Teen Vampire Queen Has Tantrum

Stephenie Meyer is no J. K. Rowling.

The, er, traditionally-minded Mormon mother of three and creator of the popular (among girls) Twilight vampire teen novel series (about to hit movie theaters) is being silly.

Apparently, the incomplete manuscript of her fifth novel in the series--the series is actually over, the fifth novel was just a money-maker which re-told the first novel from the boy's point of view, yawn--was leaked to the internet. The novel wasn't even close to finished and the leaked MS had a lot of mistakes, etc.

So the author has decided to discontinue working on the book.

Wow.

Seriously? I can imagin a setback like that giving you pause. I can imagine it giving you menopause. But listen to this: "This has been a very upsetting experience for me, but I hope it will at least leave my fans with a better understanding of copyright and the importance of artistic control ... I feel too sad about what has happened to continue working on "Midnight Sun," and so it is on hold indefinitely."

Now if that doesn't sound like Meyer is punishing people, especially her rabid fans, who are definitely the ones spreading the leak around, then I don't know what does.

What do you think? How would you respond to such a betrayal of confidence? Would you want to punish your fans for loving your work too much?

Aaaannd The Inappropriate Teen Sex Starts Again

Yay! The new TV season has FINALLY started!

If it feels like it's been forever, let me just remind you that the strike last season caused all narrative television to break off in the fall and resume inadequately, and sporadically, the following spring.

So it actually has been forever since we got to catch up with our favorite fictional characters. And in most cases--well, in all cases--I've started caring a lot less about them.

Let me just take a moment here to tell the stupid stupid network executives DIRECTLY that I will entirely STOP caring about any show that doesn't show full episodes online. No, I will not buy a TV, much less get cable, just to watch some TV show. I have Netflix, I can wait, but your ratings can't. I'm willing to put up with the commercials, so bring it on.

Here are the cases where I still kinda care:

Thank oG Gossip Girl is back to showing full episodes online. They had stopped after the strike break last season, and were only showing teasers. As a result, I missed the last four or six episodes and am probably going to have to download them from iTunes or something. Ugh. No, I haven't watched the season premiere yet. I'm not yet caught up.

I just want to say that I don't just love Gossip Girl for itself--for its energy and freshness--but also because it is based on a series of novels. That's the second recent TV show (after Dexter) to do that and I think it has opened up a world of exciting possibilities, especially for cable TV. The traditional filming of popular novels into two-hour adaptations really only works for short novels with very strong, three-to-five-act structures. (Think A Room With A View, Sense and Sensibility, etc.) Longer novels, with more epic scope, get the life crushed out of them in film (Think Vanity Fair or any Anna Karenina adaptation) because you're trying to compress 15 or 20 hours worth of story into 2.

But dramatic series on TV? Perfect! I can't wait for the inevitable season-long dramatic adaptation of a longer novel. (No, mini-series don't count.) There could be a channel whose entire purpose is single-season novel adaptations. Awesome!

I've already talked about my excitement over the transgender contestant in the new America's Next Top Model, so I won't reiterate. The premiere is tomorrow night (Sept 3) on the CW.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles premieres next Monday the 8th on Fox, despite its unwieldy name. This show is the true inheritor of the Buffy legacy, because it's the only one in which there is a truly strong, yet flawed, physically kickass female protagonist who is a true leader. That was the real appeal of Buffy, all clever dialogue and martial arts aside, and that's the true appeal of Sarah Connor.

Heroes has a three hour premiere event on NBC on September 22, but I'm not sure I'm even going to bother. Last season (only their second) was so boring and annoying that I often forgot to watch it, and my excitement about it is almost gone. Bringing back Skylar--or whatever his name is--was a huge mistake and I don't care to see how they get themselves out of it. ... Okay, I'm a little curious, but not that much. We'll see.

Ugly Betty and Grey's Anatomy premiere on Sept. 25 on ABC. Love Betty, loathe Grey's, but it sucked me back in this summer when there was nothing but reality to watch. Chuck premieres Sept 29  and Life premieres Oct 3 on NBC. Neutrality here.

Can someone please put Eli Stone out of my misery? I like Jonny Lee Miller, despite his crazy stalker-like relationship with Angelina "I steal colored kids" Jolie, but this show actually makes me feel embarassed every time I watch it.

That's all for now. I might watch some of the new ones. Might not.

Here's a schedule of premiere dates. Here's a grid of the fall schedule. Plus, here's lineup/breakdown of the new dramatic series.

So what's your poison this season? And when does it premiere?

Is Palin Covering Up Her Daughter's First Pregnancy?

So have a look at the picture above of the Palin family children. The girl on the right is Sarah Palin's 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, holding Trig, the baby born in April with Down Syndrome.

Trig is supposedly Bristol's youngest sibling. But the rumors have it that Trig is not Sarah's son ... he's Bristol's.

It's these rumors that prompted the family to come clean about another potential scandal: Bristol is pregnant (again?). McCain's camp claim that they knew about the pregnancy when they vetted Palin and are okay with it. Well, sure, if it seals the campaign's pro-life stance, why not?

So here's the deal:

March 2008: Palin announces she's seven months pregnant, although no one, not even her aides, had noticed anything different about her. She looked as trim as ever and even modeled for Vogue during her supposed pregnancy. This article emphasizes that she doesn't look pregnant (perhaps they suspected something) over and over again.

April 2008: Palin is in Texas delivering a speech when she supposedly starts leaking amniotic fluid. She finishes her speech, boards a plane, flies from Texas to Alaska, and then gives birth, at the age of 44, to a Down Syndrome child, a month early. Yeah, I don't believe it either.

August 2008: After her candidacy is announced, rumors that Trig is Bristol's kid surface immediately. To quash the rumors, Palin announces Bristol's current pregnancy, saying that she's five months along. Now let's do the math. Trig is born on April 18 or 19. Even if Bristol got pregnant the very next day, she'd still be only a little over four months along. Right?

Except ... suppose this is all a lie. What if Trig really wasn't Palin's baby? It would make sense then to withold the information until the last possible minute, so that people wouldn't be obsessing over Palin's lack of a baby bump. Especially if Bristol didn't tell her parents about the baby until very late and they couldn't make other arrangements. In fact, six pounds is a low birthweight for a full-term baby, but not unreasonable if a 16/17 year old didn't tell her parents she was pregnant and wasn't taking care of herself. What if the baby didn't come early, but they planned to let on that he did, so that the scrutiny of Palin's baby bump--and of her family--would be minimal?

And what if, now, they've exaggerated the progress of Bristol's pregnancy and plan to claim that her current pregnancy ends early, too? She could conceivably (get it? conceivably?) be three months pregnant, or even four.

So why all of this? Well--this is pure speculation, and everything could be exactly as the Palins say it is--but suppose Bristol is an angry young woman. She's 16, she's been ignored by her political animal mother pretty much since birth (Bristol would have been born around 1991 or 92, right when her mother was ascending to her first city council job), and all she wants to do is get her parents' attention, get back at them for putting her mother's political career first.

So she finds a boyfriend and deliberately gets pregnant ... or accidentally on purpose gets pregnant. But then her nerve fails her--or else this is part of her plan--and she doesn't tell her folks until it's really really too late.

Unfortunately for Bristol, a governor (that's a winner of elections to you) knows how to turn such things to advantage and, knowing that the McCain camp is sniffing around, Palin realizes that having a baby right now will raise her value through the roof. Upon pain of death Bristol is sworn to secrecy (or maybe she goes along with it, hatching a new plan) and they keep the swollen Bristol out of the limelight (how do they do this? Who knows? There are no pictures of her or articles about her at this time. Did they keep her home from school?)

Bristol's revenge is to get knocked up again right away. Now they have to let her have it herself. How will this play out?

Well, even if none of my little speculative fiction is true, let's think about the kind of family it is, in which a 17-year-old girl gets pregnant while her mother is being vetted for the office of vice president. This is clearly not a girl who gives a shit about her mother's political career. This is clearly a girl with an issue. This is clearly not a girl who is affected by her parents' born-again abstinence thang. This is clearly not a girl whose parents are watching her very closely. Wonder why the media isn't focusing on that.

ETA: Okay, most of the media reporting on this didn't mention which bloggers were circulating the rumors, but I finally found out that it's the Daily Kos. They did the same speculation job I did but did a much more thorough job. Turns out, Bristol was removed from school for 5-8 months for mononucleosis. Right.

Transwomen, America's Next Top Model, and Storytelling

I'm so excited about America's Next Top Model this season having a transgender model competing that I'm actually going to watch it!

This is a whole new reality TV narrative. We know how long the bitchy girls last (right up to near the end, so they can create more drama) but we don't know what narrative they're going to put Isis (the transgender model) in. Will it be a simple story of the other girls' bigotry? Will she be there to make some of the girls look good because they accept her and are all extra tolerant 'n' shit? Will she be a sort of tragic translatto, accepted by neither, rejected by both, and anguished beyond all measure?

Or will this actually be a window for mainstream America to look in on transgendered life?

...

Psych! Truthformation is not entertaining, folks! Truthiness is what's driving Americ@! But don't worry, we'll be keeping an eye on this down EnterBrainment way.

Any bets on what Isis' narrative will be? The season premieres on September 3 (that's next Wednesday!) In the meantime, watch her vid above or here.

Slut-shaming and Perez Hilton's Girly Demographic

We knew celeb gossip queen Perez Hilton's readers were all female, right? Well, mostly female. The pink layout of his website would pretty much tell you that right away, even if his celebsession wouldn't.

But it's interesting to get a confirmation that team Perez knows its demographic. I just signed up for a username on his site and the sign up form is above. As you can see, the defaults are set at 23-year-old females, and the security question defaults to "favorite celebrity."

It's particularly interesting, then, that his ruling narrative revolves around original sin (i.e. fornication) and shaming primarily the celebrity women who engage in it (too much). Salon's Broadsheet picked up on his ongoing bashing of "Sluttyienna Miller" last week, and pointed to feminist blog Jezebel's column "Missdemeanors," that chronicles the misogynist things gossip columnists (especially Perez) say. 

Welcome back to Missdemeanors, in which we accuse gossip bloggers of Crimes Against Womanity. We do this because the gossip industry is sexist, and only getting worse. These people are paid to write "gossip" but, 99% of the time, the words they use to go with celebrity pictures denigrate, critique, belittle and objectify women.

Too true. So my question is: why are young women so addicted to these sites? I mean, isn't this supposed to be the inheritor generation, the one that inherits the benefits fought for by the first three waves of feminism? Why is this the generation that so gleefully flocks to misogynist fundamentalist churches, frequents slut-shaming gossip sites, and doesn't even know what "Ms." (the term, not the magazine) is?

Well, I pass on explaining the whole generation, but Perez I can take a whack at. The gossip queen himself has stated very articulately that gossip needs to be an ongoing narrative. The easiest and most basic narrative in our culture is the morality play. And we don't need Arthur Miller to tell us that people love to be part of an accusatory mob.

Plus, there's something about celebrities that brings out the worst in us. We identify with them and want to be them, but their bad behavior can also get glued to their success and looks (both of which are beyond us mortals) so that we don't feel so bad about not having the latter.

I'm wondering if girls who engage in this stuff do it without connecting Perez's outrageously misogynist treatment of women to the misogynist treatment that they themselves receive. For my part, I really enjoyed Perez's site for many months, but over time the toxic atmosphere poisoned my enjoyment. I couldn't stand the constant evaluation of women's looks. So I still pop my head in there when I need information--Perez is still the best source--but I don't have a feed anymore.

What do you think? Is it that girls are not noticing the sexist connection, or that they are taking out their frustration at the sexism they experience on other women?

Plus, read this new Wired profile of Perez.

Jason Statham and the New Male Sex Symbol

So I went to a preview screening of Jason Statham's new flick Death Race Tuesday, and it was so forgettable that I didn't even remember to write about it here.

But something has jogged my memory and reminded me of something that really puzzled me when I watched the movie: who is this all for?

I mean, obviously, this is for the 14-24 white male crowd, as all stupid action flicks are.

But the slow-mo scans of hot women's bodies are so minor and perfunctory that they might as well not even be in there. The only slo-mo in the whole movie is the one or two scenes when the gratuitous hot women get out of a bus or car. And it literally cuts into the action in a way that must be annoying even to horny 14 year old boys. (Note to horny 14 year old boys: alpha dogs in men's prisons do not get hot chicks bused in. Sorry.)

So whose body are they enthusiastically pornifying? Well, Jason Statham's, of course. Throughout the flick the camera lingers lovingly on his muscles, the breadth of his shoulders, his muscles, the way his shirts hug his muscles, his muscles, the sinews in his arms, his muscles, his pecs, his muscles, etc. There's even a totally gratuitous porn moment where he's doing pull ups on a sort of ceiling grid and the camera scans his musclely back for, I swear, at least 60 long seconds. (You can see a brief flash of this scene in Today's Vid to the upper right.)

So I ask again: who is this all for? Is it for that vast audience of gay men action fans? Is it to draw in the wimmin (who, quite honestly, might be intrigued by Death Race because one of the hotties bused in to the prison turns out to be a strong, smart, brave character, and the big baddie is a woman, played by Joan Allen, whom a prisoner calls the "baddest ass" in the prison)? Or is this muscle porn entirely for the enjoyment of supposedly straight, horny, 14 year old boy action fans?

I have no clue. I really don't.

But I'll tell you this much: if it's aimed at the action genre's typical fans, it worries me. Are we seeing the beginning of an attempt to sell an ideal male body type to teenaged boys? Are they supposed to feel inadequate when they look at Statham's body and run to spend their pennies on free weights? (or maybe make up for it by spending their money on canisters of nos?) Are we going to see male anorexia or teenaged male weight-lifting addictions sprouting up all over the place?

Gor, do we need this?

What do you think? Am I on the wrong track?

Vin Diesel Directing Fast and Furious Prequel

Here's news to get my liberal heart and my gossipy soul pounding in unison.

Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Michelle Rodriguez, and Sung Kang will all be in Fast and Furious, the fourth installment of the The Fast and the Furious franchise.

Fast and Furious will be a direct sequel of the first movie, while the other two were more spin-offs. I dig Paul Walker 'cuz he's hot, but I dig Vin Diesel more for reasons outlined here.

Michelle Rodriguez, aside from being in some awesome movies (especially Girlfight), and being a Latina actress who takes Latina roles that are mostly, arguably not stereotypes, is an out lesbian in Hollywood. That takes steel ovaries.

Sung Kang is an Asian American actor whose rise through community films like Better Luck Tomorrow have the entire Asian American community at his back, can do very little wrong in my book.

Plus, Justin Lin is directing this movie.

But the best part, the bestest bestest part, is that Vin Diesel will be directing a 20 minute prequel to the whole franchise, starring everybody.

Sigh. Some days are just really good news days. (Via.)

Big-breasted Women Dancing in Their Bras

An object lesson on the male gaze:

Look at the video above, a Playtex bra ad of large-breasted women dancing in nothing but their bras--in joy over their comfort and fit.

Just the description "large-breasted women dancing in their bras" should bring in random male web surfers looking for masturbation material. They'll be disappointed because, although the women shake their moneymakers and look directly back at the camera, the whole commercial is shot for the female gaze.

The ad is not supposed to turn you on sexually. Instead, it's supposed to create a sense of shared positive emotions. The women in the ad are inviting other women to watch, share the joy, and join in the dance. The women are dancing for equals, not judges and approvers.

I love this series of ads by Playtex, just as I loved the Dove soap Campaign for Real Beauty. And it's not because I'm unaware that these are cyncial Madison Avenue ploys for national discussion and attention. I know. I grew up in this country too.

And it's not because Dove isn't just as evil as other corporations. (See Today's Vid.)

But even the cyncial calculation that showing real women as if they were (gasp!) beautiful will get people talking about your product enough to up your market share ... helps. Because our entire advertising and marketing complex is ruled by the male gaze. So acknowledging that there is a female gaze, you know, at all, and providing that female gaze with something worth looking at is, sadly, somewhat radical.

What's really sad though is that this will not effect any real transformation. Agencies are doing this because it's still shocking to act as if normal-looking women are attractive. If this were ever to stop being shocking, the ads would lose their value and we'd just go back to default, which is to present the most sexually titillating women.

Because women will look at bimbos, but men won't look at the ordinary. Or so goes the conventional wisdom. I'm not sure I believe that. What do you think?

Angelina Regenders Hollywood

This item is short but sweet: Angelina Jolie is being seriously considered for a leading action role previously linked to ... wait for it ... Tom Cruise.

No, she's not gender-bending; they're rewriting the role for her.

How cool is that? That a woman has enough star power -- and action star power at that -- to get a script regendered to suit her.

The downside is, of course, that Cruise was detached from the project because he wanted too much money. So the obvious conclusion to draw here is that Angelina, the queen of Hollywood to Cruise's once-but-not-future king, even with a potentially expensive rewrite, can command so much less of a fee that it's worth their while to go with her.

So now I'm all ambivalent. What do you think?

Scrappy Doo Syndrome

I think it's usually called "Cousin Oliver Syndrome," after the kid they tried to bring in to save The Brady Bunch. But I'm talking about a very slightly different syndrome here: not the cute kid they bring in to young-up the aging cast, but rather the subgroup of Cousin Olivers who intrude annoyingly into every plot by being stupid and aggressive, and putting themselves and everyone else into danger.

Like Scrappy Doo.

I just identified this one recently in the third installment of "The Mummy" movie franchise (with Brendan Fraser) in which they introduce a now-adult son, Alex, who looks about five years younger than his dad, and is bratty and aggressive without intelligence, charm, or any other sort of stature a fictional character requires to become sympathetic. Because he's now an adult, he gets to share all the ass-kicking with his parents, plus acquires all of the romance part. But he's an annoying Scrappy Doo who distracts and detracts from the characters we're really interested in and adds nothing.

Another recent Scrappy Doo is the Iskierka character in the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik, a fire-breathing young dragon utterly without charm who puts everyone in danger because of her thoughtless bloodthirstiness and greed. She was introduced at the end of the third book and has been a drag on the series ever since. (Naturally, she comes in at a point when Temeraire begins to lose the sweetness of innocence and is ready to assert himself as an equal partner in his relationship with Laurence. She's there to make sure we still have our young-dragon hit.)  Novik manages to balance her personality among a number of others, but there's no pleasure in reading about her for me.

This is the same problem with Dawn Summers in the Buffy series. No teenager is really that annoying. She was an adult's idea of a teenager in a show that was about the teenager's idea of a teenager: she was a whiny, stupid teenager incapable of learning lessons, and affecting everyone adversely with her years-long acting out, in a show in which all the other characters had started out as kickass, mature, responsible, knowledgeable, sophisticated, and witty teenagers. Dawn was a box of rocks who, despite being raised by an older sister who fought demons for a living, could never learn not to go wandering off by herself at night. I guess that's supposed to be humorous. You know: irony.

The thing is, the pleasure of young characters--children or teenagers--in a book, or film, or TV show for adult audiences, lies in watching them learn and grow and make choices. The milestones for youth are very clear to adults, and there's a great satisfaction in watching youthful characters pass these. But part of the satisfaction is in watching them pay for their mistakes, or exchange some of the innocence of youth for the sadder wisdom of experience.

Youthful characters who never grow or grow up are inserted into series and franchises as permanent cute vendors. Somehow they are expected to bring the youth-freshness ingredient to the bake-off over and over again because Hollywood seems to think that a character merely embodying the most obvious characteristics of youth (cuteness and whininess) will automatically charm us or call forth our tenderness. They also seem to think that a permanent state of youthful idiocy is funny. But Hollywood thinks a lot of things that aren't so. Hollywood never seems to learn that the youth-freshness ingredient is a combo of a cute face and a satisfying bildungs-arc.

(At least with Novik we can be sure that Iskierka will grow up. I hope it happens soon, though.)

What are your most hated Scrappy Doo characters? (Plus, check out this article on TV's most hated characters, and this one on seven signs your TV show has jumped it.)

Cross-posted on SeeLight.

Kelly Kapoor And The Importance of Pop

It's International Blog Against Racism Week (IBARW) and I'm coming in to it late. Here's my first post for that. You can participate, too! Just go here and read the instructions.

Via Hyphen, I found this clip from Letterman featuring Mindy Kailing, a.k.a. Kelly Kapoor from the TV show The Office.

She's not just an actor on the show, but also a writer, which is cool. But what's really fun here is that she talks about being an Indian American actor who can't do an Indian accent. She had to learn by studying Apu. I'm so glad that she can have her success without it, because it's a common failing among Asian American actors, and one that has kiboshed many a career.

Also cool is her story about how she got her name, "Mindy." Her parents, needing an English name, named her after the Pam Dawber character in Mork and Mindy. That's right, TV.

This is also a theme in Asian America: the strange provenance of English names. I have a friend who immigrated to the States as a young child. When she started school, a well-meaning teacher told her that she couldn't use her Chinese name, she had to have an English one. So, being a child obsessed with Wonder Woman, she chose Diana.

I've heard other such stories, so when people get all contemptuous of pop culture, I have to think again. If pop culture is how people in other countries understand what it is to be American, if pop culture is the tool that immigrants use to ease their transition and to help their children become Americans, then it's not just a silly surface thing, is it?

Pop culture is popular culture, meaning not just that everybody likes it, but that it's the culture of the people. The people at large, that is, not an elite minority. It's the culture that people actually use to understand the world, or to find their place in it.

So when people use pop culture for important things, like naming their children, or themselves, that's more than appropriate. It's just, plain cool.

Ludacris/Obama Boo-boo and Cartoons

Hoo boy.

This is why entertainment and politics don't mix, people: Rapper Ludacris met with Obama in Chicago and came away inspired enough to write, record, and release a song about his Obama-feelings. In "Obama is Here" (see YouTube video above or here) Ludacris talks about how much Obama likes him, calls Hillary a "bitch," says McCain should only occupy a chair if he's paralyzed, and calls Bush, essentially, a retard.

As Jay Smooth points out, Ludacris is just doing what he always does, praising his friends and insulting his enemies. But this is politics, not hip-hop, and a stray word here can sink an entire campaign. By being stupid, Ludacris has put Obama in an impossible position, one in which he has to repudiate the rapper's remarks, without alienating the rapper's public.

It's, interestingly enough, very similar to what happened with the New Yorker cartoon controversy, where The New Yorker was also just doing what it always does--satirizing a national political situation using a trenchant cartoon--but managed to stray into someone else's territory, where the rules are different.

In this case, they were wandering into the realm of critique of media portrayals of race, an area previously reserved to people of color groups. The main objection to TNY satirizing media portrayals of the Obamas stated that their cartoon was racist. But this is patently absurd. The real problem with the cartoon was that white editors and writers were making comments about a topic that they'd previously ignored--and that only blacks had commented on before.

But this is what's happening all over with Obama's amazing candidacy: the borders between entertainment and politics, between identity politics and national politics, and between media critique and public critique, are breaking down. Whoda thunk it? We just thought Obama would be revolutionary in pictures!

Do You Websurf Like a Girl?

In case you didn't know what gender you were, the internet and the Olympic committee are here to help.

That's right, your gender identity is that important to the world!

Apparently, the Chinese have set up a lab to do gender testing on allegedly female Olympians, to make sure they're actually women. 'Cause it's so rewarding for dudes to win sporting events that they'd actually pretend to be wimmin to do it ... for the rest of their lives.

Although the reasoning behind the testing is weak, the testing itself is weaker. Apparently, people with XY chromosomes can be insensitive to male hormones, allowing them to develop female genitalia (although not female internal reproductive organs) and have no male advantage in sports. Yet these people would test as "male" for such a purpose. Santhi Soundarajan, a world-class Indian athlete, was caught in a just such a bind last year. She attempted suicide.

So, is the reward for sportswomanship greater than the punishment for genderqueerness? Is there really such a danger from Male-to-female transsexuals that athletic organizations must guard women's sports against them? Or is this just another example of fear of the queer?

On a more fun note, this dewd has created a script that examines your internet browsing history and tells you whether you're more likely to be male or female, that is, whether you hit sites that more men or more women tend to frequent.

Naturally, my browsing is very celebrity-heavy, so I'm "97% likely" to be female. That genderedness of browsing doesn't surprise me. But the fact that google and yahoo are more female does.

How about you? What gender does your browsing for you?

(Both stories via.)

Fairies 'n' Stuff

So, in less than two weeks, Justine Larbalestier will release her fourth book How to Ditch Your Fairy.

Yes, it's about fairies.

And yes, it's young adult fiction. The heroine, who is fourteen and can't drive yet, doesn't appreciate her parking fairy and wants to get a new one. Hilarity ensues.

I've read all of Justine's YA books and if you enjoy YA, or even just good storytelling, you don't want to miss this one.

Here's an excerpt she posted on her website, if you want to get the drift of the novel, and her writing style.

Enjoy!