Business Items

• Review - The many unfortunate witticisms brought to mind by Twilight will be difficult to arrange into any coherent structure. Before I get to that, however, I need to defend myself.
  It’s not like I paid to see Twilight. Sure, I suppose the picture exacted an intellectual price, as well as a matter of time, but its purveyors received no material reward from me. As it happened, my Boxing Day was wholly unscheduled, and, when the early matinee of Doubt [see below] finished, Twilight was starting directly across the hall. At this point, the thin line between serendipity and sloth was crossed, under the rationalization of sociological research. I could’ve laid low until the 4pm movies began seating, but, instead, I let my curiosity regarding the popularity of a poorly-conceived morality tale get the better of me. That’s my defense.
  Given Twilight’s multitudinous failures, it’s difficult to decide which facet deserves primary criticism. There’s the question of whether the flick’s photographers wore out so many blue filters as to force Gary Sinise to start seeing the entirety of the visible light spectrum. To say that the lily white cast ends up looking wan is an understatement of the highest degree. Apparently all non-Native residents of the Pacific Northwest are borderline albino, regardless of their level of life or undeath.
  Plot…there are too many holes to merit a syntactically sound sentence. I’ve never been an adolescent girl, and that deficiency may be the root of my apoplexy. It would seem, however, that there’s no greater sign of male affection than the delivery of the kind of brow-furrowing stink-eye that even pyrokinetics save for occasions when, having been blindsided by a three-headed skunk with porcupine quills, they must concentrate on the beast’s incineration. There’s no other conclusion to reach, considering the primary courtship’s inexplicable progression. Skipping to the film’s end [Spoiler Alert!], the pains taken to maintain Bella’s human integrity are nonsensical; her initiation into the vampire lifestyle is the only possible resolution of the underlying existential conflict.
  The sequence [Spoiler Alert!] beginning with the interruption of the vampires’ baseball game would be offensively bad, regardless of context. I suppose credit should be given for mise-en-scene in the standoff between vampire sects, but the posturing therein is unforgivably derivative of the seminal dance fights from West Side Story and Thriller. Even more preposterous than the potential for ominous finger-snapping is the similarity between the battle with which that sequence culminates and the analogous one from Zombie Strippers. I suppose the implicit lesson is that, really, the world is a safe place, where even the juvenile humor occasionally heard from teenage boys is entirely neutered, and, thus, no less humorless than the rest of the flick.
  I won’t even get into the matter of casting, beyond speculation that very little of the production budget went to actors. Needless to say, there are many, “Where have I seen that douchebag?” moments.
  After a bit of reflection, all I can gleam from Twilight is some notion that, in a perfect world, every teenage girl would find a supernaturally powerful yet entirely non-threatening century-old boy devoted to keeping her intact, in every sense of the word, to whom to devote her formative years. “Non-threatening” is, of course, the appropriate adjective for any description of Twilight’s reality. It’s no wonder, then, that the movie is so damned atrocious.

• Review - Doubt is good. None of the bad things I just said about Twilight are true of Doubt. Well, it’s possible that a blue filter might’ve been put to use once or twice, but, if so, such application is benign. The cast is great, the writing is above-average, and its ambivalent denouement serves to reinforce its argument. Since praise isn’t funny, I’ll leave it at that.

• Single - For the first time in known history, Atlanta finds itself atop Forbes‘ “Best Cities for Singles” rankings. As an unattached resident of the Atlanta metro area who’s also under the age of 35, I’d say this victory speaks to the bleakness of mating in America.
  Looking at Forbes’ methodology, I see a few potential sources of confusion.
  The first is that no effort has been made to distinguish between sexual preferences. It’s a touchy subject, I know, and one to which standard statistics fail to speak. It’s also a matter of fact, however, that a measure of “never married” individuals that fails to discriminate between heterosexuals, gay men, and lesbians will be both misleading and useless to all three groups. The idea that “singles” numbers for Atlanta and San Francisco, Forbes’ top two cities, fail to be inflated by those localities’ roles as regional havens of diminished sexuality-based discrimination is implausible, particularly considering state governments’ irrational refusal of marriage rights to homosexual citizens.
  What other problems might I have with the methodology? The “coolness” metric is not only subjective, but also dependent on the view of people who likely have no direct experience of the cities they’ve been asked to judge. Solid municipal public relations do not the quality of life improve. The “culture” rating makes no claims of weighing elite universities any more highly than community colleges or world-class museums any higher than minor league sports teams; this is a measure of community involvement, not cultural standards. Including the frequency with which a city’s denizens make use of Match might be more applicable to a rating of widespread desperation than one of unwed social fecundity.

• Unemployment - As long as I’m ranting about statistics and their interpretation, I might as well inveigh against belief of the most-publicized unemployment report. More telling are the statistics reported under the sterilized heading “Alternative measures of labor underutilization.” Comparing U-6 and U-6, for instance, shows that the number of people “employed part time for economic reasons” is growing even faster than the number of people completely unemployed. Unfortunately, BLS’s refusal to report “total unemployment as a percent of the civilian work force plus all marginally attached workers” precludes any straightforward comparison between the swelling ranks of discouraged workers and the swelling ranks of the unemployed.

[Note: This post was edited a few minutes after its first posting, but it's still pretty weak. For Xmas, I gave myself even more editorial latitude than usual. Thus, you may notice at least two words of my own devising, as well as a complete break from my commonplace attempts to stay "on topic." I apologize to anyone who's disappointed.]

You know, compared to the rest of Western civilization, we really don’t have all that many holidays here in the states. Thanksgiving is about gluttony and football, Easter has something to do with hard-boiled eggs and the undead, and the summer-ish holidays - Labor Day, Independence Day, and Memorial Day - focus on watery intoxicants and the various manifestations of open flame. The yule tide panoply of holidays, however, claim a semantic relation to the act of giving, probably because, even in the pre-historic days of yore - the stress of gift exchange was enough to take one’s mind off the intemperate weather. It’s a bit like treating a headache by slamming your thumb with a hammer; the new, short-lived problem distracts from the enduring one. On the other hand, it could also have to do with the historic need to collaborate as stores and temperatures began to coterminously run low. [No, I have no qualms about splitting infinitives.] Regardless, in the spirit of giving, I will now attempt to provide the “1200 words describing what the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 (STP 2) says about Third-Wave Feminism” that I promised/threatened erstwhile Granite Stater and regular-season fantasy football front-runner Mark Stokes precisely 3 weeks ago. Needless to say, it’s an endeavor I undertake with a lack of enthusiasm reflecting the increasing amount of dread the DVD sitting on my desk has elicited throughout the duration.

In light of the varied builds displayed within the Sisterhood, it seems fair to reason that the Traveling Pants are  an ill-conceived device of experimental fiction, the connection within an adolescent cohort made material. As such, this flick might be considered a bastard, hermaphroditic child of magic realism and commercial young adult fiction, yet another example of a legitimate artistic movement’s subversion by Disney capitalism.

STP 2 makes no delay in the onset of its “woe is me” sentiment, beginning with the estrangement felt by the 4 primary characters now that they’ve dispersed to Brown, Yale, NYU, and RISD. Perhaps I’m the only one who noticed that those schools are too little far-flung to prevent their students from visiting each other on foot, given the time allowed by a long weekend. Much as the bottom is known as “scoring position” in wrestling parlance, this overwrought milieu, no matter how artificial, provides a situation from which the young women in question can assert their ensuing empowerment. [At this point, I don't know if I've seen even half the picture; one simply assumes it to be so predictable.]

Update: Yes, it is that predictable. Somewhere between 30 minutes and an eternity after composing the previous paragraph, I witnessed the blatant platitudinal condescension of America Ferrera delivering a line something like this: “What I learned this summer is that only I can diminish myself.” One has to admire the subtlety. [This is neither here nor there, but I might as well offer some NFL playoff predictions while I'm feeling Nostradamic. NFC: NYG, CAR, MIN, ARI, ATL, TB; AFC: TEN, PIT, NE, SD, IND, BAL.]

[By the by, did anyone know that Blythe Danner played Charlie and Alan's mother in the pilot episode of Two and a Half Men? Yes, IMDB is more engaging than STP 2.]

Returning to the stated purpose of this missive, STP 2 does a fair job of conveying the notion of solidarity without uniformity, which appears to be a big theme for the Third Wavers. [In my heretofore unprofessed ingorance on the subject, I'm deferring to the pertinent Wikipedia entry.] Hence, the characters’ dispersion and re-assembly, the array of disparate yet eerily similar experiences that aggregate to a whole, and the proscription against anything less than full disclosure that somehow fails to be perceived as either intrusive or distrustful. In all the sentimental soft-pedaling, however, one is left to ask: whither any mention of the LGBT issues often associated with an overtly feminist agenda?

Welcome, sweet relief! I’ll get no return on that 119 minutes of life, but I can look forward, as will many of you, to bathing my alimentary canal in naturally occurring L-Tryptophan, unnaturally occurring shortenings, and an incapacitating array of carbohydrates. Enjoy your holiday of choice!

• Date - Xmas Eve is upon us, and I hope everyone is handling their Festivus hangovers gracefully. If I’m not mistaken, such would be in keeping with the well-nigh timeless traditions of Saturnalia.

• Harassment - Considering the holiday lull, it comes as little surprise that this tale of sexual harassment, assault, and discrimination is making the internet rounds, eliciting such predictable responses as this. While I’m loathe to make light of unjust victimization, I was struck, when reading the story, by the fact that the lead had been buried. Sadly, “Waitress Get Sexually Harassed” is a “Dog Bites Man” story; “Restaurant Server Receives Health Benefits From Employer,” on the other hand, is a “Man Bites Dog” story. Then again, given the personal nature of the piece, as written, it may be an example of a cliche being a cliche a million times until it happens to you.
  Probably because I’m in the midst of reading The Political Brain, a cognitive investigation of political decision-making that is simultaneously partisan and substantive, well-written and abysmally copy-edited, I find myself pondering the underlying networks that shape my response to Rebekah Spicuglia’s anecdote - and those of each individual involved. One doubts, for instance, that the role Spicuglia’s alleged involvement with the “feminist mamasphere” - and what one assumes to be that collective’s work toward the obsolescence of paternity - can be overstated when describing the harsh light by which my limbic system might view her work. More pertinent might be the question of whether or not the man or men in question felt themselves to have been rebuffed with sufficient violence to convey the point of rejection, particularly considering that the restaurant in question resides in Kennesaw, the only municipality known to require firearm and ammunition ownership of its homeowners. Even more pertinent is the precarious position in which the aggrieved woman finds herself, having postured for a lawsuit without first creating any measure of material evidence.
  Update: What with me having a penis and all, I’m hesitant - though likely less than I should be - about commenting on the role of sexuality in the hospitality industry, particularly as it relates to female servers. Luckily, the woman writing this post felt no such reluctance.

• Gratitude - Thanks to those of you who heeded my enjoinder to contribute to This American Life. For your enjoyment, and as a matter of anticipatory obsequiousness toward potential philanthropists, I offer this link to Steve Martin’s timeless SNL bit reciting Xmas wishes. [Yes, that sentence was written with its Fog Index in mind.]
  As elder brother and entrenched Broolynite Miles Kafka notes - and gains extra credit for attempting to use a semi-colon in the process (Consult your wife, but I don’t believe that connecting a statement to a question is technically proper usage.) - this was, perhaps, the first earnest “call to action” in the history of this forum. Considering the many worthy causes in search of funding, from sending starving kids the paste on which they subsist to paying the quarrelsome attorneys who take up sometimes onerous causes pro bono in the name of retaining the civil liberties upon which participatory democracy relies, the matter of providing an aging hipster’s podcast with the necessary bandwidth is a rather quotidian one. If it makes you feel better, you can think of it as an effort to mend the remnants of the Great Society movement. Back in the land of reality, this podcast sets itself aside from the many other worthy causes by representing a quality of life issue that can be directly affected by minimal contribution or effort. Unlike guinea worms or any number of North Korean slave laborers, I would notice if it were gone.