Thursday, February 05, 2009 - Posts
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Like Sam, I too found "David After Dentist" more charming than creepy when I first saw it: David immediately got filed in the mental category "Awesome Little Kids I'd Like to Hang Out With," alongside Amelie Jr., the Korean "Hey Jude" baby, and Gio Escalante. I worry less that this video is cruel in the here and now and more about what David will think about it when he's a teenager or when he's applying for jobs. Will David be embarrassed? Proud? Will he be like a former child star, who can't walk down the street without someone leaning out of a car window to yell, "DUUUDE, IS THIS GOING TO BE FOREVER?"
What's really scary, though, is the speed at which this video has been remixed and re-posted—there's already a Dr. Katz-style animated version and a Christian Bale mashup. Maybe I'm being primitive about it (they're stealing David's soul when they copy his picture!), but that sort of gives me the heebie-jeebies. Something like "David" is different from, say, a clip of your kid on TV's America's Funniest Home Videos. Web stuff can move around the world so easily, getting copied and reproduced—not to mention archived indefinitely—that it's unnerving. I can make myself forget about this when I'm sharing information about myself. (I'm working on my "25 Random Things About Me" list, so I've been thinking a lot about the nature of my personal privacy threshhold.) But is it ethical when it's your kid? Now that my friends are trickling into their child-bearing years, I see infants all over Facebook. I'm not sure if this is due to the simple fact that since we live a lot of our lives online, it's natural that our kids are coming along, or whether it has something to say about the extent to which we view those kids as extensions of (accessories to?) ourselves. I'm sure that, when I reproduce, I will be putting lots of totally hilarious clips and pictures online. The question is: Will I be mother enough to hesitate before I hit "post"?
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It looks like perhaps beholding Obama as a mere saint might not be wishful thinking enough for some folks. An update from the far realms of fantastical projection, via a press release that popped up in my inbox this afternoon:
In a recent appearance at a Washington, D.C. elementary school, President Barack Obama indicated that his favorite superheroes are Spiderman and Batman. But who do Americans think Mr. Obama would be if he were a superhero, and what about the other inhabitants of the White House?
Recent poll data from E-Poll Market Research's E-Score® Character and E-Score® Celebrity surveys suggests that Mr. Obama's personality profile most closely matches that of Batman from the recently revamped film franchise, while Michelle Obama compares closely with Princess Fiona of the Shrek series. Additionally, Vice President Joe Biden's personality shows a close resemblance to Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots from Transformers. ...
... Can this trio of Superheroes turn the White House into a new Justice League? Can they vanquish the nasty recession, health care troubles and evildoers both foreign and domestic?
Uh-oh. Batman as played by Christian Bale has vexed politics at best—though I guess maybe Obama's comment that he'd meet with dictators without preconditions is kinda sorta like Batman's willingness "to go outside the law to meet terrorists 'on their own terms.' " (But Bale can't play our President Calm-Cool-Collected!) I guess I can buy Michelle as Fiona. (From Wikipedia: "She is really a very down-to-earth and independent woman who is a match for Shrek at burping and farting, is a loyal friend, and unlike princesses of fairy tales, an expert in hand-to-hand combat with knowledge of Chinese martial arts.") And while I'm no Transformers expert, it appears that Optimus, like Biden, is a bit of an old-school warrior for justice, had his original moment in the ‘80s, and has enjoyed a recent renaissance in the spotlight.
So who's Hillary? Who's Rahm? Who's Daschle? Who's our Joker?
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Oh, Hanna, I beg to differ! I found young David's trip through the post-dental bends to be an awesome example of the Internet-enabled, 21st-century, DIY version of "Kids Say the Darndest Things." The video isn't, in my opinion, amusing because it's "Ho-ho! Look at the kid acting high!" It's because what David, with the aid of some drugs, is saying to his father's camera is so profound, so eternal, so deeeep. "Is this real life?" "Why is this happening to me?" "Is this gonna be forever?" These are the very questions I ask myself, day in and day out, toiling at my computer, wondering what I'm doing, wanting to know what does it all mean. Hanna, perhaps you might try the animated version? I'm sure it's only a matter of time before the "Is This Real Life?" T-shirts appear in online stores.
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I think the "David After the Dentist" video passes the "appropriate to post" test. This isn't likely to haunt him forever; given how fast kids grow, it won't be long before even his biggest fans wouldn't recognize him on the street. (And since the clip is from last summer, he probably already has enough new front teeth to disguise him.) He's old enough that his dad probably asked and got his permission before posting, and young enough that it's not likely his peers are out there on CollegeHumor.com discovering this clip and laughing behind his back. And the material is harmless enough that I think when David revisits it in a few years, he'll crack up as much as the 3-million-plus who've already watched it on YouTube.
I can see your point, Hanna, that the dad comes off as kind of cruel, the way he's sitting up there laughing and filming while his child suffers. But I feel like it's how the kid—not the blogosphere—interprets what the parent is doing that matters, and David doesn't seem to mind his dad's low-key attitude. In fact, it might be putting him at ease. Of course, this is coming from someone who thinks it's hilarious that my parents used to coo to my sister and me, when we were too young to understand anything beyond tone of voice, "You're such a stupid baby! Awww, look how ugly you are!" Sure if someone were watching (online or otherwise), that would seem awful. But since all we took from it was the affectionate cadence, I think it's genius.
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It's taken me a while, and a schooling from a couple of Slate men, to figure out what's wrong with David's dad. As anyone online this afternoon knows, his dad posted a video of him freaking out after getting anesthesia at the dentist. My husband and I have just started posting a couple of kid videos on YouTube, and it never occurred to me that anyone other than my mom would look at them. But every once in a while, the blogosphere picks one up, and then suddenly you and octuplet mom are in the same boat. Probably, in that car, what Dad and David were doing made some kind of sense. But from the outside, here's what it looks like: David is sitting in the back of the car, suffering. He is seriously discombobulated. He thinks his entire life from that point on will be a bad acid trip. And Dad is grooving on it, joking, recording the lolling of the head, the screaming, with his handy camera, looking forward to the moment he can post it as a cool video online. Ladies, anyone else want to join me in judgment?
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Welcome, Willa! I have been a Grey's watcher since the first episode (Meredith and McDreamy's lust at first sight in Joe's bar didn't grab me as much as Christina's painful perfectionism). I also wondered what Shonda Rhimes was thinking when Denny Duquette insisted on being a major character in Season 5 despite his prolonged tragic death in Season 2. Sadly, despite the astounding 15-year record of NBC's ER, it is very difficult to keep hourlong medical dramas compelling and original after five years (witness Fox's House), so I hoped the silly dead-Denny story arc would resolve quickly (with Isabel's brain tumor diagnosis, no doubt) and possibly postpone the shark-jumping a bit longer. Alas, the conceit went on a bit too long—she's supposed to be a doctor; how about a little self-diagnosis?—and became tedious and annoying. Yet I've had a standing appointment with the ABC full-episode player every Friday this season (um, my DVR won't let me watch The Office and record G's Anatomy simultaneously), and the plot still manages to make me respond. The pairings and re-pairings at Seattle Grace have lost their surprise but, so far, despite its creator's originality fatigue, the program still delivers a serving of irony, pathos, or character twist stirred into every script in spite of itself.
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Leon Panetta, Obama's pick for CIA chief, earned $1.2 million last year as a corporate consultant, speechmaker, and board-sitter. (Included in that was a $150,000 fee for consulting for the Leon & Sylvia Panetta Institute for Public Policy at California State University. And if I were a California taxpayer, I'd be thrilled that the school was able to snag Leon Panetta to consult for the Leon Panetta Institute for a mere $150,000.) Like Tom Daschle, Panetta took in about $250,000 last year making speeches to corporations—Panetta got $56,000 from Merrill Lynch alone for two talks. I know there's been a lot of bashing of our corporate financial titans lately. How they live like pashas and pay themselves grotesque salaries in spite of the fact they have pretty much brought down the world's economies. But sometimes you've got to feel sorry for these former masters of the universe. For years they have been forced to sit at luncheons and fight to keep awake while listening to Tom Daschle or Leon Panetta drone on and on. How hard it must have been for them to fight the impulse to say, "Leon, I'll write you a check for $56,000 right now if you'll just stop talking."
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I don't know why I'm on the sex-and-body beat this week, but ... Has anyone else read Rebecca Traister’s smart Salon piece about the rise of the girl gross-out essay? Traister argues that we’re seeing a spike in women writing about squishy, gooey bodily functions:
Laughing about all the nasty shit -- or crying about it, kibitzing about it, whining about it, bragging about it, confessing it, writing about it, and most important, exposing it -- it's all the rage. Jezebel, the popular women's offshoot of the Gawker empire, has been the leader of the oversharing crusade, with vibrant, aromatic and really graphic posts about everything from lodged tampons to yeast infection remedies to bloody period sex to female ejaculation.
Trend stories usually seem fake to me, but I think Traister’s right about this one—though we’ve seen waves of similar self-revelation in the past. (Do you all agree? Disagree?) As for me, I confess I’m both repelled by and attracted to all these bloody confessions—at times amused and impressed by the frankness of these women, at other half-put off by it. Perhaps that’s because I come from conflicted Catholic stock. But I think it’s also that the phenomenon Traister is describing is more multi- than single-faceted, in ways I wish she'd teased out more.
Which is to say: I have different reactions to different parts of Traister’s piece. Miranda Purves’ graphic description of her pregnancy in Elle seems to have a purpose that goes very beyond exhibitionism. You have to be graphic to write that piece in the first person, because the piece has to enact Purves’ own shock at what happened to her body and to convey her sense of feeling gypped that few people had spoken explicitly about this to her beforehand. She's onto something. In an age of disclosure, it’s (paradoxically) shocking how many women are surprised by what can happen to their bodies during delivery. (I remember reading a brutally honest description of birth in, of all places, Sylvia Plath’s diaries when I was 24, and thinking: Why on earth has no one ever told me this stuff? )
But I’m not sure I feel the same way about Charlotte Roche’s Wetlands, where, I’d say from my brief perusal of it to date, the reader finds a lot of youthful narcissistic exhibitionism on display. So far I don’t get the value of that exhibitionism; the writing seems bland, and the “rawness” is designed to shock—a stance I find increasingly tedious in our bare-our-souls-and-bodies culture.
Which brings me to a question for all of you: Is being relentlessly in-your-face the only way to write about the secret reality of the female body? Is this mode of brazen oversharing a kind of feminist reclaiming? Or is it mostly a canny method of self-packaging? Of course, as Traister herself notes, those two questions may not necessarily have mutually exclusive answers. The either/or approach is used far too much when it comes to women who write (or speak) provocatively about themselves.
So I’d like to ask the inverse question: Can you write effectively—that is, shockingly—about the actual reality of inhabiting female body while also being, well, more modest, or neutral, in affect? I’m trying to think of examples. … Sontag’s journals actually come to mind. She writes at times about female genitalia with a coolness in tone about that's eerie yet revelatory. What else?
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Tonight, television's pre-eminent hot doctor shows, ABC's Grey's Anatomy and Private Practice, are teaming up for an "unprecedented crossover event," or what I think of as a last-ditch effort to keep me and millions of others from breaking up with them for good.
Grey's has always had its detractors (like, all those people who laugh belittlingly whenever it's referred to as simply Grey's—whatever, this show and I, we're on a first-name basis), but when it debuted in 2005, it was the perfect treat: good-natured, sexy, casually multiracial and female-centric, funny and touching in perfect proportion and, in some truly ineffable way, supremely satisfying. But since the end of Season 2 it has become increasingly erratic, annoying, and dark; bad habits that have culminated in this year's bonkers story line about a very dead guy loudly shagging one of the show's very not-dead heroines.
All of Grey's—the good, the bad, the sexually stupendous ghost—can be pinned on Shonda Rhimes, the show's creator and producer. Rhimes belongs to that posse of TV savants—Aaron Sorkin, Joss Whedon, David E. Kelley, and on and on—who are the living embodiment of the auteur theory as it applies to television: writer/producers with a distinct sensibility, style, and syntax that they bring to project after project, week after week, for better and worse.
What's currently happening on Grey's is, absolutely, for worse, but it's also totally spectacular, in the way of Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and other infamous botch-ups (Ishtar, etc). It's not every day you get to watch uniquely talented artists fail at what they usually do best. Grey's no longer reliably delivers enjoyable television, but it does consistently provide the rare opportunity to see genius imploding in real time. Riveting stuff.
Should you choose to watch tonight's "event," here are two thoughts on the "why" of Grey's collapse: 1) At a certain point, showrunners get so powerful no one can say no to them, even when their ideas don't make sense. Rhimes wants to ax one lesbian story line that's working for ... another lesbian story line? Uh, sounds amazing? 2) Rhimes doesn't know exactly what makes her show any good. Take a look at what she's done to Addison Montgomery, the star of the wholly execrable Grey's spin-off Private Practice. On Grey's, Addison was classy, brassy, and smart, an adult among emotional adolescents. Now that she's got her own show, she's an insecure, boy-crazy head case. Rhimes didn't know what was great about Addison, even though she made her, and she doesn't know what's great about Grey's.
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