It all started with that damn Myron Oygold.

For reasons that I still don’t understand, Mr. Oygold initiated a project that forced several of us to get a Twitter account. Until today, I had not yet created a Twitter account. I had seen it used, and grumbled about it. People kept telling me, “You need to get on Twitter” and I would mutter to myself while they would all whisper about what a crabby old Luddite I was. I accepted this whispering and derision, because I really did not want to get Twitter. But then Myron Oygold started his campaign and once there was guilt in play, I had no choice.

And two hours ago, I created my Twitter account. And now I can fully articulate why it is that I hate the very idea of it.

What annoys me the most is that Twitter is so clearly a Foucaldian-style Panopticon. For those of you who have never read Foucault’s Discipline & Punish, here’s a quick excerpt to describe the Panopticon-style prison:

“He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection” (Discipline & Punish, p. 202)

In other words, this is what Foucault describes as “an uninterrupted play of calculated gazes.” In this prison system, by creating a space where the prisoners know they can be looked at, but cannot see when they are being seen, creates a system of self-reporting and good-behavior-through-fear. Further, Foucault describes that we are increasingly in a “carcereal” society–a society which is constantly in this prison-like format.

Fine. So now you are thinking, “I’ve heard this all before!” People have been talking about new media-as-panopticon since the birth of the blog. You are wondering how Twitter makes this any different at all. After all, many people put similar updates on Facebook. But Twitter feels different to me.

It’s the snippets of phrases, the constant and meaningless updates that make this even more useless. Twitter makes self-reporting fun. It makes it an act of pure leisure, in its simplicity. Not everyone wants to take the time to write a full blog, but who doesn’t want to tell everyone they know, “At the supermarket. Price of Velveta up $.30. Enraged.” This constant self-reporting continues to normalize the trend. No longer do you have to bother being in front of a computer to tell everyone you know that you just ate a rotten peanut. Now we have added immediacy into the mix, and self-reporting can become more constant, and more socially acceptable.

Here’s what I fear. I am dreading the day when eventually someone uses Twitter as a legal alibi. (“But, your honor, I was clearly having lunch with my pyscho Ex when the murder happened!”) Scratch that. I fear the inevitable episode of Law & Order when a fictional character uses Twitter as an alibi. (Dear Dick Wolf: When you use this plot point, please email me for info on where to send royalties. Thanks!)

Twitter does not make any major changes to the inevitable trend of voluntary (and leisured) self-reporting, but it does make it a more constant act. Twitter does not change things dramatically. But how can we even pretend to care about privacy acts and phone tapping, when we are constantly reporting our every movement to the world?

Related:

I had been anxiously awaiting the release of wii Fit, the new exergame for the Nintendo wii that has recently been getting shitloads of publicity. In part, I’ve been very interested in the productive aspects of the game (because I always think that “productive” and “play” together is somehow problematic), and also in its use of rhetoric to get players to come back day after day.

My interest in the later is, in part, because I’ve recently become fascinated in the “train every day” style games such as Brain Age, My Word Coach, and Flash Focus. What seems particularly compelling about these games is the tactics of guilt and derision that they use to get players to continue playing. These games almost always have a masculine figure that proclaims that the player is not quite smart enough, not a good communicator, or has crappy vision. And, of course, by visiting the game every day you are guaranteed to become smarter, better-versed, and (apparently) have X-Ray vision. Or something. They also often use guilt to get players to return. For example if you don’t visit Brain Age for a while, the game guide (a bopping Japanese head!) remarks how long it has been since he has last you, and chastizes you. These are all compelling tactics–and again, pretty much the antithesis of what I know of as the definition of play (although very much similar to visiting my Jewish grandmother).

So, I was curious where WiiFit would fall into this continuum of guilt and derision.

Not surprisingly, the derision part was played down in the exergame–the game was very gentle when telling me that I had the body of a 52-Year-Old. Also, rather than the usual masculine figure, the game is guided by the gender-neutral balance board (the contraption used to self monitor and exercise in the game). Thus, there is a slightly softer and less harsh tone to WiiFit than the other “train every day” games. I guess it’s more politically correct to tell someone that they are stupid, than that they are fat. (As a side note, I have not yet had it long enough to fall delinquent with the game play, so I am still unsure of its guilt tactics.)

But on to the game itself!

As I imagine has been discussed in the slew of other reviews that have come out in the past week, the game is set up by having the player do an initial assessment (again, consistent with other “train every day” games), and the player is allowed to use their already constructed mii (their avatar for the Nintendo Wii system) as their on-screen representation. Once the initial test has been taken, the player has four categories of exercise that they are allowed to select from: Yoga, Strength Training, Aerobic, and Balance Games. As with other “train every day” games, the more you play, the more exercises you unlock. My feeling was that there is not quite enough good (and interesting) different kinds of aerobic games to start with (though the hula hoop is a killer!). Also, the balance games seemed more decidedly geared for kids than for grown-ups. (Though I suppose this is fine, because I don’t imagine too many kids dipping into the Yoga!)

One thing that also really surprised me was that the game (while fitness oriented) was equally balance oriented, and is very concerned with the player finding their center of balance–more so than perhaps blatant work-outs. I suspect that hardcore exercise people would hate the game. But novices that often don’t feel like going to the gym (like myself) or families trying to get kids to exercise more might find the game very useful.

As a side note, I also would like to remark that the first two days I played the game with the balance board backwards (it thought my right foot was left, etc). This was saavily pointed out to me while I frustratingly noted that, “everything always moves in the opposite direction” from where I aimed. Turned out I just had to turn around the balance board. So, who knows, maybe I don’t have a 52-year-old body after all!

Related:

WiiFit.Com

To many, I have an enviable job. Currently, I am writing my dissertation (on gender and video games) and one of my regular tasks for the last few years has been to play many games under the guise of “research.” What I have a difficult time explaining to those who covet my research topic is that my “research” often involves playing poorly designed games that are attempting to target feminine demographics. Thus, playing World of Warcraft may sound like a fun research venture (and it is!) but spending several hours a day negotiating my virtual cooking skills with Cooking Mama often puts me in a fetal position while Mama, with her burning eyes, chastises, “Don’t worry! Mama will fix it!”

But I am not here today to talk about Cooking Mama. (Although, I suppose, I could rant about that too.) I want to talk about two recent game releases that particularly have pissed me off with their poor designs, poor controls, and misguided assumptions about players.

Fish Tickling

The first game is called Endless Ocean: Dive, Discover, Dream, for the Nintendo Wii. I don’t tend to like free-form, wander-at-your-will games, but I had heard some compelling things about Endless Ocean as an attempt to appeal to a highly coveted women’s demographic. The idea is that you roam around semi-freely as a scuba diver, exploring the ocean, examining neat sea-bound creatures, and looking at pretty coral reefs. I was dubious, but the reviews on Amazon were (mostly) pretty high and I figured it was worth checking out.

The primary problem with Endless Ocean is that it doesn’t know if wants to be free-form or not. While it isn’t necessarily a mission-based game (and you can wander around freely) spaces only open when you do really boring research missions involving collecting specimens. While you can interact with fish, you can only get so close to them to look at them, and you must befriend a fish before you can find out information about it (befriending a fish, by the way, is done by “petting it” which creepily is done with one finger, making it look like you are trying to tickle a fish).

Don’t get me wrong—I am not an all-action, all-the-time kind of game player, but there needs to be some kind of payoff to exploration games. I got especially annoyed when the woman minding the boat (the person who gives you advice and tells you about missions) explained that she doesn’t come with you because she doesn’t know how to swim. If only this game had weapons, I could have hit her over the head.

Obviously there are many people who like this game, and if they can find something compelling in this world… good for them. I just really didn’t get it.

Agatha Christie: And Then I Was Bored

The second game (also for the Nintendo Wii) is Agatha Christie: And Then There Were None
. Admittedly, this game never seemed remotely appealing to me and I could find no positive reviews about it, but (as I have already explained) I often have to buy and play games that look particularly moronic, but are being targeted at the demographic I am writing about. So despite all of my reservations, I purchased a video game based on a mid-century novel. Clearly what Agatha Christie had always intended.

I must be honest: I did not get past the first level of And Then There Were None. This was, in part, because having wandered around the game’s mystery mansion for about 30 minutes with nothing happening, most of the doors locked, and everyone telling me to leave them alone (and no one murdered!) I finally gave up. Is it too much to ask for a little bit of death in a murder mystery?

Here’s the thing, linear RPGs are frustrating enough. But linear RPGs where you have no idea (and no clue) what you are supposed to do next are absolutely infuriating. Finally, I took to clicking on every radiator I passed so that I could hear the narrator say, “A radiator. Those are always useful to have around.”

The worst part was that despite being designed for the Wii—where there is any number of innovative ways to move the character around, the game creators resorted to old school click-a-spot-to-move there controls. The only actual use of the wii-mote’s functions were to turn handles and open doors—and even that wasn’t asynchronous. It was like someone had designed a game for the Tandy computer and ported it over to the Wii twenty years later.

I had suspected that this would not go very well when I opened the game box to find an insert card that declared: “Register Now to Win Free Stuff” (very possibly the worst worded promotion I’ve ever seen).

Both of these games cost me $30 dollars, and I declare in the loudest voice I can possibly yell in on the Internet: I AM NOT HAVING FUN. I want my fucking $60 back.

- Shira Chess

I am a woman. I am a feminist. And I am a democrat.

But that is totally besides the point.

During this election cycle, I have become increasingly disturbed by one phrase that has occurred almost everywhere: by newscasters (on all new stations), by pundits, by anchors, and by the voters who have been quoted by these venues. The phrase? “The Clintons.”

Because despite being a woman, a feminist, and a democrat I am becoming quickly unnerved by the fact that in Hillary Clinton’s campaign she is being referred to as “The Clintons” with absolutely no pause or second thought about what this phrase implies. “The Clintons” is a way of saying that voting for Hillary gets the package deal: husband and wife (like Sonny and Cher?) leading us from the dark days of the Bush administration. The way I see it, regardless of who I plan to vote for in the upcoming elections, this phrase is problematic for at least two reasons.

First, given that Hillary is being touted as the “feminist vote” by many, I find the phrase “The Clintons” decidedly anti-feminist. It implies that if we are going to vote for a woman we can only do so with a man backing her. It implies that either a woman can never get the vote on her own, or else a woman just can’t do the job on their own. It is condescending and patronizing. If I am going to vote for a woman president, it is going to be because of her credentials, not because of her husband’s credentials. Because otherwise, this allegedly “feminist vote” is suddenly more than a little anti-feminist. Rather than being about a woman’s strength, power, and talents, it is implying that “behind every mediocre woman is a great man” or something like that.

Second, it is so unabashedly manipulative in that none of those people using the phrase “The Clintons” are even questioning their use. It implies that the news programs, pundits, and campaign organizers feel that we won’t notice if they slip good ole’ Bill into the equation because god knows we aren’t *ever* going to elect a woman unless we are tricked by thinking we are electing a man. It seems that the phrase “The Clintons” is used just as manipulatively as Hillary’s non-existent crying in the allegedly “emotional moment” that turned around her campaign. It implies that the news media and campaign officials think we are pretty damn stupid. And perhaps we are, but that doesn’t make me any less irritated.

This whole woman-for-president election cycle keeps reminding me of the rhetoric that was floating about during the Geraldine Ferraro days. I was pretty young at the time, but I remember people repeatedly remarking, “We just aren’t ready for a woman vice-president.” Even in elementary school I (at some level) understood how ludicrous that sentiment was. “We aren’t ready…” implies that we know that eventually we will be ready. And if that’s the case, then how are we not ready now?

People wonder, now, if a woman is ultimately electable for the president. But if we are electing “The Clintons” we are not even putting that question to the test.

According to Captain Jack Harkness, the 21st Century is when everything changes. I don’t know if this is true (fictional characters are so sketchy!) but the show he is on, Torchwood, certainly makes some compelling arguments to that effect. Torchwood, a spin-off of the New Doctor Who, aired its first series last year on the BBC, and will be landing on United States television sets courtesy of BBC America starting tomorrow. I watched the series through torrenting several months ago, and was compelled by its darkness, its complex characters, its involved plots, and its unbelievably fantastic monsters. (Screw it! I was getting tired of the Daleks anyhow!)

For those of you who noticed the anagram, Torchwood was originally born as a code name for Doctor Who when the new series was being conceived. As time went on and things developed, Captain Jack (one of the show’s primary protagonists) made some guest appearances in the Christopher Eckleson season of Doctor Who, and began some plot seedlings for what later grow into Torchwood.

Torchwood is a super secret agency (beyond the law, beyond the government) that investigates alien life and paranormal-ness on earth. Rather than only having two main stars (such as is the case in Doctor Who) Torchwood features an ensemble cast, giving it the ability to have deeper character development and more in depth plots. The series begins with a police officer, Gwen Cooper, happening upon the Torchwood gang’s practices and (through a series of events) gets convinced to join up and protect the world from alien threats. Sure, it sounds a bit X-Files-ish in description, but even in its first series the stories are far more imaginative than Chris Carter is in his wet dreams.

The upshot is that Torchwood takes place entirely on Earth. (In fairness, the new Doctor Who is pretty damn human-centric and most of its current episodes also occur on our planet as well, but it is by no means bound to it.) It has been recently brought to my attention that Doctor Who maintains a firmly anti-posthuman stance, and in fairness this is firmly upheld by Torchwood. After all, even in recent commercials Captain Jack passionately exclaims, “We need to protect ourselves from the future!” Sort of a sad stance for science fiction, but the stories are good so I’ll take it.

Another compelling aspect is the show’s treatment of sexuality. Without giving any major spoilers, a casual observer could easily note that each of the main characters (in some way or another) toys with bisexuality (or, in the very least, queerness) at some point in the season. This is portrayed unselfconsciously and (thankfully) without heavy-handedness or public-service-message stylings that one might get in American programming: the characters are able to toy with gender roles and sexuality without having a “Very Special Episode” or personal meltdowns. The overall message seems to be that (to some extent) being flexible with sexuality is very much integral to the human condition.

In any case, the show is far more compelling than most programming that occurs on American television, and if you don’t get BBC or BBC America, I highly recommend downloading the first season. After all, if everything changes in the 21st century you might as well be prepared.

For More:
Search torrents for Torchwood.
Torchwood on TV-Links

A few months ago, I binged and watched the second half of the 3rd season of Lost all at once. I had put this off, primarily because Lost had gotten pretty horrible in its second and third seasons. But instead of rolling my eyes and sighing petulantly at the erraticness of J.J. Abrams (the show’s executive producer), I was instead spellbound by my DVR, unable to tear myself away for about three straight days. I was struck by the amazingly good writing and storytelling that seemed to come out of almost nowhere, but shrugged it off as pure coincidence.

About two days later I was IMDBing Brian K. Vaughan to see if he had started shooting the film version of his comic, Y: The Last Man (which I will talk more about later) and laughed out loud. Turns out, during the second half of season 3 of Lost, Brian K. Vaughan was the Executive Story Editor. The quality change hadn’t been coincidence; it had been the brilliance of a writer that I am already a fan of.

In many ways, Brian K. Vaughan is the anti-Alan Moore. The comic book author’s work contains almost no exposition (other than time, location, and date stamping), sharply defined and memorable characters, and a cinematic style (Vaughan is an NYU film school grad). Indeed compared to the expository ramblings of Moore that often seem tediously allegorical, Vaughan’s writing is tight, transparent, and constantly compelling. (Note: While I am well aware that publicly dissing Moore will get me beat up the next time I go to the comic shop, I stand by this assessment.)

The thing is, though, that Vaughan’s work isn’t just sharply cool and well-written. While he has written for several well-known comics (Batman, Superman, X-Men to name a few…) his work is most charged and compelling in three of his self-created stories. These comics–Runaways, Y: The Last Man, and Ex Machina–on the surface could not appear to be more thematically disparate. But the compelling thing is that all three narratives bear the cynical yet comical watermarks of Vaughan. It isn’t surprising that he comes from film school as, at the root of it, his auteurship shows itself deeply embedded within the stories themes.

At the heart of it, all three comics are coming-of-age stories, where the hero (or, in the case of Runaways, heroes) find themselves cast out of a previous existence and forced to question their formerly idealistic visions of the world around them against harsh realities. His comics are all about heroes who feel less-than-heroic, because being a hero can’t escape the foibles of humanity. Oddly, it seems, each of these stories approaches their coming-of-age from the vantage point of different actual age groups: Runaways is a teen story (and can be collected in appropriately manga-styled books), Y deals with the twenties, while Ex Machina captures the theme from a 30s+ standpoint. And yet, each manages to resonate the same lesson: the perfect adult life you dream of is never like you think it is going to be.

Runaways takes on this theme in the most obvious fashion of all of Vaughan’s comics. The story begins with six teens discovering that their families are actually a secret-society of supervillains who are covertly running the LA area through sacrificing innocents, and various other unsavory acts. The kids decide that the best way to rebel against their eeeeevil parents is to become superheroes. This decision is aided by the fact that slowly but surely, each of the teens discover that they (to varying extents) take after their parents in terms of superpowers. Thus, because each set of parents has powers from different sources (aliens, mutants, evil scientists, time travel, and magic), each of their prodigy gain some access (but not all) to the abilities that their parents had. They decide to run away and become a superhero team.

But this is not really the compelling moment of Runaways. Runaways gets interesting (and takes on the Vaughan-esque theme) at the point that the teens actually do defeat their families. It is soon after this moment that they become listless, confused, and ambivalent about what to do next. Their powers are not necessarily strong enough to defeat big-time villains with regularity, but their is an uncertainty about how they will survive without the aid of the evil parents they have become so dependent on (and dependent on hating). This theme is repeatedly brought home throughout the course of the first seven books (after which, the series is taken over by Joss Whedon). They are unable to trust, unable to psychologically cope with where they are from, and unable to escape it and thus trapped in a superhero lifestyle that sounded glamorous in the first few issues but quickly loses its thrill. This mood, it seems to me, most deeply resonates in Nico (the daughter of the magicians) who is able to pull a magic wand out of herself only by drawing blood (or cutting). The mechanics of her spell work (she is only able to use any spell once) is even more compelling about her power than the commentary on cutting that Vaughan has woven throughout. In other words, within her small set of powers she is, literally, never able to go home and constantly psychologically uprooted.

Y: The Last Man, on the other hand, takes on the you-can’t-go-home theme both more tongue-and-cheek and at the same time more tragically. Y revolves around a mid-twenties slacker, Yorick, who–along with the male helper monkey that he had been training at the time–survives a plague that literally kills off every male on the planet. Yorick then travels (slowly) from continent to continent with a scientist and a secret agent, all of them trying to hunt down the clues of where and how the plague occurred and how Yorick and his monkey managed to survive. More than Runaways, Y: The Last Man deals with several political and social issues including cloning, feminism, the middle east, and the social constructedness of science.

And once again, Vaughan pulls in his prevailing theme. Yorick, on the surface, is living out every man’s alleged fantasy–after all if you are the last man on the planet it means that (if nothing else) you are bound to get laid. And while Yorick does, indeed, get laid from time-to-time the experiences tend to be bitter and problematic. Most times, Yorick must hide in women’s clothing and pretend to be a male impersonator (certainly not doing anything for his masculine pride) and the notion that you are the father of every new human being on the planet is bound to be unnerving and depressing. In effect, Yorick is living the ideal 20s-post-college-slacker lifestyle–more or less couch-surfing and traveling from place to place and able to have any woman he wants. But it is ultimately unsatisfying and clearly not going to end well. Yorick, by the 10th book, is almost completely disillusioned and tired, making far fewer snarky comments and looking far more disheveled than he was when the series started. Being the last man on earth just isn’t all its cracked up to be.

Ex Machina, it would seem on the surface, bears the least resemblance to the usual Vaughan theme. It is another superhero story, where former engineer Mitchell Hundred finds a mysterious relic underwater and can, thereafter, talk to machines. He is, very briefly, a superhero called, “The Great Machine” but then decides that he can do more good in politics and decides to run as mayor of New York. Most of the comic takes place during the Mayoral period (with superhero moments told in flashback) and at the point the story is told from he has mostly retired his metaphorical cape and has become an entirely political creature–although not one without problems and regrets both of his life as a superhero and his life as a politician. The story, even more than Y, is wrought with political issues from terrorism, 1st amendment rights, invasions of privacy, and the relevance of art. The story itself is not without problems–most people who study technology would define it as any extension of man, and to that end there is no reason why Hundred can’t talk to pencils and bricks. But, still, it does raise some interesting discussions about the sentience of machines that are worth having.

The cynical coming-of-age theme is more deeply embedded (and less surface) in Ex Machina than it is in Vaughan’s other comics, but its key is that the series begins with a flashback to Mitchell Hundred’s childhood where he existed for the soul purpose of trips to the comic book store. It is very clear from the dialog and the events of the stories that the young Mitchell’s greatest fantasy was to be a superhero, and part of the character’s cynicism lies in that it wasn’t all he had imagined. Realizing that he could not help all of the people he would have liked to through superheroism, he resorts to politics which, it would seem, makes him even more impotent to affect real change or help people. While his childhood fantasies might center around saving and protecting those around him, his adult self has come to terms with accepting what he can get and knowing that he will never be fully satisfied (and never regain this previous fantasy of being able to change things).

Vaughan’s stories are all compelling on this basic and innate level: we are all in the place of his characters, constantly forced to face adulthood through the lens of how we thought it would be when we were younger. This is why Vaughan’s writing is able to resonate so deeply and really has more potential than most other comic authors to move beyond the mainstream comic audience (and at this same time, doing it without an overwhelming amount of unnecessary literary exposition). So Brian Vaughan? Thank you for not being another Alan Moore (and thank you for saving Lost.)

CBR Torrents:

Y: The Last Man

Runaways

Ex Machina

Thirty minutes into reading the cult comic classic Johnny the Homicidal Maniac I began to suspect that I was reading it ten to fifteen years
too late. It’s not that it wasn’t fun, or even good in a subversive and outsider culture kind of way: but it immediately roused memories of
people I hadn’t thought about in ages.

Not to say that I knew any homicidal maniacs, per se. But growing up in the vast wasteland of South Florida culture in the late 80s and early
90s, this is the kind of comic that should have been passed around between my friends. I was reminded of all of the guys I knew who (despite
the sweltering South Florida heat) would wander around in black trench coats in 95+ degree weather (this was pre-Columbine, of course). I was
reminded of being the painfully “sweet” girl who hung out with the kind of kids that would chase her around with a plastic knife. And I was
reminded of a guy I knew who, when pulled over by cops, kept insisting to them that his name was “Lestat.” (Incidentally: the same dude tried
to “commit suicide” via a ceiling fan. Not the brightest kid in the mosh pit.) These kids–they are the ones that JTHM was written for.

And, clearly, it is not written for me (or the grown-up-ish me). Which, while a bit sad, obviously made for some nice nostalgia.

JTHM (written tongue-and-cheekily by Jhonen Vasquez, also known for Fillerbunny
and Invader Zim) is a slice-of-life kind of story about Johnny
(or “Nny”) who is (as the title promises)
an insomniac, occasionally suicidal, and completely homicidal maniac. The first few issues don’t really defy expectations. Nny gets annoyed at
a person. Nny brings them back to his house (forcibly or willingly) where he brutally (and often creatively) rips them to pieces. In large
part, this is to have a constant fresh supply of blood to paint his wall, which unfortunately after a few days begins to turn brownish (as
blood tends to do) and requires a fresh coat. The story begins to get interesting when Nny starts to ask himself the same question that
readers asked from the very beginning: why isn’t he getting caught? (And why do all of his suicide attempts fail?) After a brief death, and
a trip to both heaven and hell, he is not necessarily left with more answers, but certainly has a new sense of depth about his predicament.
A cast of recurring characters also are what makes this comic work: Nny’s growing compassion and “friendship” with a terrified little boy
nicknamed “Squee” who lives next door, and the “girl who got away” (literally) after a good date and a botched murder. The sanity of these
characters makes the insanity of Nny more compelling. After all, most of the people he kills are really irritating.

Needless to say, I was handed this independent graphic novel (now in it’s 21st printing as a “director’s cut”) and asked for my opinion.
And I think, what strikes me the most is the fact that it is in its 21st printing. Even as an unlikely story that probably fits
the description of “dystopic masturbatory fantasy for the un-assimilated” (who I’m quoting… I have no idea) it has persisted, and it has
persisted because of kids like my good friend “Lestat” and the trench coat dork mob (dripping of unnecessary sweat). It is written for the
high schoolers and college students who are just beginning to discover that there are subversive cultures that they can engage with as an
alternative to the mainstream pop culture formulas that they have been forced to memorize since birth. It is during the late-teen age that
something like JTHM would seem like the most subversive and funny thing ever produced.

And the cool thing is that there will always be a place for JTHM among the “dark” high school and college kids who deeply need this kind of
alternative culture to get them through the horrible-ness that is the teenage years. You don’t have to look far for a slew of
fan sites
to see that this comic is still deeply necessary and
full of affect. And while the post-Columbine (and post-Virginia Tech)
media would urge that showing this comic to already dark and depressed high school kids is a recipe for badness, I’d argue otherwise. I
would, instead, suggest that many of these kids need dark humored, subversive, and alternative culture just to make it through the day. With
outsider culture comes a feeling of camaraderie–of solidarity. While none of my weird high school friends ever did anything legitimately
violent, it was probably because they had others to share this kind of dark culture with.

I don’t care what the goddamn intellectual elitists say. I will not shoot my fucking TV.
Television gets a bad rap on the culture scale, but I have a hard time trusting any society that places Andrew Lloyd Webber higher than Joss Whedon.
I’m not saying that all TV is good: there is a lot of crap out there.
But I have always believed that you can learn more from a culture by sifting through its garbage cans than admiring what it puts on its walls and calls art.
It’s in the garbage cans that we find the used dildos, old love letters, and copies of Olivia Newton John’s ‘Physical’.
Watching television is the best way to understand American culture.

What it is most interesting to me about television is that while film quality has by-and-large gotten worse over the past ten years, television has been forced to improve.
I attribute this, in large part, to HBO and the Sopranos which forced mainstream networks into coming up with better narratives and stronger, more serialized, story arcs.
A blockbuster film can be mediocre but still do relatively well in the box office because people bring dates and families and only have to sit through it once.
Television is different though–when you decide to watch a television show you are inviting the stories and the characters into your home once a week.
Americans have addictively intimate relationships with serialized television and in many ways film cannot compete with this intimacy.
I am not going to try and claim that all television is good (and, for the moment, we are going to ignore the problematic nature of reality TV)
but those who have been closely watching the changes in television over the past ten years cannot possibly deny that in many ways there has been a golden age of quality narratives on television.

But the problem is this: networks and producers don’t entirely understand their audiences.
They are still tied to the old ways of Neilson ratings and market shares. They don’t really understand that in actuality, where television is concerned, fandom (not necessarily numbers) rules.
Proof of this comes in form of the parades of quality shows that have had large and dedicated fan bases but were discarded far too quickly by impatient networks.
(Off the top of my head: Arrested Development, Freaks and Geeks, Studio 60, Firefly, Undeclared, Jake 2.0, Veronica Mars, Sports Night.)
On television, fandom rules and fandom cannot be understood purely by ratings but can be ascertained by online discussion, fan fiction, creation and sales of show related products, and also importantly, by piracy.
Ultimately it is the most pirated shows, the ones that travel unstoppably around the corridors of the internet–these are the shows that are truly successful.
Everybody Loves Raymond might have had good Neilson ratings, but Arrested Development will be watched and admired for at least the next 50 years.
And, it would appear--given an article that appeared in this week’s Television Week-
-that networks have finally begun to understand this dynamic.
According to the article seven new fall television shows have been leaked onto pirate sites, and many of these shows may or may not have been leaked by the networks themselves.
What is most compelling about this “illegal” interaction is that many networks put their new shows up for free and legal download on their official web sites.
I suspect that they know that the easiest way to get the geek fan-culture types to watch their new shows and create a buzz is by “illegally” leaking what they would gladly give out legally.

Below is my brief reviews of the seven leaked television shows.
There are only a few that I think have real potential and staying power, but I think there is something compelling about the fact that these were the shows that were leaked.
Television alone is no longer a barometer for American culture, but also what is pirated and what networks might assume to be pirate-able.

Bionic Woman

I wrote my master’s thesis on action television heroines, so I was particularly curious to see how NBC’s portrayal of Jaime Sommers would pan out.
In the exposition-laden first episode, I was neither disappointed nor particularly impressed. Interestingly the new Jaime Sommers seems to resemble newer action heroines such as Alias’ Sydney Bristow or Dark Angel’s Max (with her whining and tears)
more than she resembles the 1970s Sommers who was irrevocably perky and emotionally chaste. Like other modern action heroines, the new Sommers constantly treads the line between powerful and powerless.
Have you ever seen a masculine action show where the protagonist finds out that he has super-human cyborg powers and consequently cries his little eyes out in a bathtub? That’s what I thought.
I also highly suspect that this was a premature release done on purpose by studios–the legal notices at the beginning (and watermarked throughout the episode) were enough for most pirates to masturbate
over and the show stars geek icon Katee Sackhoff of BSG fame (which I guess means that Starbuck really is dead. Sigh.) This was built, produced, and exposed to the geek pirates who will clearly make it a hit. The question is whether or not the narrative will be good enough that mainstream audiences will follow along with them. The writing is not bad, the special effects were not overdone, and the acting was decent, but the story was not particularly compelling to start with.
In order for the new Bionic Woman to be better, faster, stronger than the other action babes, it is going to have to get some good narrative and fast.

Pushing Daisies

Originally meant to be a spin-off of Showtime’s Dead Like Me, ABC’s Pushing Daisies was unquestionably the most charming addition to the fall lineup (that I have seen thus far).
I also suspect it will be a breakaway hit. (In recent years, ABC has become fairly good at both picking weird and edgy shows and marketing them properly.)
Pushing Daisies is a fairy tale of sorts about Ned, a man who is able to touch dead people and bring them back to life (though not without repercussions and caveats).
Ned manages to be both repressed and quirkily lovable, and finds himself in quite a bind when he brings his long lost childhood sweetheart back to life and must ultimately deal with the fallout of this decision.
The show is not particularly profound, but it is awfully cute, shot in bright colors and with a lot of wide-angle lenses. Raold Dahl would have been a big fan of Pushing Daisies, I suspect.
I would forecast that this show will last at least a few seasons, and will have a sizable fan following.
I am unsure whether this show was leaked on purpose–but I think the creators know that they have something potentially compelling–even if not meant for the geek crowd.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles

The Sarah Conner Chronicles, a spin-off of the Terminator films, was meant to be a mid-season release in 2008.
The show is well-written, slickly directed, fast-paced, and full of special effects that are surprisingly good for television.
Given that it is for the FOX network, it feels a lot like 24 with killer robots (although I wouldn’t argue with the possibility that Keifer Sutherland might be a killer robot).
But if this is like 24, it is like 24 when it was still vaguely coherent. Although I am not quite sure how they will keep up with the pace that they have set in the premiere episode
(let alone keep a budget to afford those special effects on a weekly basis), I am curious to see how it will be done, because there is no question that this show will have a massive audience
both mainstream and within sci-fi fan culture. (Notably, the presence of Summer Glau of Firefly fame should draw in some fans of that show.)
That said, I find its early pirated release particularly compelling since it is not technically supposed to air for another six months.
Was its release really the network’s doing? Or perhaps someone involved in the production leaked it to create enough buzz for an earlier release?
I have no idea, but I find it curious that The Sarah Connor Chronicles was found among the collection of fall releases.

Lipstick Jungle

Remember Sex and the City? Yeah. So do the producers of Lipstick Jungle. It’s pretty similar, in a one-hour format with a now-typical television mix of melodrama and comedy (“comodroma”? “melody”?).
The premise is the intersecting stories of three uber-powerful women in New York City who (shockingly!) are trying to balance their work and love lives.
It has the potential to improve, but for the most part I found this show whiny and vaguely offensive:
the theme seems to be that while women can be successful and powerful at work, they are still women and too obsessed with their emotions.
This NBC show will probably last for a few seasons only because the twenty and thirty-something women miss their weekly fix of Sex and the City.
And I’m pretty sure that any leak of this show was not really meant for the pirate-folk.

Reaper

Imagine Kevin Smith directed a television show for the CW. Wait… you don’t have to. Reaper is that very show, and it manages to meet the expectations of such a collaboration.
(And I’m not just saying that because in general Kevin Smith’s pathetic directing and horrible writing generally make me want to gouge my eyes out.)
The premise? Blah blah some stupid kid’s parents sell his soul to the devil before he is born… blah blah on his 21st birthday the devil gives him a job as an escaped-soul bounty hunter.
No, really. In the first episode he collects a soul in a magical Dirt Devil (which, I might add, is the most misguided product placement I’ve ever seen).
I would like to say it was the worst writing I have seen on a TV show in years, but sadly I just sat through the premiere of Cavemen… so lets just say second worst.
While the bad writing makes me hope that Reaper doesn’t have a shot in hell, I’m pretty sure the folks at the CW are illiterate anyhow and I suspect that it will be popular with teen boys
(who, of course, don’t tend to be a very stable television demographic, so maybe it won’t last). But here’s hoping that it won’t last more than six episodes.
It wouldn’t surprise me if this show was purposefully pirated by a studio someone with hopes of getting the attention of this demographic.

Chuck

As I was watching the premiere of the new NBC show Chuck I found myself constantly asking one question:
If networks wanted to make a show about a dorky, quirky geekboy who gets super-human powers and ends up working for the government why the fuck didn’t someone just bring back
Jake 2.0?
Because, without question, Chuck, a show about a tech support guy who gets all of the information from the NSA and CIA burrowed into his brain through an email (!?!) was inferior to Jake 2.0
(a UPN show from a few years back in which a tech support guy working for the NSA is infused with nanotechnology and becomes super human).
Chuck, unlike Jake, was riddled with logical flaws, mediocre writing, and uninteresting characters. My highest praise was that there was a half-decent car chase.
I would be surprised if Chuck, like his predecessor Jake, does not last very long.
In terms of it’s relationship to piracy, I am not sure whether or not this was pirated on purpose by NBC (if so, I would have to wonder why given the quality!).
What hits me as curious is that the whole show seems to be making a meta-statement on piracy: Chuck’s affliction is ultimately due to what could be pared down to an “illegal download.”
If this is true, the show can be interpreted as a warning to pirates suggesting, “be careful what you hack…” Which makes a pirated version of it somewhat interesting by its own right.
Incidentally: when Chuck found out he had superhuman powers he did not cry in a bathtub like NBC’s Jaime Sommers did. Just saying.

Cavemen

Cavemen ate my soul. Sigh.
This is a television sitcom based on the characters from the Geico commercials (which had already offended me in its 15 second slots so you can only imagine what 22 minutes did to me).
Cavemen seems to be attempting to tackle racism.
While at least no laugh track was forced on the audience (or, at least, not in this early version), the writing was appalling and the show was highly offensive on several levels.
I don’t know what the ABC executives were thinking, but I suspect it will be off the air in time for a bad reality TV show as a mid-season replacement.
I have to imagine it was pirated by mistake, because as far as I’m concerned it was created by mistake.

So what do I make of the hodgepodge of Fall television promises? Not too much, just yet. Television premieres offer a lot of exposition, and it often takes four or five episodes for a good show to create the intimacy necessary for a weekly invitation into my boudoir. But there’s some potential here–perhaps more potential than I’ve seen in this Fall’s film previews. Ultimately I’m nowhere near ready to shoot my television just yet. And the networks? Well, we’ll just see about the networks.

Shira Chess is a doctoral student at RPI who has written extensively on television, gaming, and cultural studies.
Her thesis-lite (En)Gendering the Boob Tube: Technology, Agency, and the Action TV Femme is available on her site at Shiraland.

I fully recognize that you are not Nancy Drew people. I imagine that not many of you went to see the new Nancy Drew movie, nor have seen the old ones. Under duress some of you might confess to having read some of the horribly written books as a child. Maybe one or two of you are actually teen detectives. Who am I to judge?

But I must confess: While I am not necessarily a Nancy Drew fan per se, I am secret addict of teen girl movies. I can’t quite say why. Perhaps it is the dramatic and triumphant stories of awkward girls. Perhaps it is the overzealous and obligatory makeover scenes. Perhaps it is the adorably chaste romances between generally unsuitable teens who will likely break up a week after the story ends. Or perhaps I just have an unhealthy addiction.

Needless to say, when I saw that the new Nancy Drew movie was coming out, I responded much in the same way as when the Princess Diaries movie came out, whispering to myself, “My inner twelve-year-old needs to see this movie.” And so, last weekend, I indulged my inner twelve-year-old.

And my response to the movie gets a bit muddled at this point, because while the twelve-year-old in my brain wants to report that the film was delightful, my grownup and significantly more cynical academic inner voice is somewhat troubled. (Thankfully, these two voices have learned to ignore each other over the years or else I might actually have an aneurysm.)

Here’s the thing. Teen movies make for an excellent barometer of cultural trends, of the movement of younger generations, their anxieties, and their desires. Movies (teen or otherwise) don’t come out of thin air. They always come out of something bigger and often something scarier. Regardless of whether audiences want to admit it, movies and television function like the subconscious of a society, symbolically telling us what we really think and feel about the world around us.

Not that you care but here’s the plot: small-town Nancy must temporarily travel with her father to Los Angles for a new job. While on one hand, Nancy’s provincial style cannot possibly fit in with the trendier and PoMo stylings of her new high school peers (we are even gifted with the obligatory high school cafeteria rejection scene), she manages to fit in by finding a mystery wherever she goes. By selecting a house where a rising actress mysteriously died twenty years earlier, Nancy Drew is able to distract herself from her social failings by sleuthing out what has happened to the fallen film star. Mystery and hilarity ensue.

So while my inner twelve-year-old was delighted by the 50s stylized “new” Nancy (perkily played by Julia Robert’s niece, Emma Roberts), my inner academic voice began to slowly rumble. As the pristine Nancy walked around in knee socks, plaid skirts, and penny loafers, bribing officials and criminals with baked goods and singing the praises of all that is “old fashioned” I began to get uncomfortable. And by the end of the movie, when the far less chaste and more “fashionable” teen girls who made a point of humiliating Nancy at the beginning of the film decide to emulate the new Drew’s style and labeled it “The New Sincerity” I grew concerned.

Per Nancy Drew etiquette The New Sincerity, it would seem, involves more than just sleuthing behind a parent’s back. It is unquestionably reminiscent of what Betty Friedan labeled “The Feminine Mystique.” By the standard of The New Sincerity girls should be good, they should be chaste, they should be nurturing, they should show proper etiquette, are neat in a sort of OCD way, should dress both femininely and sensibly, and should partake in traditional values. While none of these things are exactly bad, they are romanticizing a time, a place, and a style where women and femininity were trivialized and patronized.

Furthermore, how am I supposed to buy into a New Sincerity from a film with a dozen or more product placements?

Via an anonymous tip, I was told that the phrase “The New Sincerity” is actually one with growing cultural significance which exceeds the boundaries of teen flicks. So on a hunch, I did a bit of sleuthing of my own, attempting to figure out what exactly this self-important and seemingly meaningless label means. It would appear that it is something about the death of irony (if irony is dead then I am not leaving the goddamn wake!), though I honestly can’t tell if the discussions on the death of irony are meant to be ironic. It appears to be a post-9-11 movement towards will-full naivety. There also seem to be some academic links to the term, many of them referencing my often-hero Judith Butler and (from what I can tell) misreading her notions of performativity. (Which, in fairness, it’s hard not to misread Butler. I do it all the time.)

Alas my sleuthing did not get me much farther in my search to understand The New Sincerity. But let’s be honest. I ain’t no Nancy Drew.

So while my inner twelve-year-old is currently pouting in the corner and muttering that my inner academic has to go and ruin all of the good movies, the new Nancy Drew movie makes me wonder about the future of young American girls. Is this film indicative of a trend of a “New Femininity” more than a “New Sincerity” (or, perhaps, a rehashing of an old femininity and sincerity)? I’m not sure that we could say that Nancy Drew in this iteration is an anti-feminist figure (she’s certainly better than the sexist and racist Nancy Drew films from the 1930s), but I’m not sure if she is a good role model for young girls, either. Certainly the now canceled television show Veronica Mars was a far better (and more realistic role model) for potential teen girl detectives.

And so I am divided. While my inner twelve-year-old is currently modeling 50s New Sincerity clothing in an imaginary mirror and primly brushing her hair, my inner academic is a bit annoyed. She worries too much, my inner academic, but she is still concerned that young girls might take the wrong things from the new Nancy Drew. Which totally might be true. But in the end that doesn’t really stop my inner twelve-year old from wondering if Amanda Bynes or the Olson twins have any new movies coming out this summer.

Shira Chess is a PhD student in Communication and Rhetoric at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and her home page online is shiraland.com.

Nancy Drew via Alterati.net

Women don’t play enough. Just blame it on feminism? Perhaps not, but certainly the tenuous relationship between women and play, which I have previously described, is inextricably linked to the past three hundred years of Western feminisms. Lets take a short ride down the lane of historical feminist rhetoric.

The subtext of many of the early feminists (such as Mary Wollstonecraft) through the American First Wave of feminism (the suffrage movement) all the way through Simone de Beauvoir was trying to make women appear less frivolous: their social reputation was entirely linked to frivolity. For example, in her Vindication on the Rights of Women, Wollstonecraft writes that men view women as “a swarm of ephemeron triflers” and that they are “reckoned a frivolous sex.” This sentiment (and resentment) continues through early feminisms with detrimental repercussions: feminists eschewed frivolity and often pushed an equally biological deterministic position of seriousness and morality. In order to show their equality to men, women overcompensated for frivolous reputations.

More recent feminisms—the second wave and beyond—similarly focused on serious causes: birth control, pro-choice, and getting women into the workplace. And while these topics are all vital and necessary to furthering feminisms, they left little time for leisure: getting women into the workplace didn’t disintegrate their responsibilities at home, and this killed any possible hope for playtime. Feminist texts don’t generally discuss women and leisure: they are too busy trying to get the serious stuff down.

And still, many feminisms maintain this serious stance. While the term “feminazis” is abhorrent, one might wonder if a “nazi” surname could possibly be attributed to a more playful feminism. The immovable strictness of feminisms and the inability to embrace the necessity of frivolity has ultimately limited feminist causes. If women can’t play with equality then there is no hope for being taken seriously.

A quote commonly attributed to anarchist feminist Emma Goldman is, “If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution!”* This is a sentiment that many feminists still desperately need to embrace: stamping and stomping will only get a cause so far and at a certain point it is necessary to embrace the cause—frivolity and all—and turn stomping into dancing. While women of the past have been accused of being purely frivolous, it is this very frivolity which is missing from feminism today.

Playful does not mean dismissive. Frivolous does not mean ignorant. Embracing one of these things does not automatically mean being associated with the other. Instead, it means that along with gravity and importance, we must embrace the ridiculousness and lightness of a cause. Along with work we must make time for play. Play is not just for children: men have long known how to integrate play into their everyday lives and until women learn to play as men do (not through emulation but through experimentation) we will not understand the freedom that so many feminisms have sought to bring to femininity.

We cannot possibly know, yet, what a playful feminism might look like. While the women from Bust magazine have been pushing the “fiber arts” of knitting, crocheting, and sewing, the “frag dolls”, the “riot grrls”, and women in sports all have different ideas. And none of these are necessarily playful feminisms: they are all, to a large extent, imbued with old ideals and rhetoric. While the women of Bust have embraced the social play of Stitch ‘n’ Bitch groups, some might suggest that knitting is simply a leftover form of play that is potentially problematic on several counts. While members of all-girl online gaming groups such as the Frag Dolls or the PMS Clan have certainly pushed their way into the masculine video game space, they are not necessarily involved in inherently feminine forms of play. While my mother and her friends might find their play in shopping and beauty spas, one might question if this consumer-driven activity can ever actually be play. My point is not that any of these acts of play are wrong: but rather that feminists need to start examining how women play, how often they play, how they play differently from men, and how to use play to subvert patriarchal norms.

We live in a time of fractured feminisms: women young and old, liberal and conservative no longer necessarily stand behind the zealous beliefs of First or Second Wave feminisms. Feminist rhetoric argues, fights, and no longer knows what it is fighting for or with.

Play is unifying.

Through finding more feminine forms of play women can finally grow comfortable in their feminist skin. Through agonistic play, community play, and role-play, women can come to know and understand one another and cut across the divisions: we are entitled to leisure, we are entitled to play, we are entitled to move beyond the drudgery of working the double-shift in order to understand the playful freedom that men have always had. Play is unifying, powerful and strong, and although frivolous, play can have a purpose. It is time to toss a Feminist Frisbee in the air, and see where it lands.

Because the playful can be political, too.

Shira Chess is a PhD student in Communication and Rhetoric at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and her home page online is shiraland.com where papers are available that explore these topics more thoroughly. This was the blog version of the much longer paper How to Play a Feminist (PDF|DOC).

Related Links:

Frag Dolls

PMS Clan

* This quote was a paraphrase of other things Goldman said, but the pithiness of the line and sentiment is what has survived (and what is still quoted today), so it is what I am quoting here.

Feminisms don’t play.

Feminisms work. And then work more. Feminisms are occupied with women’s rights: in homes and in offices, with bodies, with technology, with health, and with politics. The feminisms of the past three hundred years (and further back) have all been inextricably entangled with these matters of gravity and importance. As such, there has been no playtime in feminism. And why should there be: why would a series of serious social movements have time to concern themselves with how women play and how they spend their leisure time?

But I submit that it is time for a playful (and play-filled) feminism.

This project began fermenting about a year ago because of my mother. My academic interests in gender and video games have often led me to use my mother as a test-case for new ideas. In my frustration with her total dismissiveness of video games, I finally bluntly asked, “What kind of video game would make you want to play?”

She paused. “How about a nice shopping game?” she asked, earnestly.

I wanted to be surprised at this remark, but I wasn’t. In the three-plus decades I had spent getting to know my mother, I realized, shopping was how we most often spent time together. For instance, when I, or my cousins, or her sister, would come for a visit, we would ritualistically scoop up my grandmother, so that three generations of women could go wandering around the shopping mall, looking for bargains at Macys, trying on lipsticks, and eating in the food court. This realization was unsettling, and yet I knew that my experiences of shopping-as-play were in no way unusual. I know many women that use beauty and shopping to play.

This is not to say that I am condemning consumerism or women for taking a part in it. It would be hypocritical of me to suggest that I am at all above sneaking away to Target for my play breaks from hours of study. Or, for that matter, using shopping as an excuse and vehicle for befriending and getting to know new women: I have done this many times and found it to be a highly successful practice.

The more I thought about this comment, the more uneasy I became. Seeking another opinion, I told one of my professors what my mother said. “A shopping game? Wouldn’t that be E-bay?” she pithily replied. Indeed, I realized that digital play, from video games to the internet often took on this consumerist guise.

I soon became attuned to the word “play”, and its uses in feminine spaces. I found it often in cosmetics and skincare departments, and in advertisements promoting gigantic sales where women could go on shopping sprees. Once I found it on a package of condoms being marketed to women.

Men, it seems, have more authorized, more playful kinds of play: they rule the domains of sports and video games: what can be called agonistic play. Masculine play often involves gatherings of men playing and watching sports, or playing and watching video games. Agonistic play—while competitive—comes from a Greek root which is slightly different from antagonism. It is about the camaraderie of competition. Whatever complaints one might have about steroid use in sports, or violence in video games, these things seem to be only bi-products and anomalies. Masculinity, it seems, is permitted to define play.

Femininity is often left out of the game, entirely.

But play is a necessary component of human life. Johan Huizinga, one of the most prolific sociologists to ever write about play and games wrote in his seminal work Homo Ludens, “Play cannot be denied. You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.” If what Huizinga says is true, if play is a significant, undeniable, and vital function of human life, then it is important to examine it. And, if what I propose is true, if many women deny themselves this significant function, then this creates a real problem: we must dig deeper to understand the relationship between women and play.

Women’s play and leisure are most often linked to time: either too much or not enough. With many women still managing what has previously been called “the double shift” of managing the work world and the home world, women’s leisure plays out in snippets of time: knitting, television watching, and shopping to name a few alleged feminine play activities. This kind of play never becomes fully immersive and is about wasting time and filling time, not about having real and full leisure time. Women’s play is often also about making families happy: engaging in other peoples play. Playing with one’s children or taking on a husband’s leisure hobbies does not allow women to ever really own their play.

The resistance and troubles that women have towards leisure and play are not surprising. In fact, I would like to suggest (and have suggested in longer articles), that tenuous relationship between women and play is inextricably linked to the past three hundred years of Western feminisms (give or take a hundred years and a feminism or two).

Shira Chess is a PhD student in Communication and Rhetoric at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and her home page online is shiraland.com where papers are available that explore these topics more thoroughly. This is a blog version of the much longer paper How to Play a Feminist (PDF|DOC). Part two of this essay will be published this Saturday, until then why not download a free trial of a delightful shopping game or check out the Feminist Gamers Livejournal Community.