare much better.  Blue Moon gets mediocre ratings (putting aside that it’s a MillerCoors product) — but oh, there are so many better American craft-brewed Belgian white ales out there!

Oops, I lapsed into beer snobbery there. But it’s really not about drinking hoity-toity beer. It’s about honoring authenticity and complexity over a manufactured narrative that can be overwhelming, especially for those of us who have had to sit through the endless line of juvenile beer ads while watching a sporting event on TV.

That narrative, centered around young, goofy men ogling young, goofy women while a “drinkable” beverage loosens them all up, divorces the experience of drinking beer from its production (which is an art form when done right) and the communal enjoyment of its taste (which a site like ratebeer.com or a booth a your local gastropub — we love you, Hopleaf! — revels in).

And it’s not as if Obama didn’t know there were plenty of beers out there that could have allowed him to step outside that narrative without losing credability. Jack Nicas of the Boston Globe reports on how Boston brewers made their case to be the beer of choice at the meeting — emphasizing how all three participants had Boston connections. Matt Simpson, a “beer sommelier” who writes the “Ask Beer” column for Beer Magazine (which, to digress and paraphrase that ol’ saying, tries have to have its traditional beer narrative and drink its craft beers too), made the rounds with his own recommendations in interviews with NPR and ABC.

That ABC News article also interviews Anthony Bowker from Goose Island, who makes the case for a beer from his (and Obama’s) local Chicago brewery — possibly, he notes, 312 Urban Wheat Ale (a summer fave of mine as well).

Personally, I’d take the Chicago angle as well, but I’d recommend that Obama show his support for an up-and-coming small business … who happens to make the best damn lagers on the planet. That would Metropolitan Brewing, which is quickly making a name for itself on the north side of Chicago. Their Flying Wheel Bright Lager is a perfect choice for a summer day.

A very “teachable beer,” one might say.

After a few fits and starts, according to Michelle Orange of the New York Times, HBO’s series “In Treatment” begins its second season tonight.  We are back in the life of Paul Weston, a psychoanalyst played by Gabriel Byrne, and his patients, whose individual sessions occupy each 30-minute episode.

You might never have heard of it (since HBO didn’t roll it out with the fanfare of its other big dramas), you might have balked at the unique scheduling of its first season (30-minute episodes every weekday night for nine weeks), or you might have gave it a shot but gave up rather quickly because you didn’t find many of the patients very appealing.

Well, I just wanted to write a quick note to tell you all that you missed some amazing TV — and it’s well worth catching up or at least giving the short, more palatably-scheduled second season a try.  With many of the same writers introducing us to new, but equally complicated characters, the second season doesn’t appear to be headed for a sophomore slump.

The ultimate compliment I can give the show is that, as my partner and I watched it, we felt that we were going through therapy ourselves — or at least we were very involved flies-on-the-wall.

That’s a mixed bag, of course.   Very few shows, no matter how thought-provoking, have asked its audience to explore such personal emotional depths on a nightly basis.  At the same time, of course, I’m of the mind that we can all use some therapy.  Especially at these rates.

The unique weeknight scheduling of season one was an artistic risk — but a big success, in my mind.  It allowed the audience to get into the rhythm of Paul’s life and by extension, the day-to-day struggles to confront his and his patients’ demons.

And, in the end, however personal I make those struggles, there is a distance between audience and characters.  In some ways, the characters represent extremes — with each case by the end revealing a fairly clear neurosis.

But at its best, the characters were also devastatingly ordinary. And I get the sense that realism turned many people off.  Some characters were arrogant, some were blowhards, some were self-pitying, etc.

Of course, in the nakedness of therapy, I’d venture to say we’d all be pretty difficult to watch.

I’m still watching Joss Whedon’s “Dollhouse,” and I’m becoming mildly intrigued. Television reviewers had only been given episodes 1-3 when they made their initial, mixed at best, reviews of the series. I wanted to wait until I got through episode 4 before I starting making any pronouncements.

So now here’s a tepid one. The story has great potential as an allegory for women struggling for agency in a increasingly subtle patriarchal world, but it is fulfilling that potential at a snail’s pace. And the feminist themes are being continually undermined by the marketing of its star, Eliza Dushku, who recently posed on the cover of Maxim.

I don’t agree with Nancy Franklin of The New Yorker that the “primary qualification Dushku brings to the part is that she graduated with honors from the Royal Academy of Cleavage.” In fact, I could easily see her growing into the role or the role growing into her.

Like Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Buffy, Echo, Dushku’s character, is valued by others because of her stereotypical beauty. It’s an explicit part of her skill set, as the operators of the Dollhouse put it. Like Buffy, I’m confident (and I can begin to see the seeds being planted) that Whedon is planning to play off of the stereotype and assumptions — and ultimately play against them.

Franklin misses the point when she continues to say, “In terms of gender studies, it is notable that Dushku’s demeanor as a zombie is much the same as the demeanor many actresses her age resort to when trying to project an image of themselves as unthreatening and ‘feminine’: a slouchy walk, a bobbly head, and ever-parted lips.”

She is that way because the operators of the Dollhouse — and their clients — want her that way. By exposing this gendered system, the show can — potentially — undermine it. But Whedon is clearly walking a fine line here, and when The New Yorker doesn’t get it, you might need to make access to the allegory a bit clearer.

And you might want to have a word with Fox and Dushku herself about the messages they are sending off-screen (or at least outside the narrative of the show).

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“So, what was the highlight?”

That’s the question most people have asked since I returned from attending the Inauguration festivities in Washington, D.C.

And my answer surprises even me: It is the road trip home, listening for the first time to Barack Obama reading “Dreams of My Father.”

We’ve gone from the ridiculous to the sublime. Somehow Americans have managed to elect an intellectual to the highest office.

As the self-aware reflections in his first book suggest, though, Obama is much more than an intellectual.  Listening to his narration, as he takes on voices as varied as his high school friend Ray and his Kenyan sisters, aunts and “Granny,” I realize our president could just as easily have been a novelist — not simply a stodgy law professor.

Considering Obama’s intellect and artistry, then, I have cringed each time a TV host or pundit has noted that this Inauguration is particularly historic because America now has its first African American president. The significance of that fact is undeniable, but it is such a limiting lens through which to see this moment.

Obama has so many other unprecedented qualities — which his cultural and political analyses in “Dreams of My Father” reveal. He is progressive in the most radical sense, the president who can truly navigate our 21st-century world because he has spent his life thinking … critically thinking … about … everything.

By this time in my own thought process, I shift my mind again (never has a moment of cognitive dissonance felt so good), and I begin to think about that rest stop in Pennsylvania on the way home. I went into the restroom, and I saw four adolescent boys goofing off, as they are wont to do.

But these boys — all African American — also proudly donned big buttons celebrating Obama. I hope I’m not being overly presumptuous here — but I’ve heard it time and time again — boys like these had been brought to the Inauguration by parents who wanted them to witness the moment first-hand: a black man becoming the most powerful person in the world.

The boys would now know they can be anything they want to be (or so the hope goes — more on that later).

There’s no reason, I realized looking at the boys, that Obama can’t be both the first African American president and the first president to grasp the complex realities of living and leading in the Information Age.

In fact, as a close reading of “Dreams of My Father” makes clear, Obama’s lack of a coherent familial and racial identity is what spurs his thinking.  He is able to approach most political and cultural texts (both spoken and written, informal and formal) as an outsider and coolly dissect their messages.

The passage from the book that most resonates in this regard comes when he walks into his first South Side Chicago barbershop — Smitty’s — soon after arriving in the city to start his career as a community organizer.

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Ironically, even as George W. Bush has frequently positioned himself in opposition to the Hollywood elite and liberal journalists, he might be considered our first pop culture president.  According to Stephen Humphries of the Christian Science Monitor, the media has shaped his image and legacy to an unprecedented degree — and not to his advantage:

The proliferation of new forms of media – coupled with a democratization of communication that allows anyone with a modem to become a filmmaker, broadcaster, or pundit – has meant that no other sitting president has had quite so many slings and arrows to suffer. Against such a backdrop, Bush may find it exceedingly difficult to control the final narrative of his presidency.

Humphries reminds us of the countless portrayals and parodies of Bush — from songs to comedy shows to films. But the most intriguing element of the story is how Bush himself fed this frenzy by, from the beginning, constructing a “regular guy” persona.  He seemed to know the importance of establishing an easily accessible image, but like so many parts of his presidency, he didn’t realize how easily he could lose control of that image.

If you look closely, you’ll even see a quote from yours truly on this point:

Bush well understood the importance of the popular-culture vote. During his 2000 campaign, he accentuated his image as a regular guy. “I don’t think it’s an accident that, for a number of years, we always heard about [Bush] going back to the ranch to clear brush,” says John Matviko, editor of “The President in Popular Culture,” and professor at West Liberty State College in West Virginia.

But that cowboy persona was turned against him by dozens of YouTube impersonators – most notably Will Ferrell – who lambasted Bush as a country yokel who “misunderestimated” the importance of elocution.

“[Bush’s] entire presidency was about the projection of an image, so the fact that there have been so many pop-culture representations of him is a logical extension of that,” says Bernie Heidkamp, a contributor to PopPolitics, an online magazine about the convergence of politics and pop culture.

You don’t believe it?  Well, as Keillor himself points out, it’s not any more of a leap of logic than what the Republicans are trying to do:

It is a bold move on the Republicans’ part — forget about the past, it’s only history, so write a new narrative and be who you want to be — and if they succeed, I think I might declare myself a 24-year-old virgin named Lance and see what that might lead to. Paste a new face on my Facebook page, maybe become the Dauphin Louie the Thirty-Second, the rightful heir to the Throne of France, put on silk tights and pantaloons and a plumed hat and go on the sawdust circuit and sell souvenir hankies imprinted with the royal fleur-de-lis. They will cure neuralgia and gout and restore marital vigor.

I am one of those who doesn’t think that the award-winning film “American Beauty,” written by Alan Ball, is that good of a movie. I found it a little too obvious and pedantic in its attempt to unearth the not-so-quiet desperation in late 1990s suburban America. It didn’t move me.

Then came Alan Ball’s next project — “Six Feet Under” — and, putting aside a few lulls in the middle of its run of five seasons, I consider it one of the highlights of 21st-century American culture. Following in the trailblazing path of “The Sopranos,” it used the long-form nature of a television series to develop the subtleties and complexities of its characters with a literary patience and depth.

Alan Ball’s latest project premieres tonight, and from most accounts, “True Blood,” the fantastical story of vampires fighting for rights and recognition in the modern world (based on the Southern Vampire Mysteries of Charlaine Harris), falls somewhere in between the glibness and the richness of his two previous major works.

But even a blatant attempt at political allegory is refreshing, since it signals a thematic ambition that has been missing of late — with a few exceptions — on the small screen.

I’ve written plenty about the power of allegory, from Narnia to “Battlestar Galactica,” from “The Wire” to “Mad Men.” And, at least according to Alessandra Stanley of The New York Times, “True Blood” should be giving us plenty of “pop politics” to talk about:

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The most pressing question in this presidential campaign has become: Why isn’t the Obama campaign (or their surrogates and sympathizers) spreading insidious rumors about John McCain to counterbalance all the junk out there about Obama?

Now, I subscribe to plenty of liberal/lefty e-mail lists — so I feel fairly in touch with the viral pulse out there.  And I know plenty of Obama sympathizers will say that they’re working very hard at getting out the unknown stuff about John McCain.

But my response to them would be that you’re still hampered by this ridiculous need to stay in the realm of truth.

For example, Brave New Films has done a great job of exposing “The Real John McCain.”  In their latest salvo, they reveal that McCain, in fact, is the true elitist.  He and his wife own, among other things, ten mansions:

Others are exposing McCain’s elitism as well.  Isabel Wilkinson over at Huffington Post has noted that McCain has been wearing $520 Ferragamo loafers while campaigning this summer, which, in turn, has produced more fodder for BagnewsNotes, who continues to show how contrasting visual images of an angry and out-of-touch McCain and a genial and engaged Obama tell the true story of each man.

Unfortunately, though McCain’s elitist hypocrisy might scandalize many of us, it doesn’t come across as a threat to the American way of life.  That’s because old, rich white men have always held power in this country.  Strangely, it’s not news — both to the man in the street and the Man in the media.

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The following is a new article by Tim Mitchell, published in the “depth” section of PopPolitics magazine. Mitchell has previously written for PopPolitics about the “Mimic” film trilogy and “Versus” horror films like Alien vs. Predator and Freddy vs. Jason. Now he tackles the technological complexities of “Dark City” — just in time for the DVD release of a new director’s cut:

The 1998 film “Dark City” will be re-released on DVD this week in a new director’s cut that features additional footage. I’ve always felt that “Dark City” never received the recognition it deserved — due in no small part to being overshadowed later by a very similar film, “The Matrix,” in 1999.

What is particularly intriguing about “Dark City” is that it combines many narrative themes specific to science fiction (aliens, space and time travel, and computer technology running amok) with elements of German Expressionism and film noir to create a narrative that provides an unique commentary on the role of technology, including cinematic technology, in the shaping of both the individual and society.

The film’s director, Alex Proyas, ultimately creates a haunting dystopian commentary on today’s media-saturated world.

Continue reading “Man, Machine, Memory and Movies: A Critical Look at ‘Dark City’“

Via Daily Kos, a must-watch. And just in case you have any doubts, there really is a Sen. John Cornyn from Texas and he used this video to introduce himself at the Republican state convention:

Yes, it’s just plain silly. But it’s also a hyperbolic presentation of a very real masculinity narrative that the Republicans have capitalized on in the last few election cycles.

I’ve already talked a bit about how defying this narrative might be Barack Obama’s most revolutionary act.

The following is a new article by Tim Mitchell, published in the “depth” section of PopPolitics magazine. Mitchell analyzes how the underappreciated “Mimic” trilogy of sci-fi horror films has a lot to say about postmodern America:

The other day, I found an October 2007 story by R. Colin Johnson on the EETimes Web site that sounded like something out of the Weekly World News: “Darpa hatches plan for insect cyborgs to fly reconnaissance.” According to the article:

Cyborg insects with embedded microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) will run remotely controlled reconnaissance missions for the military, if its ‘”HI-MEMS” program succeeds. Hybrid-Insect MEMS — a program hatched earlier this year at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) — aims to harness insects the way horses were harnessed by the cavalry. … The final milestone … will be flying a cyborg insect to within five meters of a specific target located some one hundred meters away using remote control or a global positioning system (GPS). If HI-MEMS passes this test successfully, then Darpa will probably begin breeding in earnest. Insect swarms with various sorts of different embedded MEMS sensors — video cameras, audio microphones, chemical sniffers and more — could then penetrate enemy territory in swarms to perform reconnaissance missions impossible or too dangerous for soldiers.

Not surprisingly, the article cites this project’s origin as being rooted in science fiction:

This vision of enhanced animals with electro-mechanical controllers was imagined in a 1990 novel called “Sparrowhawk,” in which author Thomas Easton imagines bioengineering enlarged birds and insects to use as beasts-of-burden. … In a HI-MEMS world, cyborg bugs would patrol, gather intelligence, penetrate secret meetings, track targets, retrieve samples and more — all predicted by Easton’s 1990 book.

While privacy rights issues are discussed in the context of a techno-insect world, the later half of the article reassures the reader that Darpa’s plan has more than a few bugs in it. “If Darpa’s track record is any indicator, then we have some breathing room before we have to start worrying whether that insect crawling on the wall is conducting unwarranted surveillance,” it states. “Only a fraction of the wide-ranging programs that Darpa sponsors are successful — at least in the way they were originally imagined.”

Reading this piece reminded me of the “Mimic” trilogy, a series of science fiction/horror films that began on the big screen in 1997 and was followed by two direct-to-DVD sequels. All three movies were loosely inspired by a short story of the same name that was written by Donald A. Wolheim in 1942. The central premises of the “Mimic” trilogy — humanity biologically manipulating organisms for explicitly human purposes and technologically altered insects infiltrating human populations unnoticed — are similar to Darpa’s cyborg bug project and other projects that focus on genetic engineering.

This article examines the “Mimic” films, particularly how the plot device of the “Big Bug” monster is still relevant to public discourse on scientific issues. In particular, concepts and issues that are specific to genetic research and their related environmental and political impacts permeate the “Mimic” films, thus making them different from their irradiated Atomic Age predecessors and worthy of unique consideration.

Continue reading “Pictures of Insect Men: A Retrospective Analysis of the “Mimic” Trilogy.”

More than a year ago, in response to Joe Biden’s racial miscue at the start of the Democratic primary campaign, I discussed how most white Americans have no idea how to talk about race.

Little did I know, though, that ignorance and naivete about race wouldn’t prevent a lot of white people in the media from trying to talk about it every chance they got over the past year.

And hearing the media’s response to the results from West Virginia last night, it’s clear that all that talking hasn’t advanced the conversation very far. Despite periodic attempts at nuance, the dominant race narrative on MSNBC, CNN, Fox and other mainstream political outlets is that Barack Obama has trouble getting white people to vote for him — and that African Americans are hypnotized by the first viable black presidential candidate and simply will not vote for anyone else.

This narrative reduces the complexities of both white and black Americans — and it validates racism by giving it a back-door entrance into the conversation. It reminds me of those well-meaning white folk who argued in favor of segregation because America just wasn’t ready for change just yet.

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The following is a new article by Tim Mitchell, published in the “depth” section of PopPolitics magazine. Mitchell analyzes how critically discarded “versus” horror films can tell us a great deal about how we see conflict in the post-9/11 world.

Horror is like any other genre of film: The most popular titles of a given era often gain their notoriety by striking a chord in audiences that is somehow related to the collective fears and hopes of that particular time. Along those lines, when critics associate horror films with modern social and political fears in post-9/11 America, they usually cite films of an apocalyptic nature: films that portray a community (or the entire world itself) as irrevocably unraveling at lightening speed at the hands of a monstrosity that is equal parts unexplainable, unstoppable and unavoidable.

Films released during the last several years such as “The Host“; “Sunshine“; “28 Weeks Later“; “Right at Your Door“; “Cloverfield“; “Land of the Dead“; and “Diary of the Dead” fit this trend. So do recent remakes such as “Dawn of the Dead,” and literary adaptations such as “War of the Worlds“; “30 Days of Night“; “I Am Legend“; and “The Mist.” These are akin to earlier films such as “Them!” (1954) and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956) that reflected the public’s fears of atomic weapons and communism back in the 1950s.

There is another kind of horror film that complements and yet contrasts this end-of-the-world sub-genre of horror, a kind of horror film that most critics dismiss. Unlike many of the apocalyptic films, these films do not so much depict a supreme battle between good and evil, but instead plague their characters with nothing but damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don’t choices.

Fears of vicious attacks and random massacres are not the product of some aberration of the natural order but an honest reflection of how the universe actually works. Thus, fears of this type of world do not center on vanquishing monsters to save others so much as on just surviving in a pre-determined situation. What kind of horror film is this? The crossover film that has the word “versus” in the title — namely, “Freddy vs. Jason” (2003), “Alien vs. Predator” (2004) and the recent “Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem” (2007).

Continue reading “A Look at Iconic Versus: The Post-9/11 Significance of the Freddy vs. Jason and Alien vs. Predator Movies.”

It’s about time.

It’s been two decades since “Pretty Woman” made prostitution seem cool — a path to self-esteem and self-empowerment — and I have rarely seen, outside of academic journals and hard-hitting documentaries, such an effective puncturing of that cultural myth as I read today in an opinion piece by Anne K. Ream and R. Clifton Spargo of the Chicago Tribune, who were inspired by the media’s recent treatment of Ashley Alexandra Dupre, the prostitute who famously serviced the former Governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer.

Of course, the glorification of prostitution began long before “Pretty Woman,” but as Ream and Spargo point out, since that film hit the big screen, the myth-making has reached ridiculous extremes — from “Pimp and Ho” nights at clubs to “Turning Tricks” pole-dancing at gyms.

And that’s not even mentioning TV shows like HBO’s “Cathouse” — “where a Nevada pimp and his ‘girls’ are portrayed as one big, happy, sexually uninhibited family.” That show and others “are an ode to the joys of being sexually serviced by women.”

I realize we need to be careful not to condemn sex workers for their choices — which are often made from a very limited list of options. But we need to make sure we don’t end up justifying a system that ultimately devastates women’s lives.

Ream and Spargo rightly note, “Our cultural fascination with and glamorization of pimping and prostitution do not make for a kinder and gentler sex trade.” And they go one to cite statistics — from 90 percent of prostitutes having been victims of childhood sexual assault to jaw-dropping mortatily rates:

A comprehensive 2004 mortality study, funded by the National Institutes of Health and conducted by the American Journal of Epidemiology, shows that workplace homicide rates for women working in prostitution are 51 times that of the next most dangerous occupation for women (which is working in a liquor store). The average age of death of the women studied was 34.

Yet somehow it’s almost conventional wisdom that prostitution, if done right, can be a savvy career move and an avenue to self-fulfillment:

Nowhere was this more clear than on a recent edition of “Larry King Live.” During an interview with Natalie McLennan, the woman who allegedly trained Dupre at the escort agency New York Confidential, King asked, “Do any hookers ever marry their johns?”

“They do!” she exclaimed, telling King the tale of a fellow “girl” who “went on a date with a client and then we never saw her again. It turns out that they met and they fell in love and she never returned. It’s a real sort of Cinderella, ‘Pretty Woman’ story, you know. Which is I think . . . just a fantastic story — ”every girl’s dream.”

For the vast majority of women working in prostitution, however, the reality is less fairy tale, more grim fable. But who wants to let that get in the way of a good story?

This is one of those dominant cultural narratives that we must do a much better job of resisting.

I’m quoted twice in Jennifer Parker’s abcnews.com story about the significance of the presidential candidates’ theme songs. It’s a nice, wide-ranging piece about how the candidates are tapping into pop music to add a boost to their campaigns.

Of course, I had a lot more to say than what Jennifer was able to quote. So I thought I’d use this space to expand on my comments — specifically on why Hillary is the only candidate to use female artists and why the songs prove yet again that Republicans lean heavily on a very limited rugged individualist, hyper-masculine narrative.

The only notable songs from the campaign trail are Hillary’s — and that’s not because Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5″ is a hidden work of literary genius. It’s because Hillary is the only candidate from which we hear a female voice (with the exception of Obama invoking Aretha). That might seem obvious, but it’s actually counter-intuitive.

For awhile I felt that Hillary was going to lengths (and the media was complying) not to make gender a part of the campaign. Learning the Pat Schroeder lesson, she rarely showed emotion. Going further back, moreover, she had long been positioning herself in the Senate (until her infamous vote endorsing the Iraq War became unpopular) as a defense hawk. No one was going to accuse her of being “soft.”

So for her to make the music of Parton and Gloria Estefan a central part of her campaign rallies — and to choose a song from Big Head Todd that focuses on how a woman is changing the world — is an intriguing choice.

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