Hippo Dignity

In the focus group I did with HIV+ people on Sunday, someone raised a really interesting point. There used to be all sorts of movies about AIDS, all with the same inevitable theme — death. Someone gets AIDS, and they have to set their affairs in order, or reunite with their family, or even sue for their rights, as in Philadelphia. I loved Tom Hanks in that movie, but he still died in the end.

Nowadays, with antiretrovirals, there’s not as obvious a dramatic arc. Tom Hanks gets HIV, goes on ARVs, and lives happily ever after in that loft with Antonio Banderas. That’s not a story! So stories about people living with HIV are just a lot less common these days, outside of some gay-oriented media that doesn’t always make it overseas. (Given the importance that Christianity and Zulu traditional spirituality, both extremely conservative, play in the lives of the people I’ve met here, I can’t imagine Queer As Folk going over big in Kwa-Zulu Natal.)

However, that doesn’t mean that all those “HIV and then death” stories aren’t still out there — movies, especially, have a long afterlife. And so the belief that AIDS is always already a death sentence persists and is reinforced. The question then becomes: how do you tell a mainstream story in which someone’s survival on ARV isn’t miraculous or presented as a great triumph, but just the ordinary order of things?

I was too annoyed with Virginia Heffernan’s recent piece on the way new online “franchising” opportunities for TV shows may or may not help make them a hit to take the time to write up a response to it. Luckily for me, Maura had more time to spare, so I point you to her.

Pull quote:

i think what heffernan’s argument really boils down to is the fact that, generally speaking, scripted shows that are adored by self-proclaimed tv connoiseurs–from your alessandra stanleys to your twop message-board denizens–don’t really do well on a mass level in general….but the online chatter, ancillary fantasy worlds, and general obsessing about those sorts of shows creates the illusion of greater popularity than there really may be

(Yes, she doesn’t use proper capitalization. We’ve mentioned it to her, yes. We love her regardless.)

Read the whole thing here.

Dramatis Personae: Me and Lisa, who have had tickets since February, and Max, who delightfully was available to step in when Lisa’s mother couldn’t use her ticket.

Max: I… I just saw Ian McKellen’s bits.
Me: You really didn’t read any coverage of this play, did you?
Max: You mean, you knew?
Lisa: It’s been in all the articles.
Max: Was that why you bought the tickets?

So, my timing in posting about changing distribution models turned out to be pretty good after all, because today Steve Jobs announced the iTunes integration deal with Starbucks.

Once again, Maura is right: this is a super-smart deal. First, Apple and Starbucks are aiming for much the same middle-class, style-and-status-conscious audience, and they are both trying to sell that audience music. Second, both the iTunes store and Starbucks have gotten into the business of not just selling music, but packaging up music on their own — the “iTunes exclusives” for ITMS, and the Hear Music label for Starbucks. Integrate the two, and you’ve got a fairly healthy, easy-to-use distribution channel that totally sidesteps the majors — and which will make Starbucks’s Hear Music label only more appealing to the sort of former Top 10 stars the labels hideously call “legacy artists.” (The sort of people who buy legacy artists tend o be older, and also, therefore less likely to be comfortable with tools like BitTorrent.)

New distribution channels, new models, new ways of thinking about selling music. You knew they were going to have to come from outsiders, but I didn’t expect them to come with my double tall soy latte.

ObDisclaimer: GE, NBCU’s parent company, is a client of my employer’s, but my opinions are my own, and not those of anyone I work for or with.

It’s an interesting coincidence that two stories about big changes at media companies happened to hit at just about the same time. Lynn Hirschberg’s profile of Rick Rubin must have been in the works at the NYT magazine for quite literally months — they can’t have known that NBCUniversal would sever its relationship with iTunes at the very same time their story hit the streets. But it’s a sweet coincidence, because both of these stories are, in a way, about the same thing: the failure of the big media conglomerates to know how to deal with the way digital distribution is ripping a hole in their traditional profit model.
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In the quite literally mind-bending Devorah Sperber exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, in front of “After Picasso (Gertrude Stein).” Dramatis personæ: two older women, part of the First Saturday crowd.

Woman #1: Do you think she made that herself?
Woman #2: The artist?
Woman #1: Gertrude Stein.
Woman #2: (a bit nonplussed) No, that’s not… Anyway, isn’t she dead?
Woman #1: That doesn’t mean she couldn’t have made this.

At this point, I had to walk away.

In my almost-nonexistent standing as a Stein Expert, or at least a person who has read more Gertrude Stein than most, I think she would like the piece, as long as she saw it as a celebration of Picasso rather than a critique of him. I don’t think the work necessarily takes a stand on Picasso either way. But I do that that Sperber’s use of spools of sewing thread, the tools of a feminized craft, to revisit masterworks of the western art canon is a form of feminist critique about a billion times subtler and more interesting than most of what I saw in the Global Feminisms exhibit, which felt almost unbearably obvious and dated. (The Kara Walker wall being a notable exception - I always forget how tremendous her work is in person. Remind me next time, will you?)

When I was in college, and working as a temp in midtown over the summer, I would take lunches sometimes in the public space in the ground floor of the Philip Morris building.  There was a gallery associated with some New York museum, I forget which, though I remember the Laurie Anderson retrospective that was hung there.  The space also had a nice set of steps well-proportioned for sitting and reading, and tables where one could sit and eat. I think the space is still open to the public, although it’s now the Altria Group building, you could go check it out for yourself.

Anyway, I worked a series of lame temp jobs in that general area, and would go there for lunch whenever I could, so I can’t tell you exactly when this happened.  But one day, my head was still half in the book I’d been reading as I walked towards the stairs and the door, and I didn’t notice the guy sitting on the steps until I’d tripped over his foot.

“Oh!” I said when I recovered.  “I’m –”

And then I stopped.  Because I realized I’d tripped over Kurt Vonnegut.

Now, when you trip over some random man’s foot in the lobby of the Philip Morris building, you don’t expect it to be the author whose books you collected in a series of matched trade paperbacks through high school and into college.  And when you’re as lousy at face recognition as I am, you certainly don’t expect to know that person on sight.

I was struck utterly dumb.  He smiled, did one of those “don’t worry about it” nod things, and I walked off on my way.  I spent most of the rest of the day alternating between wishing I’d said something more and knowing that perhaps that wouldn’t have been the right moment to say anything anyhow.

What strikes me now, mumblety-odd years on and not having thought of that story in years, is not just the sweetly New York oddity of authors being so thick on the ground that one is tripping over them, but how nice he was about the whole thing, the getting overlooked and then the starstruck silence.  He was a mensch, take him all in all.  I still have a couple of those trade paperbacks, too.

Ten years ago today, the first episode of a not particularly promising TV show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer aired on a second-rate network. We all know how that worked out.

Buffy had a tremendous influence on pop culture, is an acknowledged inspiration for shows ranging from Alias to Grey’s Anatomy, and perhaps most importantly for me at the time, it had a young, strong, capable heroine who could doubt, fear, and even resent her true self, but was no less heroic for it. She was a fully-realized, three-dimensional, action hero. It’s still all too rare to see a female character like that on TV, and in fact the chipping away of the character of Buffy herself in the last two years of the show’s run suggests how hard it still is to create and maintain a strong female lead in a mainstream media production.

What was also important for me, as I started to realize that academic life wasn’t the right path for me, was how rich an interpretative text the show could be. The writing was smart, and funny, and full of dense references outside itself and within its own universe, in ways that I could sink my critical teeth into. (Insert your own vampire joke here, please.) I think in some ways both Buffy and Buffy helped me walk away from who I thought I was going to be, and I’m better for it. (Plus, of course, my blog name’s a quote from the show.)

One of the things I think about more now than I did when it was on the air is the extent to which Buffy the Vampire Slayer assumes a certain media-culture literacy shared between its viewers and its characters. Which is to say, it’s a sci-fi/fantasy/horror show whose characters are also fans of sci-fi/fantasy/horror shows.

It took a full 30 years of TV before television shows started showing us families sitting around watching TV on The Simpsons and Roseanne. Joss Whedon, a former Roseanne writer, gave us Buffy, trying to convince Giles of supernatural goings-on, exclaiming “I cannot believe that you, of all people, are trying to Scully me!” I don’t think this is necessarily better, or worse, than what came before, but a sign of the maturity of the form.

It also serves as a sort of dog-whistle to the fans of the genre, signaling that the people behind a given show share your references and your tastes, and won’t let you down. It can be a crutch for poor writing — have the character recognize the similarity of his or her predicament to the plot of the movie you’re ripping off — but it can also be a way to enrich the plot experience for the viewer, by having the character recognize the same genre cliche she has, and route around it.

I hope that Buffy’s truest lasting contribution won’t be just this self-awareness, but the vision that especially in the first seasons it held out — you can get through almost anything with friends, a good mentor, and the willingness to occasionally, when necessary, plunge a stake into Evil’s heart. After that, of course, there’s the prom.

Me, today in a meeting: “Il n’ya pas de hors-interface.”

From IM this morning.

maura: Top Searches:
1. Saddam Execution Video
2. Saddam
3. Saddam Hussein
4. Saddam Video
5. Saddam Execution
6. Miss Nevada

maura: oh, america.