As I’ve already mentioned in a previous post, I’m back in school, so I feel like it’s my duty to share some awesome learning with you. After the piracy debate broke out between Evan and Gordon a little while back I settled on the perfect topic: how piracy saved American literature. Or, as we have been learning in my Canadian Literature class, how British Imperialism screwed over early Canadian writers. Quick, name 5 great Canadian writers! If you are anything like me you probably weren’t able to think up more than one or two. There are a lot more than that, by the way, you just have to look a little harder… and not necessarily in Canada.

To my everlasting shame as a Canadian, Margaret Atwood was actually the only author I could think of when asked this question.

In contrast, if I asked you to list off some of the most foundational writers of American Literature I’m sure you would find it as easy as I did. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Twain, Steinbeck and Poe might come to mind, just to name a few. So why were so many great writers able to find publishers and flourish in the United States? Well, one reason is probably because Americans started pirating all their copies of British books after that little disagreement they had with the motherland near the end of the 18th century.

As Andrew Richard Albanes explains in his interview with Robert Spoo on The Golden Age of Piracy:

“foreign works in this period were denied U.S. copyrights—meaning any publisher could simply reprint and sell them—the American publishing industry was built more or less on “lawful” piracy… In fact, it enabled a literacy movement to take root, a reading culture that could never have happened otherwise—and that public domain–driven effort laid the foundation for an American creative economy that now leads the world.“

The extra income publishing companies were able to retain by ignoring all British copyright fees allowed them more freedom in the authors they could choose to risk publishing. That advantage, paired with the need to develop a uniquely American culture, gave American writers a strong advantage compared to their Canadian colleagues up North.

You Americans and your advantages…

Meanwhile, Canadian writers were unable to get a copyright on their works from any Canadian publishing company. As a result the few Canadian writers who found some popularity rarely received any payment for the reprinting of their work. Historical Perspectives on Canadian Publishing gives the example of Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s The Clockmaker, which was “first published by Joseph Howe in Halifax in 1836, [and] was widely reprinted in Britain and the United States with no royalties paid to the author.” In Canada, publishers were also still required to pay a copyright on any British literature they sold, which meant Canadian publishers didn’t have a surplus income to “risk” publishing local authors the way American companies could.  As Canadian authors struggled to continue writing in spite of the unconducive environment they often found that there wasn’t even an audience for local works. In his book, When Canadian Literature Moved to New York, Nick Mount explains that “the domestic publishing was neither devoted to nor dependent upon the publication of original Canadian work.” This frustration drove many Canadian writers over the border, or sometimes overseas, in order to be taken seriously. As Sara Jeannette Duncan explains in an article for The Week in 1886, “This is a distinctly colonial trait… we are ignored and we ignore ourselves”*

Sara Jeannette Duncan is so done with all you Canadian Publishers.

The two very different approaches taken by Canada and the States are, by and large, historical. While the U.S. was determined to create a new identity following the American Revolution the majority of Colonial Canadians were still loyal to Britain. These two very different approaches, and their opposite treatment of British Copyright, went on to have a huge affect on their literature.

Piracy today is often viewed as something illegal and immoral, but it is interesting to note how essential it was in developing a strong literary identity for the States. As Professor Jack Lynch concludes in his essay “The Perfectly Acceptable Practice of Literary Theft: Plagiarism, Copyright, and the Eighteenth Century”:

“We now see plagiarists as thieves, and punish them when they are caught. No modern author could expect the friendly reception Franklin got when he stole from other writers. But we should be careful not to go too far in the other direction by stifling the free exchange of ideas. The law protects us from unscrupulous writers, but we grant authors copyright protection only on the condition that their works will eventually serve the public good.”

I certainly wouldn’t go so far as to argue that Piracy isn’t a problem, but if the Americans are anything to go by, then it certainly has been helpful in the past. As our Red friend Gordon has said, “every written work, every film, every piece of art belongs to every human being living… [as] a part of our legacy and inheritance.” In this context maybe, just maybe, piracy isn’t always a bad thing.

P.S. I feel responsible to mention that there are a lot of Canadian writers who have managed to flourish in spite of less than ideal circumstances, and to proudly point out that Canadian writer Alice Munro just won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature.

I’m not going to bore you all with the same  old “this show has lost its premise” talk again; we’re past that, it is now the topic that shall not be named. What I do want to focus on, however, is how much this show appears to struggle with conflict. There’s a simple formula in sitcoms [and every other form of media] that goes as follows: (a) a problem arises, (b) that problem is solved. I cannot boil it down any simpler than that. I obviously don’t speak for everyone, but for most viewers what’s really important is what happens between those two points.

Let’s take this episode and view it through the formula above:

(a) The words “Cupcakes are so over” spell out doom for the girls’ business, and they must find a way to make their product appealing once again.

(b) Max’s tendency to dip french fries in frosting leads to “Cake Fries” which are a huge hit both flavourfully and monetarily.

That on its own is really not a problem. I’m always going to be down for an episode of television that revolves around chimeric foodstuffs [though adding too many parts lead to disaster], but as mentioned it’s not so much the end result as it is the journey that takes us there.

In between points (a) and (b) Max and Caroline go out of their way to buy black market cronuts to lure sheeple into forming a long line to their shop, hoping to seamlessly switch to their cupcakes as soon as their illegal goods run out. That’s also fine. I liked the fact that their dealer was a male prostitute on the side, and that the 2 Broke Girls wiki refers to him as “Cronut Craig.” So far so good, everyone.

Where things really fell flat for me is that once their scheme fails Caroline laments aloud:

“Max, cupcakes are over! And you know why? Cupcakes are one thing, if we get two things then we’d be something.”

And not ten seconds later Max starts taking fries, dipping them in frosting, and sticking them in her mouth.

“You’re really going to compare 2 Broke Girls with Breaking Bad?”

Now I am going to make a Breaking Bad comparison which hopefully most of you will get. This is like if Walter White lamented aloud:

“Skyler, my life is over! And you know why? I have lung cancer, but if I could find a way to make a lot of money fast maybe my life could mean something.”

And then the camera followed Walt’s gaze over to where Jesse Pinkman was exchanging a hefty bag of methamphetamine with another man for a large wad of bills. After which Walt approaches him excitedly saying “That’s it! That’s what we’re going to do!” and on and on, I’m not that devoted to this parallel.

This week’s episode has jokes about a bulimic girl, Oleg’s one-testicled Croatian cousin’s suicide [his nickname was Cronut, get it?], a torso man on a skateboard, and Max having been assaulted at one point. I took all of that in, but what really got me was how easy this show has begun making things for its protagonists. Season 1 of 2 Broke Girls had Max and Caroline stalking Martha Stewart to promote their business; “And the Cronuts” has them wait a few seconds before arriving at their solution.

I do give the writers of the show [very] mild praise for focusing on trends throughout the episode. They began with Han’s juice cleanse, moved on to cronuts, spotlighted zany trendchasers Jerry and Gary, and finally followed it up with Sophie hopping on the bandwagon to try bisexuality with her girltoy Veronica. As far as how “trendy” the latter is . . . well, the way the shoe deals with orientation is the focus of a different review. Anyway, credit where it’s due. 

Current Total: $1,512.

New Total: $2,012 [I'm going to assume that Cake Fries are what accounted for the extra rise in weekly profits of roughly $200].

The Title Refers To: Cronuts, which Wikipedia tells me were invented by one chef Dominique Anselin New York City. He trademarked the name back in May, so they’re very much old news. Oh, and they’re basically half-croissant half-doughnut, duh.

Stray Observations:

• Max being ashamed of her mistake in the cold open and letting the customers have their meal on her seemed really out of character, and is the basis for a theory I’m going to be sharing with all of you in next week’s review.
• I was devastated that Luis wasn’t in this episode after how into him I was last week. Ah well, we’ll always have the memories.
• Jerry and Gary have followed all the trends: Pinkberry, Dippin’ Dots, kale, quinoa, kombucha. 
• Things you don’t want to yell on the streets of New York “We hate back people!” and “All that work for some stupid fad?”
• You could have an entire running gag about how bad Caroline is with codewords.
• Han telling the girls to look away as they’ve “released the kraken” with their new snack food was delightful.
• Veronica: cute, Black, has short blonde-hair, exciting, and never to be seen again.
• 2 Broke Girls Beefcake Menu: Switching things up this time around, Han shows off some belly for ladies [and some gents]. It’s at least a two-pack, you guys.

Let’s start things off with a question. Who here likes Batman? Oh, yes, Commissioner Gordon?

Thank you for that very thorough answer, James. But you know what else is important, and begs asking when we all like something? Where that something comes from. Y’know, who made it, that sort of thing. So, who made Batman?

Go ahead and pick up that Batman graphic novel lying next to you, don’t pretend you can’t see it. Tell me what it says inside there, somewhere between the front cover and the beginning of the actual comic. You can read it aloud, that’s fine.

“Batman created by Bob Kane”

Technically this statement, in and of itself, is not wrong. Artist Bob Kane came up with the idea for a character named Batman [the vast majority of this cites Wikipedia]. And of course you all recognize the character I’m describing, seeing as he’s such an enormous cultural icon:

“a character who looked very much like Superman with kind of … reddish tights, I believe, with boots … no gloves, no gauntlets … with a small domino mask, swinging on a rope. He had two stiff wings that were sticking out, looking like bat wings. And under it was a big sign … BATMAN.”

That’s what illustrator Bill Finger saw of Kane’s sketches. Now Bill Finger, this guy, he didn’t do much. All Finger did was give the character a cowl, a cap instead of wings, gloves, remove the red from the costume, come up with the secret identity of Bruce Wayne, wrote the first and second issues in which the character appeared, came up with Robin’s origin, co-created the Batmobile and Batcave, is credited with naming Gotham City, popularized the use of giant-sized prop [yes, like that penny], and co-created The Joker.

It’s a good thing he gets a creator credit like Bob Kane.

Wait, he doesn’t?

Wait, you’re telling me that Bob Kane’s contract with DC Comics ensures that he will be “credited as the sole creator of Batman until the end of time”? Well, it’s a good thing he made up for it later by mentioning in letters and interviews that Finger did more than he’s given credit for:

“The truth is that Bill Finger is taking credit for much more than he deserves, and I refute much of his statements here in print The fact is that I conceived the ”Batman`’ figure and costume entirely by myself’ even before I called Bill in to help me write the “Batman.” I created the title, masthead, the format and concept, as well as the Batman figure and costume. Robin, the boy wonder, was also my idea, . . . not Bill’s.”

Oh.

Well, at least, as the internet’s foremost Batmanologist Chris Sims states, he finally did admit to Batman having a co-creator:

Finally, in 1998, when Kane died, he did finally credit a co-creator, and he even did it on his actual tombstone. According to Bob Kane he did have a collaborator on Batman: God Himself.

“GOD bestowed a dream upon Bob Kane. Blessed with divine inspiration and a rich imagination, Bob created a legacy known as BATMAN.”

 At least . . . I mean, he came up with the idea at 18, that’s something . . . Sorry, what was that you said, Chris?

A gif of Bob Kane.

“They keep on printing that, even though he was born in 1915 and only co-created Batman to capitalize on the rush for superheroes after Superman’s superheroes after Superman’s debut in 1939, largely because Kane stuck with that lie all the way to his death.”

I see.

Well, it’s a good thing, and I’m being sincere this time, that people like Marc Tyler Nobleman are writing books like Bill the Boy Wonder to help inform Batman fans at a very young age of all that Bill Finger contributed. Because seriously, Kane was essentially a member of the Caped Crusader’s rogues gallery.

I wish that he could make things right, but as you can see by the tombstone above he is dead. Ah well, at the very least people are getting better educated about all this business, and he can’t do any more harm from beyond the grave. We’ll just have to read our Batman comics and pretend Bill Finger’s name is on there.

 Culture War Reporters created by Bob Kane

Dang it, Bob!

“There is nothing new in art except talent,” words by Anton Chekhov that I was forced to look up because I’ve already cited Ecclesiastes in a prior post. They’re also words that I feel forced to grasp firmly on to as I’m faced with the deluge of television spin-offs soon to flood your televisions and my laptop with more and more of the same. With that being the worst case scenario, of course.

That being said, I’m going to try my best to take the stance I typically take on these sorts of things, which is that ultimately execution trumps everything else. Chances are that you wouldn’t have thought that a movie about a guy with his arm trapped under a rock would be able to hold your attention, but 127 Hours is great. The premise of a work of art does not damn it, though it certainly colours how audiences choose to approach and experience that work.

Before we truly begin let us consider that:

a) this is nothing new in the world of television [see CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and its children NY and Miami]

and

b) this has actually turned out really well [see Frasier, which spun out of Cheers, and The Colbert Report, borne out of The Daily Show]

Now on to the two spin-off shows that I’ve been meaning to share with you all, with the first being a series that takes place in the same world as The Walking Dead. Honestly, I am a person who stopped watching after the third season, but I think I know enough to comment that we can certainly expect more grisly zombie deaths and . . . uh, there’s certain to be more . . . hm. Rick, a little help?

Yes, that’s the word I was looking for! Things. We’re sure to be in for many more things. Don’t get me wrong, a world overrun by reanimated corpses has a number of different places it can go, but if it’s anything like the original show it’s sure to be a dreary, angst-ridden forty minutes of television. It’s even been described as being focused “on an all-new cast unrelated to Rick Grimes’ (Andrew Lincoln) dwindling band of survivors,” further increasing the likelihood of it being excessively similar to The Walking Dead. 

There’s an undeniable amount of thrilling suspense involved in watching a ragtag bunch of people do all they can to avoid being chowed down on by the deceased, which is why this has become AMC’s crown jewel since Breaking Bad [*sob*] ended. Still, we can only hope that Kirkman and co. will be able to bring something truly fresh to liven up the franchise, pun fully intended.

This second show truly came as a surprise to me, because there is no way that you could have convinced me prior to now that there might one day be a show on the air called How I Met Your Father. It’s so incomprehensible that my reaction was a combination of both Ted’s and Barney’s, with my drink simply pouring out of a mouth wide open in horror. Nonetheless, this is the world we live in, folks.

Deadline tells us that the How I Met Your Mother spin-off “would feature a new group of New York friends and chronicle a female member of the group’s quest to meet her future husband,” or in other words, “exactly what it sounds like.” Oh man. I’m going to have to slow down and take a breath.

Unlike The Walking Dead I continue to watch HIMYM, and feel vindicated by my decision to do so as we are now in the ninth season and on the verge of Ted finally meeting his bride-to-be. That in mind, do we really need to watch nearly another decade of a hip twenty-something becoming a bitter thirty-something and making horrible life and love decisions along the way? Does a different set of reproductive organs really make everything that fresh and exciting?

Similar to AMC and its zombies CBS is getting a lot out of Ted and his vastly more interesting friends, so why not simply duplicate a winning formula? Again, I’m going to try to be positive and take some advice from Mr. Mosby-

Sir, you are not wrong. The American version of The Office really took off in its second season, and it takes time for a show to come into its own. But really, though, the exact same premise? This isn’t like the aforementioned workplace sitcom either, as this new show will in part be helmed by HIMYM creators and executive producers Carter Bays and Craig Thomas. Yes, Emily Spivey will come along to add her own bit of flair and creativity, but will it be enough?

I chose to spotlight these two shows for a number of reasons, the first and most important being that I’ve actually watched a lot of both of them. Their popularity and so on, while also being significant, aside, there’s also the fact that they both bear the most promise of being more of the same.

Worried? S’all good, man!

Better Call Saul, for all of those coming off of their Breaking Bad addiction will star the titular Saul Goodman, which is a far cry from the meth-slinging mishaps of Walter White. Even the life of Phil Dunphy’s Dinkleberg-equivalent Gil Thorpe appears to be sitcom material [Fairly Oddparents references, everyone!], and you just know that’s going to be nothing like Modern Family‘s multigenerational, multiracial, and sexual orientation varied extended family. These are the very definitions of spin-offs, following character previously introduced in other shows, but they’re so very, very different.

“There is nothing new in art except talent,” says Mr. Chekhov, and I agree with him. The Walking Dead spin-off could in fact follow a very different group from the Rick’s gang, maybe chronicling the adventures of survivors who aren’t rife with distrust and grief; I realize how unlikely this is. How I Met Your Father, thoroughly groan-worthy title aside, could feature a cast of characters who are actually representative of the multiethnic capital they live in. Can you imagine, five friends some of who are non-White?

I’m unable to thoroughly write off either of these upcoming series in spite of all they are, since it’s ultimately up to the producers, writers, and actors to craft TV shows that truly grasp their audiences and, ideally, yours truly. We may no longer be able to hope for media to be original, but we can at least hope for it to be done well.

First thing’s first, I had every expectation that this episode was going to be super duper racist. It was not, but I’ll get to that in a bit because of how much of a big deal my second point is: Dang, this one lady could not get a enough of the jokes this week. She had one of those high-pitched shrieky laughs, too; it was nearly impossible to block her out and concentrate on the actual episode itself.

Now, if you type “2 broke girls racist” into Google you get 4,310,000 results. That speaks for itself, really. My review of the third episode of this season even received a few comments from an honest-to-goodness Polish person who wanted to assert that they do not believe that cats are the reincarnated souls of people who die outside. To be perfectly fair things were far worse in the first season concerning Han in particular. That being said, racist jokes on this show used to be a problem. They still are, but they used to be, too.

Similar to Saturday Night Live, the 2 Broke Girls writers took note of the flak they were receiving and took action. Unlike the former, which took to promising change without one anywhere in sight, the latter chose to veer away from making fun of Han’s race and instead focusing almost solely on his size. It’s not ideal for the character, especially since he hasn’t been able to dish it back in quite a few episodes, but it’s a step in the right direction. Which is great, because it’s the Max, Caroline, and Han Show this week.

Basically what happens in the episode itself is that Mr. Lee hires a prostitute to fake being his girlfriend to impress his mom in a trope so classic that Hollywood has a self-imposed rule that they must create a film based on that premise every four years. As an abrupt segue what I  really want to focus on right now is Max and Caroline’s foray into a strip club to hire Korean Beauty June Kim AKA Sapphire for their boss, which led to this:

Soon after this Caroline says: “”Can we turn the music off? Cause, I’m getting disoriented, and, in all honesty, a little turned on.”

Cue a few choice posts from tumblr as I searched in vain for relevant 2 Broke Girls gifs to add to this review:

“Caroline we knew you got turned in by girls come on” - amsayy.tumblr.com

“Part of me hope caroline’s freak out about “latent bisexuality” is because of a recent revelation of her feelings for max.” - graphikdesign07.tumblr.com

“isn’t even 15 minutes in and so far caroline and max have gone to a strip club where caroline admitted she was “turned on” and max cheered the stripper on

try to be more gay, i dare you” - shawsonduh.tumblr.com

There’s clearly a fraction of the show’s viewers who ship a romantic relationship between Max and Caroline, and it got me wondering if that plays into the writing of the show at all. A sexual pairing of the two is unlikely if we’re being realistic, but that doesn’t mean that the creators involved won’t seed potential hints at such a pairing just to appeal to a part of their audience. This is of course me putting far too much value in one of tumblr’s much, much smaller fandoms, but it’s best to never underestimate the internet.

I wish I had more to say about the plot itself, but it really is a pretty standard execution of the aforementioned trope which led to an overall unexceptional twenty-something minutes of television. There are minor additions to how things normally play out, such as Max giving Han marijuana to calm his nerves, but that’s about it. In the end Han’s mom finds out and she’ll always love him no matter what. We get a slight subversion of expectations in Korean Beauty June Kim AKA Sapphire actually knowing how to play the piano [you can see everyone's reactions in the image up top].

There was very little of either Oleg or Sophie this week, but Earl had a bit of fun dialogue with Han. Really, Ally Maki and Karen Maruyama did just fine as Korean Beauty June Kim AKA Sapphire and Mrs. Su-Min “Han’s Mom” Lee, respectively. No real complaints, but not a great deal of praise, either.

Creativity points to Korean Beauty June Kim AKA Sapphire’s orgasm prayer that was primarily just “Oh God” said progressively louder and louder. If that didn’t make the following scene come to mind, however, know that you are dead to me:

Current Total: $2,162.

New Total: $2,280.

The Title Refers To: Han hiring a prostitute to be his girlfriend. Alternatively, a reference to a Steven Soderbergh film by the same name starring porn star Sasha Grey in the titular role.

Stray Observations:

• Instant laugh out of Max asking Han if he had a mother. That is laughter post set-up/pre-punchline, folks.
• “Catfishing, right. That’s when you pick up a woman in a bar and when you get her in the light you realize she has whiskers.”
• Caroline is afraid of catching “syphi-gono-titis” at the strip club.
• That black light visual gag was delightful.
• “Earl, we’re talking about our Lord Jesus Christ!”
• Some of the audience laughed at Mrs. Lee speaking Korean. I can’t explain that.
• Mrs. Lee’s disapproving frown/headshake combo was so, so great.
• Chamomile tea: the drink of choice for divorced women on their balconies in the fall.
• Han described his fake girlfriend as “a Harvard educated  Christian doctor and also a renowned classical pianist.”
  
• Mrs. Lee’s body strength is all core.
• Max’s joke that made me feel legitimately uncomfortable: “What!? I was unconscious when I lost [my virginity] and want to see what it’s like!” This is in addition to what we already know the guy, which is that his name was “Coach Something.” Eesh. 
• 2 Broke Girls Cheesecake Menu: This entire section goes to Korean Beauty June Kim AKA Sapphire, for obvious reasons which involve her sexy dance. Honourable mention goes to Max’s cleavage. 

I can think of no better way to introduce this subject than with Stephen Colbert’s reaction to the news:

Before I continue I want to point out that the original Captain Marvel was a Kree alien who actually went by the name “Mar-Vell”, and when taking that into account Darlene Rodriguez’s pronunciation actually has a fair amount of validity.

With that out of the way, let’s take a more in-depth look at the young Kamala Khan.

Easily one of the most fascinating aspects about this new character, at least from a writer’s perspective, is how she came into existence. It all began when Marvel editor Sana Amanat, who grew up as a Muslim, began recounting stories of her childhood with fellow editor Steve Wacker. The two moved forward from there, “[noting] the dearth of female superhero series and, even more so, of comics with cultural specificity.”

If you were listening closely to Rodriguez, you’ll notice she said that Kamala is “among the first to be both female and Muslim” [emphasis added]. True enough, the mutant Dust [Sooraya Qadir] and the current Excalibur [Faiza Hussain] fit both those categories, but neither have been anywhere close to headlining their own title. Not only that but, in spite of them being well-rounded characters in their respective rights, there was never a very close look at who either of them were on a deeper level.

There are few easier ways to find out who a person is than by beginning with their family.

Look, I love comics. I am all about the fact that Wolverine has an adamantium skeleton and that metal that would otherwise poison his body is offset by his healing factor. That is all great stuff. Honestly, though, I could not care less that Kamala has shapeshifting powers; what I’m really interested in is the fact that she is the child of Pakistani immigrants. What I find really exciting is the fact that she looks up to Captain Marvel [Carol Danvers, not Mar-Vell; he's dead] because “she’s strong, beautiful and doesn’t have any of the baggage of being Pakistani and ‘different.’” I am a child of immigrants and that resounds with me like nothing else.

“Her brother is extremely conservative. Her mom is paranoid that she’s going to touch a boy and get pregnant. Her father wants her to concentrate on her studies and become a doctor.” – Sana Amanat

A lot of the comments surrounding this new title have focused on Kamala being a Muslim, including Colbert’s above, and it will most definitely be a very important facet of who she is with series writer G. Willow Wilson stating that it is “really important for [her] to portray Kamala as someone who is struggling with her faith.” A Muslim herself, Wilson has come under some criticism, with the following comment on the Bleeding Cool news release summing up one complaint [censored for your sensitive eyes by yours truly]:

“Also I love how they went out and got the whitest Muslim they could find. Not anyone born a Muslim but someone that converted to the faith but before that she was a white girl from New Jersey that found the religion in college. Give. Me. A. F-cking. Break. Marvel.”

I have a number of responses to this:

1. You aren’t “born a Muslim” anymore than you are “born a Buddhist”; you are raised in a certain faith.
2.  Converting to a particular religion does not make you any more or less a member of that religion; it’s about how strongly you own your beliefs.
3. Whether or not G. Willow Wilson can portray a Muslim character pales in importance compared to how well she can portray a Pakistani-American.

Just thinking about Patty and Joe on TVOKids brings on a reminiscence wave like nothing else.

The first two of my responses are facts and I will not back down from them. The third is highly subjective. As I mentioned above, my parents were immigrants, to Canada from the Philippines and Malaysia respectively, and that had an enormous impact on my childhood. It was a big moment for me when I was four-years-old or so and saw Patty on TVO interviewing someone on Canada Day, saying something along the lines of, “living here makes you a Canadian.”

Clearly it was and is much more complex than that, but regardless it still blew me away. “I am Canadian,” I thought, sounding like a commercial for Molson Canadian. Even though I didn’t look like most of the people I saw on TV and walking around downtown I was Canadian, I was just like everyone else. Figuring out how you belong is difficult for adolescents everywhere, but coming from an immigrant family adds just one more layer to work through, and an extremely complex one at that.

It feels like I’ve gotten a little bit offtrack with all of this, but what I’m trying to push is the fact that in a lot of ways the new Ms. Marvel book is immigrant literature. It promises to explore what it feels like to have parents who didn’t grow up in North America and who have their own ways of doing things, hanging on to the culture of wherever they came from. It appears to touch on finding out who you’re supposed to be as a teenager and as an American.

Fanart by tumblr user doktorvondoom.

Ms. Marvel is going to be edited by Sana Amanat, who lived a life much like Kamala will be living. It will be written by G. Willow Wilson, a Muslim female writer. Adrian Alphona is on art duties, and his work on Runaways proves he’s more than up for the task. This is a fantastic, talented team and they are going to be creating the first ever mainstream comic book title headlined by a Muslim female super hero.

Ms. Marvel #1 hits comic book stores everywhere February of next year. I’m going to be picking up a copy for a book that offers a distinctly different perspective from everything else on the stands, and that paints a picture of what it feels like to be an adolescent, a female, a Muslim, a minority, and a child of immigrants. Honestly, the superheroics are just a bonus.

Sometime last month a friend of mine on Facebook posted the following status:

“So wake me up when it’s all over, when I’m wiser when I’m older. ~ Avicci”

As a person who only really catches up on pop music when he’s sitting in a car listening to the radio, I went to YouTube to check out what this was all about. I was pleasantly surprised to find that this was a song that I could listen to 10 to 15 times an hour for days:

It wasn’t just the infectious beat that got me, though, it was also the niggling feeling I had that this was a very familiar voice singing. With that in mind I let my fingers take me over to Wikipedia to where I was met with the following words at the top of the page [emphasis added]:

“Wake Me Up” (stylized as “Wake Me Up!“) is a song by Swedish DJ and music producer Avicii, which features uncredited vocals from American soul singer Aloe Blacc and acoustic guitar from Incubus’ Mike Einziger.

Photograph by Travis Hugget.

Let me provide a little context here: Aloe Blacc has the voice of an angel. Aloe Blacc’s album Good Things is what helped me through my only college all-nighter. Aloe Blacc’s “Loving You Is Killing Me” has more funk in its first 10 seconds then anything on the charts right now [depending on whether or not Janelle Monae has a new single out or not]. Aloe Blacc is the reason that whenever Gordon tells me that he needs a dollar I emphatically respond “HEY HEY!” Aloe Blacc, as you might have gathered, is the artist responsible for “I Need A Dollar” and consequently the intro music to How To Make It In America as well.

Now before I catch you saying something along the lines of “Lots of artists provide vocals and aren’t credited” let me fill you in on a little more information. Here’s what Avicii had to say about how the song was created:

“None of us sing and we really needed to get that demo down and the only person I knew that lived in LA was Aloe, so I called him and he was free. Lyrics come really easy to him so he wrote them in a couple of hours and we finished the track.”

Not only did Blacc provide the vocals for the track, he also penned all of the lyrics and was one of only three people to write the song [Avicii and Incubus guitarist Mike Einziger being the other two].

Aloe Blacc’s uncredited vocals lie at the bottom of the list on the Wikipedia article for “Uncredited background singer.” Let’s make this perfectly clear, this is absolutely nothing like Mick Jagger doing background vocals on Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain”, because in “Wake Me Up” Blacc’s are the only vocals. He’s not providing backup he’s literally singing the song; the song that he wrote.

Right now two of of the three videos on Aloe Blacc’s VEVO YouTube page are dedicated to his own version of the song. Below is his music video for the track:

I don’t really want to get into how much more meaning this one has over the pretentiousness of the one that came before it, but you have to admit that Blacc’s advocation of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, which “improves the lives of day laborers in the United States,” is worthy of more than faint praise.

As of this article’s publication the latter video has 664,148 views while the former has 147,304,231 [Avicii's lyric video has roughly 10 million less]. Nowhere on the Swedish DJ’s videos is Blacc credited nor is his name even mentioned.

I realize that this post touches on similar ground as the one I wrote on Monday concerning Dota 2 crudely adapting many iconic WarCraft designs, and my final thought on both issues is this: give credit where it’s due. Concerning Aloe Blacc this rings even more so, since these are his words and his voice, not simply his work co-opted by others.

This is not to say that Avicii’s song is without merits, my soft spot for good EDM preventing me from ever writing it off, but that by no means excuses his marketing choices. “Wake Me Up” by Avicii ft. Aloe Blacc doesn’t take the spotlight off of him, and gives credit and much-needed attention to the latter.

Shame on you, Avicii, for collaborating with this talented man without doing what you could to acknowledge him.

Last week I mentioned that I had stumbled across an online publication called Primer, marketing itself as a young man’s magazine for coping with life after college. I noted it bore a lot of similarities to Art of Manliness, and I had stated I wanted to compare and contrast the two once I had read up a bit more.

I’m not going to do that.

Don’t get me wrong, I did read Primer (and re-read Art of Manliness)- it’s just that the differences between the two aren’t going to take up an entire post to list off. Instead, I’m going to be looking over Primer, which is a pretty dang solid publication all around and fully deserving of a post all to itself.

Let’s get started.

Primer was established back in 2008, so it hasn’t been up for very long and you can kinda see that. Everything’s very sleek and streamlined, it’s just that they’re clearly still in the process of building up their articles- their segment devoted to taxes has only a single post devoted to the subject. That said, I’m really interested on watching the publication grow- it’s got a lot of good things going for it.

Let me break it down for you.

I. The Writers

One of the first things I noticed when I was browsing the articles on Primer was that the authors were pretty varied in terms of race (and gender- but more on that in a sec). Now obviously, that in and of itself doesn’t mean anything, but the general implication is that you’re going to be getting a wider array of perspectives than if all the viewpoints originated from the same (general) background.

(It’s a perspective gif)

I also noticed a couple (repeat) female authors, and you really gotta appreciate the fresh take there. Granted, there’s probably people out there would debate whether or not the female perspective on male development is helpful, but I think it really speaks to the general tone and attitude of the magazine. These guys are open-minded and certainly not tied down to any set-in-stone criteria for what is or isn’t manly. I’m guessing this probably has a lot to do with Primer’s major selling-point, which is that the one commonality the authors do share is age. They are, as their audience is, in their 20s. As savvy as a lot of these guys are, they haven’t figured things out yet either, and you can really feel a level of sincerity here that you’d be hard pressed to find elsewhere. There’s no condescension, no paternalism, no world-weary complacency about who or what you’re going to become as you grow up. It’s really and truly refreshing, and I wonder if that’s just the kind of attitude that my generation could really benefit from.

II. The Issues

With most (if not all) of the authors being in their twenties, the issues that they’re addressing are (to me at least) about as relevant as it can get. I like Art of Manliness, but the simple fact of the matter is that the average guy out there could probably stand to benefit more from learning how to get your security deposit back on your apartment than how to build your own house.

Which isn’t to say it doesn’t help…

Perhaps one of the criticisms to level at Primer is that it’s pretty clearly targeted at an urban audience, but that’s probably a petty complaint in the grand scheme of things. For the most part, the articles here are all centered on issues that will affect you personally- checking out an apartment, searching for work, managing finances on a tight or unstable income, or dealing with the lack of friends you’ll have after leaving college (which hits pretty close to home). Plain and simple, people- these guys get it.

III. The Future

As much as I dig the general trend to toughen up and become more independent, one thing that’s always made me a bit leery of the “manly movement” is the idea that manliness is somehow being “reclaimed.” Like our grandfathers had perfected it, and somewhere along the line we lost it. I’m not saying our ancestors weren’t tough as nails- they were-

What I call ‘em every time my brakes die in my truck…

-it’s that when you idealize the past like this, you forget or glaze over the simple fact that the 40s and 50s were viciously sexist, racist societies. Imagining that the past was some kind of utopia isn’t just wrong- it’s unhealthy and unjust.

Primer doesn’t do that. As I said above, the impression I’m getting from the publication is that adulthood is something yet to be figured out. There’s no formula- and that doesn’t mean “do whatever you want, there are no rules,” it means that there’s still plenty of room on the chalkboard for fresh ideas. For all the crap that gets thrown at us (and Primer is decent enough to not call us all lazy kids and  understand that times are in fact tough), Primer is, at the end of it all, hopeful. You have to appreciate that, if nothing else.

Now that said, there’s still some issues I’d like to cover, and these apply not just to Primer but to any such men’s-issues publication.

I. “What’s Good For the Goose…

…is good for the gander.”

A “gander”, for those of you who don’t know, is the term for a male goose- the phrase meaning “what’s good for men is good for women, and vice versa.” I guess I’m still trying to sort out exactly what counts as a “men’s’ issue.” Unemployment, financial problems, home repair- these aren’t somehow exclusive to guys. Maybe I’m just wholly ignorant of how big the gender-divide is in this country, but surely these articles are just as helpful to women as they are to men, right? I’m not opposed to the idea of a “men’s magazine” or a “women’s magazine”- I just don’t want good info or advice to go unheeded because it was marketed to one group and not the other, y’know?

II. We’ve Got No Class

The image of “manliness” tends to get associated with this kind of suits-and-whiskey type of lifestyle. Typically the ideals or roles that seem to be glorified in these magazines are of men who are either wealthy, or at the very least, well-off. I get that part of the whole point of these magazines is to help people develop self-sufficiency, but poverty is a reality and certainly one we could use some advice on. Class issues (yeah, yeah, the Marxist is talking about class issues) could stand, at the very least, some recognition here.

III. The Place of Race

While we’re not seeing lynchings or internment camps scattered across the western world, the simple fact of the matter is that race is still a relevant, if not hot-button issue. As the world becomes ever-increasingly interconnected and multicultural, we’re going to need to know how to best handle the inevitable misunderstandings or issues that are going to crop up. How you treat others, or how others treat you, based on your race, is something I’d like to know more about, and if there ever were a venue for this kind of open and frank discussion, it’d be in a magazine such as this- yet we’re really not seeing it yet.

IV. Faith Of Our Fathers Peers

Philosophy, or at the very least, motivation, is pretty common as a subject in these publications- religious issues, however, aren’t typically touched on.

And I get that- I can’t imagine how difficult it’d be to write an article on religion for diverse audience on a grand scale. Still, the religious make-up of the country, heck, the world, is shifting and 20s are a major make-or-break point for spirituality. I would at least like to see the subject addressed, y’know?

And there you have it- what Primer‘s doing right, and what it could stand to do better. Check out the site for yourself, and tell us what your impressions are down in the comment section.

See you next time.

You know how I’m always whining about how this show has no momentum as far as its story and how all I really want is for the characters to head in basically any direction? It’s like this entire episode was written to make me shut up already.

We start things out with this week’s zaaaaany character of the week, a one-armed maid named Paulina. I expressed some pretty heavy disdain with the fact that Max and Caroline would ever hire a cleaning lady, but the idea that Sophie cut them a good deal by assigning them an amputee was actually pretty funny.

Okay, okay, I feel like I need to fast forward ahead because I am actually excited about what goes down in this episode. Basically while cleaning they find Max’s porn stash [which features plenty of 'stache] and Caroline discovers, hidden among the 80s centrefold models, a pastry school brochure which promises to be only $3,000/year. Okay, for real, though, that is like a tenth of what I paid.

Standing in the school’s admissions office Max, unlike her friend, appears to be entirely immune to Chef Nicolas’ sexy French accent [and face]. What really gets her, however, is Nicolas calling her “chef” before he departs. I’m telling you all right now, Kat Dennings really acts in this episode.

She’s glum and moody after her pastry chef dream has been unearthed, feigning anger over invasion of privacy when what she’s really upset about is Caroline finding out what she really wants. She’s ecstatic after realizing through a simple word from Nicolas that she might one day be more than what she ever thought she could be, and then she’s angry, frustrated, and on the brink of giving up when she’s trying her best and failing to create the tart that will be her entrance exam to the school. It seems out of character, later, when she tells her diner friends to crowd around her as she reads what she thinks is her acceptance letter, but it’s really just indicative of how important the moment is for her, that her confidence is strong enough to trump her cynicism for once. Then, of course, there’s the crushing realization on her face when she doesn’t get in.

Now that’s a lot to take in, I know, but it’s indicative of how much great stuff happens. It’s all fantastic character-driven stuff, but it’s the last few scenes that strike the most sincere, effective emotional beats. When Max returns to confront Nicolas she’s pissed, because she knows she deserves to get in. When he claims it’s her attitude, not her ability, that factored into his decision-making we get this shockingly heartfelt response-

-which is enough to convince him to admit her to the school. It’s a scene that contrasts really well with her trying to close herself off to Caroline, taking a page from Ke$ha’s book by hiding in their cupcake shop closet with the bare necessities: a bottle of whiskey and a toothbrush.

Then the show does something it hasn’t done in a very long time, which is make things more, not less, difficult for the girls. It turns out that it’s not, in fact, $3,000/year, but $3,000/course. There are eight a year, meaning that a year’s tuition is really $24,000; still less than mine, but far from an amount the two of them can afford. This is the second time that Max has felt she’s won, and it’s devastating that she’s once again come so close only to have her dream snatched away from her.

Which brings us to the next scene, which is going to be my new go-to when it comes to proving just how strong the girls’ friendship is. Knowing what Max has gone through Caroline does everything short of getting down on her knees and begging Nicholas to let her friend attend the school. She goes so far as saying that she’ll wash the floors, though she “would really prefer to do anything but that.” In retrospect it’s pretty apparent that from the very beginning of this show all Caroline has ever wanted was to fulfill Max’s dreams. She’s an optimistic person by nature, and a big motivation for her character has been trying to show that life really can be good, that sometimes things work out. As a Wharton grad Caroline’s no fool, either, and she’s well aware that sometimes things working out requires sacrifice.

When she returns to their apartment she sees Max crumpling up her porn and tossing it into a hobo fire she set up in their kitchen. As she watches her friend’s extremely symbolic gesture she reveals that she set up a “work-study arrangement” for the two of them. She’ll be working in the school’s office, and Max will be studying.

Not only is it really sweet, because it is very much so, but this heralds a brand new story arc for Max and Caroline and one I am legitimately looking forward to. It also reaffirms the show’s conceit, as the totals below fully explain, and that’s not something I can ever be against.

Current Total: $2,420.

New Total: $2.50 [It turns out that Chef Nicolas decided that $2,417.50 was an acceptable first payment, which is more than fair all things considering].

The Title Refers To: This line that Max delivers:

“Pastry school is the same as porn, it’s just a dumb fantasy”

Stray Observations:

• Either Oleg has sex with his maid, or his prostitute also cleans his house for him. It could go either way.
• Earl’s grandmother was a slave.

• Porn: “It’s the body in its natural form: spread-eagled on a motorcycle”

• Knowing what Max’s homepage is compels me to share one of my favourite tumblrs with all of you: Pornhub Comments on Stock Photos.
• “Your face is the Manhattan School of Pastry.” “You know it isn’t!”
• “I’m not sure we’re in the right place.” “Are any of us, really?”
• Special mention of Bebe, played my Mary Lynn Rajskub, who works in the office and appears to suffer from anxiety or some other form of mental illness. I’m mildly concerned with how we’ll be dealing with her moving forward, as thus far her problems appear to be present only to be made fun of.
• I also thought that Nicolas’ French accent sounded super fake, but it turns out that Gilles Marini is actually from France. Shows you how much I know.
• Max’s joke that made me feel legitimately uncomfortable: “I perform best when there’s a gun to my head ask any of my ex-boyfriends.”
• Her definition of a tart sounds amazing: “just a cookie with some pudding on it.”
• Obligatory Han-dishin’-it-back quote: “I didn’t know she could take b-tch to the next level!”
• “We’re roommates, both single. Quelle surprise.” Caroline you’re the best.
• Max’s chef name: Cuchita Bonfire.

In spite of swearing off Family Guy roughly three years ago due to feeling like the show’s creators had zero respect for their audience I watched an episode today for a single reason which Gordon brought to my attention. It branches off pretty naturally from last week’s Culture War Correspondence and post from early 2012 about cartoon death, though that was primarily concerning younger audiences. That reason is, of course [obviously a SPOILER after the jump]:

Brian Griffin, the family dog, is dead.

Before we even get into the why and how of all this I do want to make it clear that in spite of swearing off McFarlane cartoons in college I had watched roughly 8 full seasons of Family Guy. That being said, I want to firmly maintain that Brian completely deserves his place in the show’s opening sequence as a member of the main cast; if anything, he’s vastly more fleshed out than either Meg or Chris, if not both combined. Living in a household with Peter Griffin as its patriarch would drive the average person insane, and the family dog has long been the voice of reason, someone to break through the dysfunction, and even teach us a little about life. Not only that, but we’ve been witness to what lies beneath his sensible exterior in one of my all-time favourite seasons of the show:

Furry, flawed, and also one half of the wildly popular dog/baby adventure episodes, Brian was probably the least likely choice I would’ve given if asked which major character would be killed off this season, news I missed having little to no interest in the show. To be fair, he’s one of three characters the creator voices [with Peter and Stewie being the other two], so that was probably a strike against him. Still, I’m with the AV Club, I would’ve guessed Meg.

A Blow-By-Blow of The Incident [Pun Absolutely Intended]

Anyway, I’m going to recount the main events of “Life of Brian”, the 6th episode of Family Guy‘s 12th season in images. Pretty much exactly 1/3 through the episode Stewie has left Brian in the road setting up a street hockey net, and then:

And, while the family was understandably concerned after this brutal event, we were somewhat assured that everything would turn out fine due to a squirrel spitting on Brian, kicking him, and informing everyone that “That guy sucked.”

Then, at the vet-

“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Griffin, but Brian’s injuries are just too severe for us to save him. I don’t know how much longer he has but I suggest that you all go in and say your good-byes.”

Brian’s last words: “Y-you’ve given me a wonderful life. I love you all.”

And, if you absolutely weren’t convinced, Brian even had a funeral in a people cemetery.

Honestly, in retrospect the dropped clues are pretty obvious, with Stewie’s time machine as a stand-in for Brian himself. The two of them discuss it being demolished-

“Your time machine, it’s like your crowning achievement. I can’t believe you’d just destroy it.”

“Trust me Brian, it’s for the best. And hey, at least I’ve had some fun with it.”

And then soon after, once it’s just been crushed-

“Well, I guess that’s it, this is like the end of an era.”

“Oh sack up, you twink. It’s just a machine!”

No, Brian’s not a machine, but he is just a fictitious construct. Characters die all of the time [insert obligatory George R. R. Martin reference here], but what really matters is whether or not their death was effective, whatever that means in the scenario it takes place in.

So Did It Work?

Here’s the thing, everyone, Family Guy is a comedy. Comedies by definition must be funny, and that’s why even when Brian was bleeding and broken in the street we ended with a joke before cutting to commercial. Heck, the funeral had a handful of gags, one of which was really funny [Joe the cop being beaten around the head with a purse by a Black woman]. They kept it pretty sombre, but ultimately this is a show that’s meant to make us, at the bare minimum, smile.

Just two weeks ago, in “A Fistful of Meg”, that episode’s titular character died. Not only was that retconned, as you can see her mourning above, but incredible amount of violence has been used on the show for laughs a lot. Here’s one of the show’s most famous clips that revolves around a baby beating five shades of stuff out of the family dog:

That’s all to say that his death certainly wasn’t portrayed as being humorous. In all my years of watching this show I’ve never seen so many minutes tick by without a joke thrown in there. Since the death wasn’t set up to be amusing maybe it may have something to do with Seth McFarlane himself.

Apparently he’s said,

“I talk to the fans and in a way I’m kind of secretly hoping for them to say we’re done with it. There are plenty of people who say the show is kind of over the hill… but still the vast majority go pale in the face when I mention the possibility.”

Which feels a lot like he’s very ready for things to finish up already. Couple that with Eric Thurm’s observation over at the AV Club that Brian is “the character [he] (and probably a sizeable chunk of the show’s viewership) [identifies] with most, and the one who most often tethers the show before it veers off into total insanity” and it feels like McFarlane is pushing to see how far he can go. The Metro website believes this so strongly they outright ask if this was an act of sabotage.

As far as him potentially coming back one day [a possibility that the show sought to make inevitable with the time machine's destruction] the comments section of that very review provides the following observation, and one that plagues comic book storytelling with its many deaths and resurrections:

The only way this death is really going to justify itself is if, and I didn’t even mention that this occurred, the Griffins’ replacement dog Vinnie ends up [consistently] bringing something fresh to the show. Replacing a main cast member is serious business, but it’s also the opportunity for new material to crop up.

I’m not going to keep watching the show to see where this is all going as this was more of a one-time thing for the blog, but I think I’m going to applaud their decision. The moments of mourning really dragged down the episode as a whole, but the promise of a significant shake-up is something I am very interested in.

I can’t say I’m personally going to be missing Brian, since I stopped watching the show such a long time ago, but I’m hoping that Vinnie will grow to become a character others miss when the show inevitably comes to an end [it'll be the one instance where no one will be able to say "Simpsons did it first!"]

Writing the first Shame Day of 2014 is a difficult position to be in. The topic must be the source of some terrible wrongdoing, but must also have committed that wrongdoing in a way that truly incenses us as decent human beings. All that being said, let me present today’s subject, Mr. Shia Saide LaBeouf.

Now rest assured, dear readers, I have reasons for targeting the former child star and lead in Disney’s Even Stevens and repopularizer of the word “no.” Believe me, I wouldn’t willingly put myself through having to check and recheck that I’m spelling his surname correctly otherwise. To begin with, midway through December of last year he released a short film titled Howard Cantour.com.

The film follows the titular Cantour, an internet film critic, and received a pretty hefty amount of critical acclaim. Not only that, but it starred my number one favourite stand-up comedian who almost exclusively jokes about food, Jim Gaffigan. It was also a near shot-for-shot adaptation of the comic Justin M. Damiano, by Daniel Clowes.

But look, sometimes it appears that people garner inspiration from other works all the time, like CBS’s upcoming Intelligence and its similarities to a novel by webcomicker K. B. Spangler. What would be nice is if we knew for ourselves just how alike the two pieces of work are. Luckily, Wired’s Graeme McMillan is here to help us out with that:

How closely does the film, which appeared at several film festivals, hew to the comic? Well, both open with exactly the same monologue from their eponymous leads: “A critic is a warrior, and each of us on the battlefield have the means to glorify or demolish (whether a film, a career, or an entire philosophy) by influencing perception in ways that if heartfelt and truthful, can have far-reaching repercussions.”

Both stories then switch to a scene wherein the titular critic discusses a film with a freelance critic he dislikes, who asks whether he’s attending a junket where the director will be present. In Clowes’, the freelance critic explains that the director “so perfectly gets how we’re really all like these aliens who can never have any meaningful contact with each other because we’re all so caught up in our own little self-made realities, you know?” In LaBeouf’s short, she says the director “so perfectly gets how we’re all like these aliens to one another, who never have any meaningful contact with one another because we’re all so caught up in our little self-made realities, you know?”

Oh, and Clowes was [and it pains me to use this word] obviously never credited anywhere in the film.

If you know anything about how I feel about either Bob Kane or Avicii you know that people not crediting others for their work is something I have absolutely no respect for. In general, this alone would’ve been enough to give LaBeouf the CWR Mark of Shame, but no, he does everything he can to truly deserve the award.

See, the guy heads over to Twitter to apologize. In most cases that would be the best possible course of action, except that . . . oh man, it’s just salt in the wound . . . except that it appears his apologies are also not his original work. Here’s one of the tweets:

Copying isn't particularly creative work. Being inspired by someone else's idea to produce something new and different IS creative work.—
Shia LaBeouf (@thecampaignbook) December 17, 2013

And here’s a response to a question in Yahoo! Answers from four years ago:

Oh, and the question being answered? “Why did Picasso say ‘good artists copy but great artists steal’?”

Bleeding Cool has a whole list of his apology tweets with their internet sources beneath them. One of these plagiarized tweets is even a straight-up apology for plagiarizing tweets.

I’m not even going to go to the levels of pretension he attained with his skywritten apology to Clowes. What I want to do is, if all of that still hasn’t convinced you what a bad person he is, present to you the email conversation LaBeouf had with Rich Johnston, writer and creator of Bleeding Cool.

At this point I’m not even going to bother delving into how many of the lines in his emails are not his own, because the answer is a lot. Below is one of their final exchanges, chosen because it’s just about as classless as the rest of it, and because it all but begs for a particular gif to be used:

JOHNSTON:Is the repurposing of other people’s apologies for your own on Twitter art… or laziness? Is it an attempt to create, or is it simple dickishness? Can it be both? Is there an inherent hypocrisy in apologising for reproducing someone’s work without their permission on film, by reproducing other people’s work without their permission on social media? Is it all part of a wider plan, a wider statement, a wider artistic endeavour, or is an attempt to wind people up? Or is it both?

LABEOUF:Both
I never asked to be paid
And never profited off anyone’s back
acting is Plagiarism
Like magicians
We tell you we’re gonna lie to you

Like magicians.

To bring this all back to the real victim here [no, it's not us, though at this point we've witnessed so much of what a single tool can do we could be expert mechanics], according to his publisher Clowes is currently “exploring his legal options.” Buzzfeed also did some legitimate reporting and got the following quote from the man himself:

“The first I ever heard of the film was this morning when someone sent me a link. I’ve never spoken to or met Mr. LaBeouf. I’ve never even seen one of his films that I can recall — and I was shocked, to say the least, when I saw that he took the script and even many of the visuals from a very personal story I did six or seven years ago and passed it off as his own work. I actually can’t imagine what was going through his mind.”

So let’s all remember Daniel Clowes and empathize with the feeling of having your own work co-opted for some else’s gain, and then having that same person give you the apology equivalent of a middle finger.

Then let’s all think about running Shia LaBeouf over with an Ultra Lounge-o-matic Superchair.

EDIT: Bleeding Cool has an update on the correspondence between both Clowes’ and LaBeouf’s lawyers, as well as the sort of response we all now expect from LaBeouf.

Good science fiction is tough to come by. There’re plenty of factors we could point the finger at for that, but more often than not, it seems the people who produce sci-fi just don’t quite understand how it works.

Science fiction is, at its core, a means of exploring some sort of political or philosophical or ethical question. The spaceships, the time travel, brave new worlds- they’re all framing devices for questions about what makes us human…

…how we treat others…

…or our place in the universe.

Unfortunately, the folks who wind up calling all the shots on TV and movies often mistake the teleporters and warp drives for being the substance of science fiction, rather than just the accessories. There are plenty of futuristic tools in James Bond, but you’d never consider a 007 installment a sci-fi flick.

And that’s really what my main concern was going into Helix. For all the claims of “produced by the people who gave you Battlestar Galactica and The X-Files”, the question is whether or not this show will be real science fiction, or just some action-thriller with monsters and big guns.

If you’ve seen the trailers for Helix, it’s more or less self-explanatory. Secret facility somewhere in the arctic has experienced some sort of contaminant breach and a crack team of CDC scientists are tasked with finding out just what went down, what they’re up against, and how to contain the whole mess. An evil corporation appears to have orchestrated the whole thing, so yeah, it does bear a lot similarities to the Alien franchise- black goo included.

The X-Files also had a thing for black goo, as I recall…

Evan will be pleased to know that one the characters is Asian.

And can rock a fur hoodie like nobodies’ business…

I was further pleasantly surprised to see that not all the characters from the CDC were somehow impossibly young, stunningly beautiful people (as seems to be the habit with so many shows). That said, they do pretty much hit all the tropes just as you’d expect them. They wind up conveniently cut off up there at the base, it turns out there’s all this history and tension between the team, the base’s staff are all being secretive about the nature of their work, and, yeah, the heavy-set middle aged woman is as snarky as it gets.

They’ve clearly put money into this, and they’re pretty good at creating the frightening, disorienting atmosphere, and plenty of elements are refreshingly realistic. The the military escort the CDC team gets admits that he “rarely left base” when stationed in Iraq and “never shot his gun since boot camp.”

And while all of that certainly speaks to the series’ favor as a thriller, I don’t know that there’s anything we’re actually looking at here, in terms of the big-picture question. The whole “Has Science Gone Too Far?” question has pretty much been done to death…

But as of yet, that’s pretty much all we’re getting here. There is a sort of “first moral question” that does kick in at the beginning of part 2, when the team has to decide whether or not they should use force when dealing with potentially infected individuals. Considering that the disease is like the bubonic plague meets rabies meets H.P. Lovecraft, the question seemed pretty clear cut- but maybe that’s just me.

Pictured: What doesn’t constitute a big moral dilemma for the author of this post.

There’s also a tougher question of how you deal with a crisis situation- mostly in regards to how much information you give out, how realistic you are with people, and so on. Still not the big picture questions you’d typically associate with sci-fi. Still, “unregulated experimentation” seems to be the principal issue being addressed. While it’s not a terrible issue, it oughta be examined fairly. Show the upsides to it instead of beating us over the head with the “thou shalt not allow scientists to play god” line over and over. My hope was that they’d somehow subvert the whole trope by turning it on its head (like what Splice did), and since we’re yet getting started, I guess I’m still hoping for that. I’m just not holding my breath.

Except for the freaky parts of the show, which they do pretty well. Credit where credit is due, eh?

Welcome back to the CWR 2 Broke Girls Reviews, everyone! Did you miss the show? Did you miss me [writing about the show]? I’m going to say upfront that I appreciated the break like nothing else, and coming back was . . . difficult. Approaching a show from that angle is far from helpful, and I ended up analyzing every little thing, as I am wont to do regardless. But then the tone of the episode, and perhaps the rest of this season, became crystal clear.

2 Broke Girls is channeling the rom-com vibe like a successful séance. 

Fans of the show are well-aware that things are tense between Caroline and Chef Nicolas, what with him having an épouse back in France and all. On the snarkier, darker haired side of the coin, however, Max has not gotten a lot of action in the drama or bedroom departments. A little bit back with Johnny in Season 1, but since then it has been smooth sailing because her boat has not been rocking. The writers’ room has finally decided to amend that issue, but in a way that makes it feel like a Katherine Heigl movie.

Don’t Trust the B—- refugee Eric Andre has been more or less just playing a goofy dude as Deke, more friendly than flirty. This week he and Max bro a good amount, but also get their dough wet together [not a euphemism] as shown in the image up top. Not one to buck rom-com convention she must of course struggle with whether a potential relationship is worth ruining what they have going on right now. She’s not entirely against the idea, though ["I'm not bromophobic!"].

We’re sticking with the formula, so it stands to reason that Deke has another romantic strictly sexual prospect on the side, and that in her indecision Max tells him to go to her. Go to the titular Judy with the Booty [played by the, uh, endowed Estrella Nouri]. Well, Max doesn’t know her nearly that well, she meant “Judith with the Bootith”. She’s sad, as is typical of someone in her position.

Then finally, in the third act, he admits that him and Judy with the Booty never got to bumping uglies, and he kisses Max. In response to a line that really does feel cribbed from a movie called Misunderstandings Create Conflict Between Potential Lovers But Are Ultimately Resolved.

Then they kiss and it’s beautiful, I guess:

And so that’s what happened to Max, and I feel the need to reiterate it if only because the tone is just so darn strong. The other threads [I'll get to Caroline's in a sec] don’t exude it that strongly, but overall it really feels like a twenty-something minute rom-com. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, but it’s not what 2 Broke Girls has been, even when the aforementioned Johnny was around. Kat Dennings is no Katherine Heigl, is what I’m saying. It remains to be seen how this season wraps up, but with so much emphasis placed on relationships that both female leads have with their respective love interests [I really am excited to get to Caroline] I’d be surprised if this didn’t keep up for at least a few more episodes.

As for Caroline she tries to be angry at Chef Nicolas about his cheating, and later breaks into his office with Max to steal exam info so that the latter can pass. This leads to a few lines that Beth Behrs delivers like, well . . . like it’s her job and she’s very, very good at it. I said it before and I said it again, her comedy game is on point in a big way:

“Max please hurry find the test and let’s get out of here because we shouldn’t be in here and it smells like him and I like it”

“Oh no, it’s Nicolas. I can smell him in the hall. And I like it”

“I’ve missed you. I’m in your office. That’s the only logical explanation I have for being in here”

“Now, kiss me again! But this time lay on top of me so your legs are out of the way. Now go!”

And lastly, before I get to the Stray Observations, I want to take this time to specially highlight that Earl refers to Han’s entrance from the winter-cursed outdoors by quipping “Still don’t know where Han is, but the new Bond villain just arrived.” I need to tell you all that Zao, from Die Another Day is one of my all-time favourite henchmen ever, Korean or otherwise. I mean, dude straight-up has diamonds in his face.

Current Total: $220.

New Total: $252.75 [still unsure of how they're making any money].

The Title Refers To: Judy with the Booty. I want to talk about how there is a big “but” regarding Deke and Max’s relationship, but that particular aspect of it is never really stressed at all. Sorry.

Stray Observations:

• Not only are they selling cupcakes and cocoa during a blizzard in the cold [haha] open, they’re selling them at night.
• Snow actually looked slightly more real than fake, too.
• Oleg has a chinchida hat. Made from the fur of the last one.
• Luis is around, and I really dig his “Who Would You Do” gameplay style.
• “I’m gonna go roll me a fatty; her name is Denise.”
• “Do you mind, Harry Pothead and I are trying to study-”
• Max’s impression of Chef Nicolas: “Hello, Caroline, I’m a man but I am pretty like a lady!”
• “You think she got that thing at a Kim Kardashian backyard sale?”

• “Move your big ass, we’re gonna burn!
• Max’s joke that made me feel legitimately uncomfortable: ”Like I said to my uncle in the middle of the night, ‘This better be good.’” Yeesh.
• 2 Broke Girls Cheesecake Menu:

The Hopefully One-Time Section in Which I Tell Professional Comedy Writers How I Would Better Do Their Jobs:

• Max tells Caroline about how Deke made her “bread wet, if you know what [she's] saying.” Caroline’s response is “Okay, thank you I’m finally off bread.” I personally think that joke would’ve been a lot stronger if she had made more explicit references to dieting, like “And I thought Atkins was going to be hard,” etc.
• Sophie talks about how Max and Caroline hooking up would ruin their friendship and “[her] opinion of Max.” When Caroline asks about Sophie’s opinion of her the Polish woman says “Oh, it’s already pretty low.” I would have had her admit that her respect for the blonde was raised, that her being able to land Max was an upgrade.
• Anyway, just my two cents.

Well readers, I bring the joyous news that you can now, at long last, read the scribblings of yours truly on two internet sites. Primer magazine, which I reviewed in the past, was kind enough to publish an article of mine which I’ll be shamelessly plugging here. In addition, it got me thinking about writing in general, leading to our topic for today.

How can we make writing viable?

See, for the vast majority of would-be authors (myself included), writing simply isn’t a viable career, (excluding TV and movies, which are arguably a very different process). Yes, you’ve got such career novelists like Stephen King or J.K. Rowling, but these people represent the rare exception to the rule that writing is something you do when you’re not at your real job.

We could probably talk all day about the role of the publisher and the marketing team and everyone else involved in the process of getting the work out there, but today let’s just focus on the consumption of the product. I think there are a few factors that really contribute to the situation as it stands today.

Let me break it down here:

I. Our Attention Spans are Shorter

I hate to admit it, but there does have to be something said for our attention spans in this culture. As much as it pains me, I think that even my own attention span has been eviscerated by TV and the internet, and the task of sitting down for an hour or two a day and slogging through a book is, well, a chore. We want ever-shifting stimulation and instant gratification (more on that in a sec) and books simply aren’t designed for that.

II. Books are Expensive

And even so, it’s not just that our brains have been fundamentally rewired (or fried) by our busy lifestyles. Simple truth of the matter is that a decent book from any major outlet is gonna put you 15 bucks out of pocket if it’s cheap. Used bookstores aren’t all that much better.

And that’s really the rub, aint it? Writers want/need their works to be pricey enough for them to get a livable paycheck, but the more expensive the book is, the less likely are people to buy it. It’s a catch-22 that seems to be acting as just a wrench in the mechanism of the whole thing.

III. You Can’t Tell If A Book’s Good Until You Read It

Once upon a time, that statement above was true of most everything. Music, movies, you name it. Nowadays, however, that’s just no longer true. You can listen to a clip of a song before you decide to buy it, you can watch a teaser or commercial of a TV show before watching an episode, and so on and so forth. Not books though. That’s perhaps the one thing that hasn’t changed.

Buying a book is a risky investment, and with all the lousy assembly line paperbacks that get churned out (another topic worth discussion) in combination with how pricey books are in general, I guess I’m just surprised that the market exists at all.

With all that hashed out though, maybe we can take some steps to least addressing those issues.

I. Audiobook Everything

For all my sheepish whining about shorter attention spans, I have managed to read two novels over the course of this past week- and that’s thanks to them being audiobooks. I can play a game, work out, clean up my house (okay, maybe not that last one) and simultaneously plough through Asimov or McCarthy. Maybe that’s still lazy, and there’s definitely a case to be made for the difference between listening to a book and actually reading one, but the fact remains that I’ve gotten reading done.

Now this is mostly just true of major novels- I’d like to see this trend, somehow, bleed through to short stories (we’ll cover that more in a sec). As much as I love short stories, I don’t know that I’d ever subscribe to a literary magazine. A subscription to those same stories as an audio file? Skinflint that I am, I’d at least give it some consideration.

II. Serialize Novels (Again)

Back when the novel was first being developed, stories wouldn’t typically be presented in complete form but would rather be published chapter by chapter or segment by segment. A lot of this had to do with how expensive books still were at the time, but it was also a means of giving the average man a chance to access a whole bunch of books at once. With the economy still lousy and books still expensive, maybe we can start bridging the creator-consumer divide by reviving this style of publishing. Give the public a cheaper alternative and a way to test out a variety of different authors. If the story’s good enough to capture your attention, you’ll keep on buying ‘em and the total price would amount to about the same as a single book (upwards of 15 bucks)- if you don’t, well, you’re only out a buck or two and the author’s made some cash he or she might not have otherwise.

III. Real Book Reviews

I’ve been complaining a lot about the  price of books, but even with easy access to the local library, I still find myself only checking out books by authors I already know. They say you can’t judge a  book by it’s cover, and that really is true. You also can’t judge a book by the synopsis, the online comments, or the blurbs on the dust jacket. It’s just too easy to skew reviews, and you’re stuck again making an investment (in time, if not money) with no real assurance of payoff. We need a reliable system out there for reviewing books- and while that does exist in some capacity, it just doesn’t seem to be enough. When a movie comes out, I can turn to my trusted critics for a good recommendation. Same for video games, music, or cigars. Maybe it’s due to how many books get put out every year, or just the time involved in reading them, but I can’t turn to a single, cohesive source for commentary on a truly wide range of books. New authors can’t get decent coverage and established writers can’t expand their fan base.

And in all honesty, I’m not quite sure how to solve this one; maybe you can help?

What do you think? How do we get writing to where it can be sustainable and reading to where it can be viable?

Let’s hear it.

I tried Grammarly’s check grammar free of charge because, well, let’s just say that I’ve been skeptical of any sort of program that claims to be able to assist or improve writing. Sure, I write a fair amount as you’ve probably noticed, but I edit quite a bit as well [every post that goes up on this blog, for one, so any mistakes you may find are unfortunately all on me]. Suspicion of any product that may eliminate the line of work I’d like to be in is warranted, I think.

Not only that, but back when I was still working as a copywriter I was asked to try out some software that would be used to “spin” articles, turning old content into fresh, new content that would draw search engine attention to our company. Unfortunately the program [the ironically named The Best Spinner] only served as a sort of glorified thesaurus, providing alternatives to words used, something that any accomplished writer could handle themselves, while rearranging sentences as well. 

So I tried out Grammarly with equal parts skepticism and trepidation- would this be an online platform that would make me, and others editors to boot, obsolete?

Right off the bat I was impressed.

Look, I won’t lie to you nice people, I was approached by someone from Grammarly to partner with them [by writing about their product and beginning this blog post with "I tried Grammarly's check grammar free of charge because [insert clever/funny reason here].”] with the result being that I would receive a $10 Amazon gift card. Even after taking them up on it, though, I resolved to be as honest as possible, because you can trust me when I say that there isn’t a purchase of $10 or under from the world’s largest online retailer that would be able to force me to type the words “wow, what an easy-to-use service they are providing.”

For example, I took a paragraph from Gordon’s post yesterday and pasted it into the “writing-enhancement platform” to see if I missed anything-

-and was informed of a number of things. For one, that it is a wordy sentence, which I already knew, but also that there is some incorrect tense form in the dependent clause, the word blah was repeated, and there are some issues with the passive voice. As you can see from the screencap below they suggest “the incompetent government absorbs it” which really should be “absorb” instead; it’s still a good point nonetheless.

And it’s in that last bit where I regain quite a bit of confidence. While Grammarly is most certainly able to direct you to areas that may require a closer look or rewrite it’s not fully capable of providing the proper alternative. It’s fantastic for eliminating wordiness [it seems to hate the word "really"] and working through tenses, but it has its limitations.

Not only that, but if you’re not assured that Grammarly has done all that it can for you there’s even the option to send your article to their very own proofreaders, who will correct your mistakes for mere pennies a word! If that’s not assurance that the human editor will be around for at least a few more years to come I don’t know what is.

Now it’s no secret that all programs and online services require constant patches and so on to keep up to date, but with English’s rapid rate of evolution how will the tech people and grammaticians at Grammarly manage to keep up? Similar to MS Word you are able to add words to their dictionary, but what about changes in grammar?

Surprising me a second time, the program appears to accept the word “because” as a preposition, which was by no means acceptable even a decade ago. It’s only within the past year that linguists have begun referring to it as the “prepositional-because” or “because-noun”. This of course doesn’t cover all the nuances the English language begins to accumulate, but that’s literally the most impressive thing about it.

As a final point, this online proofreader cements its place as a product for the internet by featuring a freaking [apparently not recognized as an inappropriate colloquialism] plagiarism checker, down to the percentage. It even shows you how to cite whatever source you may have quotes, which makes it perfect for students writing research papers.

All in all, Grammarly is an extremely impressive program with many applications, allowing you to specify whether you’d like proofreading for an academic essay or just a casual email. Most importantly for yours truly, however, is that at this point in time I machines are not yet capable of replacing me. That’ll help me sleep well tonight.

Grammarly is a subscription-based service. Options range from:

• Monthly Plan - $29.95 / month
• Quarterly Plan – $19.98 / month
• Annual Plan – $11.66 / month

I’ve read all four Twilight books. Would have checked out Midnight Sun, a retelling of the first novel from Edward’s perspective, but a copy was leaked online and Meyers never ended up releasing it. My plan is to read a minimum of 52 books this year, and my hope is that 50 Shades of Grey makes it onto that list somewhere.

No, I’m not a middle-aged suburban mom who’s been catfishing you all these past two to three years. All of that was just a little background to set up today’s topic, which is our right to write about, well, anything.

My thoughts on the whole issue began yesterday, when a friend on Facebook shared a Huffington Post blog post titled “If JK Rowling Cares About Writing, She Should Stop Doing It“. I could go into the lack of logic behind the author’s argument, but what I really want to concentrate on is the second paragraph [missing just the last line referring to the Casual Vacancy]:

“I didn’t much mind Rowling when she was Pottering about. I’ve never read a word (or seen a minute) so I can’t comment on whether the books were good, bad or indifferent. I did think it a shame that adults were reading them (rather than just reading them to their children, which is another thing altogether), mainly because there’s so many other books out there that are surely more stimulating for grown-up minds.”

Novelist and copywriter Lynn Shepherd can write a lot of different things that I disagree with, but she guarantees losing me as a potential supporter when she says that she’s “never read a word” of the Harry Potter series. There’s nothing wrong with that in and of itself [I'm not one of those people who insists to people that they have to read such-and such], the issue is that she then follow it up by saying that it’s a shame adults read them.

She’s “could use twenty pound notes for toilet paper” rich.

I’m not going to defend or decry any aspects of any of the books [though I pretty much stand by MGK's breakdown of The Deathly Hallows]. What I am going to say is that Shepherd, her own personal writing skill aside, doesn’t have a leg to stand on. This isn’t an issue of one woman complaining blogging over on HuffPost and the other literally being wealthier than the Queen, it’s that you can’t assert that people are wasting their time reading something when you didn’t deign to even touch its pages yourself.

Right?

I didn’t get into Stephenie Meyers’ stuff so that I could lecture Twihards about what they were devoting their lives to.  I actually fall back on the age-old hipster line that I “read them before they were cool.” When and where I was in high school they weren’t a big deal, and so I polished off the first three books without any awareness of the hype they would garner.

You don’t need me to tell you how reviled the series is as a whole, because memes like the one on the left pop up in Google Image Searches that don’t contain the terms “still”, “better”, “love”, “story”, or “Twilight.” What I can tell you though, as someone who’s read them, is there’s at least one aspect of Meyer’s books that is actually pretty decent: the existence of werewolves as North America’s supernatural autoimmune response to vampires from Europe is solid lore. Another fact is that as much flak as Kristen Stewart gets for playing a dour, emotionless young woman in the films the fact is that her character Bella Swan was, would you imagine that, written as a dour, emotionless young woman.

I mean, she fluctuated between dour and emotionless to irrational hysterics, and that sort of leads into my second point: that the Twilight is a series that I can talk about with people and, consequently, write about.

“Archer looks terrible!” he proclaimed, watching a 747 pass by his window.

I’m very self-conscious, especially on this blog, of presenting any ideas or arguments that feel like they were composed in the lofty rooms of an ivory tower. The fact is that I’m an expert when it comes to very few subjects; even when it comes to comics I make sure not to overextend myself, especially in light of my beginning to regularly read/buy roughly two years ago. Gordon could pen more than a few very well-informed pieces on capitalism vs. communism and never for a second would I doubt that he knew what he was talking about.

The thing is, Gordon has clearly put in the work to gain knowledge about a subject he cares deeply about. Research is key to any post or article, but surely that can’t be it. Imagine if I had presented my piece on Man of Steel, which was essentially a list of reviews and write ups by critics I agreed with, without having seen it myself. Would that be tantamount to me criticizing Here Comes Honey Boo Boo without ever setting eyes on it, content that the rest of the internet had passed judgement on it for me as it is?

The way I worded my topic above was “our right to write about, well, anything,” but it really extends beyond that. To put it more broadly what I’m asking is whether or not we can judge anything we haven’t experienced ourselves. That only leads to more questions, though, because we now have to ask how we want to define “experience”?

I can say with confidence that I can discuss the few merits that 2 Broke Girls contains because I have burdened myself with the responsibility of watching and thinking about the show on a weekly basis; I’ve also seen every single episode. That’s not something I wish on anyone, and it shouldn’t be the only qualification for someone to be able to say “what a stupid show.” What is the bare minimum, though?

Look at me now, nine-year-old Evan!

As times goes on I realize more and more that withholding judgement, at least for a time, can only be a good thing. Part of that may be because there were times in my life where I had written off Parks and Recreation, running for exercise, black and white movies, and shrimp. I mean, shrimp. There are . . . there are days when I think back to how very, very wrong I was.

There’s a clear slant there, though, because obviously not everything we try is going to be a comedic work of art starring Burt Macklin, FBI. That was never really the point though, was it? Any piece of media we interact with, any experience we seek to undertake, it could go one way or the other. We determine for ourselves what its merits are and then we can share those thoughts with others knowing that we speak from a place of experience.

The opposite side of the spectrum isn’t casting our own aspersions willy-nilly, though, at least not usually. We gather our own hypotheses about that which we have not read or watched or heard, obviously, but many of our judgements inevitably end up being formed by others. This concept of blind hatred [and devotion] is something I’ll touch on next Friday, but as it stands by not engaging with something we ultimately allow others to tell us how to feel.

There is a place for reviews, of course, and I’m kind of a junkie when it comes to them [I have basically lived off of the Unshaved Mouse's Disney reviews for the past week]. What makes them such a joy to read, though, is that I’ve seen all of these movies for myself. I can see what I agree with [like Jane being all that and then some in his Tarzan review] and take note of what I don’t [I thought about this for the better part of five minutes and there really isn't much]. It adds to my experience instead of taking the place of it.

To end with, there are obviously some things that do not require trying to admit that we will not like it. If you don’t think tattoos are for you then that sounds like a decision you should stick with. When it comes to most other choices the effects are decidedly less permanent [skydiving could go one of two ways, but it's generally pretty safe], and while you shouldn’t cannonball into anything [marathoning a few seasons would be excessive] dipping your toes into the water certainly can’t hurt. All analogies break down, so I’m stopping you before you bring up piranhas, et cetera.

Really, everyone is allowed to write about whatever they want, but writers like Lynn Shepherd will always find themselves on shaky ground after admitting they have not in fact experienced that which they put down. The minutes or hours you take to check something out will never hurt you as much as not doing so will hurt your argument.

Nobody would blame you for not remembering Heroes. The show’s stint at the top was so short and its tailspin into oblivion was so swift and violent that it’s once glorious reputation and critical acclaim has almost been obscured entirely.

“Eclipsed”, if you will…

For those of you unfamiliar, let me offer a quick recap.

Heroes followed a number of seemingly unrelated people who, in the days following a solar eclipse, find that they’ve developed superpowers. As they struggle to cope with their new abilities, their storylines begin to entwine as the looming threat of destruction, along with a mysterious and sinister figure, approaches.

The show’s total simplicity made it both accessible to a wide audience (especially one that wouldn’t necessarily consider themselves comic book/superhero fans) and further made the show easy to follow, even with its large cast of characters. That large cast in turn meant that most everyone would have someone they’d be able to relate to, and kept the episodes moving along at a decent pace with no real room for boredom. And all of that went out the window.

Somewhere near the end of the second season and the beginning of the third ratings began to plummet, with NBC cancelling the show in 2010 after it had lost more than 50% of its initial audience. Exactly how that happened is the subject of today’s post, along with some half-hopeful advice on how they can avoid it this next go around.

Oh, did I not mention it? Heroes is coming back in 2015.

So let’s get to it.

I. Limit The Cast

Now I’ve already stated that part of the initial charm of Heroes was the large cast. Out of everyone getting a storyline, chances are you’ll find at least one of them compelling and sympathetic. That said, there is such a thing as taking it too far- and we saw this happen in Heroes as the show became bogged down with more and more characters.

These and like 46 others…

The end effect was that it was impossible to keep track of all the new faces and the more central characters had less and less time devoted to them. Ultimately, it seemed to become more about showcasing various superpowers, speaking of which…

II. Stick With A Single Power

Again, it was the simplicity of the show which made it easy to follow. As large as the cast got, a huge element of their characters was their individual superpower and how they interacted with it. The idealistic one struggling to use his unruly power for good, the well-nigh invincible one who just wanted to be normal- all these things gave their users depth. At the beginning of Heroes the powers served to convey character, by the end, characters were used to show off powers.

This is not a good basis for a television show.

Well that, and we had people constantly losing their powers, and then regaining them, and people who never had powers before suddenly had them, and people who had powers now had tons more- it all got very messy very fast, and robbed the show and any sense of verisimilitude. I’m more than happy to suspend by disbelief, but I’ve got limits.

III. Ax the Drama

While those last two faults didn’t help Heroes much, ultimately I don’t believe they’re what killed the show. That was due to the show’s inability to handle its own success- let me break it down for you [Spoiler Alert].

Season 1 wound up wrapping up very neatly, with the crisis averted, the antagonist destroyed, and everyone more or less having reached some kind of understanding of themselves and their place in the world. Once Season 2 rolled around the show didn’t really seem to know what to do with itself. The show didn’t seem to understand exactly what the new challenge the protagonists would be facing would be, but seemed determined that it would be bigger and more severe than the last (which, seeing as it was the end of all life, is hard to top) and that it’d just pick up right from where it had left off.

“This season we’re going to introduce something like this, but worse!”

Naturally that not only wears away at believability but kinda negates everything that was done prior to it. It’s jumping the shark and then some.

Soon the show found itself scrabbling to create tension anywhere it could. Good guys turned evil, evil guys turned good and then bad again. People who were dead came back and villains were introduced with absolutely no sense of dread being built up beforehand. Imagine watching only the last five minutes of a horror movie on loop for 30 minutes a week and you pretty much had Season 3, only with a plot that made more sense. We can blame part of this on the writers’ strike, but ultimately I think it’s an issue of not respecting the audience. That’s the reason it became just a parade of new people, new powers, and new betrayals and revelations that’d be more at home in a soap opera. Because the audience was treated as nothing more than kids just waiting for the next shiny new thing there was no assumption that they had any interest in the characters or their lives.

And I’d be dumping on the show more, but honestly, I’ve actually got some high hopes for this reboot. Pessimist that I am, Community has pulled itself up from the only TV wreckage as nasty as Heroes and even I think is nearing the level it was when it first started.

So what do ya say? Can’t hurt to give it a shot.

It is really shocking just how few gifs there are out there for this show…

This week opens up with the strangely comforting scene of a table of eccentric [see: easily mockable] diners and the two girls’ reactions to them. Instead of hipsters or, I don’t know, bronies, we have half a dozen cumberbitches fresh from Sherlock Con. I had planned to live the rest of my life without ever typing out that term, but that’s behind us so let’s move on-

What you all have to understand is that I take everything I watch on TV very, very seriously. This means being extremely perplexed upon hearing Max insinuate that she never went to high school, particularly because it makes the story of how she lost her virginity [see the Stray Observations here and here] that much more disturbing. The thing is, I don’t think you have to be a stickler for continuity to see the gargantuan staring-you-in-the-face error in this episode.

The A-plot [and I'll be getting to the B-plot later, such as it is] concerns Caroline getting fed up with Chef Nicolas’ excessive flirting and sending him a text that reads ”I’ll have dinner with you when you leave your wife.” Oleg convinces her and Max it’s a bluff to get into her pants, but when Nicolas issues an exact time they have to rush over to keep his open marriage from falling apart. After all, Caroline is “the almost girl”, she only almost breaks up open marriages.

So they head over to his apartment and, after Caroline spurns his advances, he realizes he can’t end his open marriage. The girls think is great so he should just not Skype his wife. Except that she’s actually in the building and is coming up the stairs and goodness gracious, their open marriage is in real jeopardy he can’t be alone, so Max and Caroline need to go hide in the bathroom because who knows what his wife will think.

I now present exhibits A and B:

EXHIBIT A: An excerpt from last week’s review of the show.

EXHIBIT B: The first result on Google when searching for “open marriage”.

Let me make it even more painfully clear: Caroline was given permission by Chef Nicolas’ wife to have sex with him; that is what open marriages imply. His wife “catching him” with two girls in his apartment should cause him zero problems.

Which is unfortunate, because I actually think the girls hiding in the bathroom and then making their way unto the ledge outside the window is really fun. It starts out raining, because of course, and then proceeds to hail after they quip that “at least it couldn’t get any worse.” It’s hitting classic comedic bits, but pulls them off very well.

It’s not only pretty funny, but it looks great, too. I was just thinking to myself how cheap the bathroom set looked, but everything outside of it turned out really well. Multi-camera sitcoms often struggle with outside shots, but colour me impressed by how great the ledge made the entire scene.

After everything that happens after they crash in through the window you see on the left [Caroline slips, but when muted it looks like Max saves her from leaping to her death] I think it’s fair to say that this particular chapter of the show is closed. Chef Nicolas has realized that he will always almost have sex with Caroline, and we should see an end to his attempts at wooing her.

In other news, they appear to be giving Garrett Morris lines again. I remember back when Earl played more of a father figure to Max, helping to instill the idea that she valued others and had created a pseudo-family to make up for her own childhood,and that’s revived in a very short reference to how he cares about her being around.

Let’s be real with ourselves, Han should’ve fired both Max and Caroline a long time ago. Not only do they not respect him a whit, they don’t listen to anything he says and he is their boss. All that being said, I’m giving him the B-plot because of his adventures with the spider communities in the walk-in and dishroom. Things began escalating quickly, and a discarded piece of ham proved to be a matter of contention between the two kingdoms claiming ownership. It’s all so wonderfully absurd, and I enjoyed every second of it.

Current Total: $840.

New Total: $824. Please don’t ask me where or how they spent the $16.

The Title Refers To: Max and Caroline’s near-death experience out on the ledge.

Stray Observations:

• “Do you have eggs Benedict . . . Cumberbatch?”
• Tumblr is alternately giddy and scornful over the Sherlock fandom making an appearance,
• “Didn’t I tell you to keep my name outta your mouth?”
• Nicolas’ appearance at the diner elicited Sophie-esque whoos, which was interesting.
• Sophie’s movie biz fling “drives the Miramax party bus and [. . .] wears a big wig.”
• Earlis apparently an easy Morgan Freeman stand-in: “And if you need god, a judge, or an old guy sitting on a porch, I’m your man.”
• Deke’s absence explained away by him having the flu.
• There is a sweatshop in the same building as the pastry school, where “10 Vietnamese women are making next year’s ‘Prada.’”
• Lots of John/”Big Mary” in this episode.
• Max’s favourite Seuss book: The Whore He’s Leaving Her For
• Look, I struggled through two semesters of college friend and I know for a fact that “toilette” is feminine and therefore would use “la” and not “le”.
• 2 Broke Girls Cheesecake Menu: Nothing this week, folks.

Right at the end of 2011 Todd VanDerWerff, who I unofficially inherited these reviews from after Pilot Viruet passed the torch, wrote an article on the AV Club discussing how some shows on TV existed as “Nice places to visit”.

While the initial focus was on dramas he turns to sitcoms and describes how he divides them into two categories: “shows that aim for greatness and try to push the boundaries of the form, and shows that just want to create a bunch of characters that are fun to hang out with.” Happy Endings is my personal benchmark for the latter, with Parks and Recreation coming a close second. It’s not to say that neither show exhibits good writing [both do, in their own ways], more that they’re half hours of television in which viewers can relax, content to spend time with characters who are familiar and comfortable to them.

2 Broke Girls appears to want to be one of these shows.

The funny thing about this is that a mere thirty minutes before we join Max and Caroline for more of their latest financially-challenged escapades CBS’s most popular sitcom, an impressive hang-out show in its own right, takes centre stage. When compared to How I Met Your Mother it really isn’t much of a contest.

Where 2 Broke Girls feels necessary from time to time to remind us that Max and Caroline’s co-workers do in fact support them Max ["And the First Day of School"] How I Met Your Mother keeps all five of its main cast constantly interacting with each other [in pretty much every episode]. In the former the actual hanging out feels like a reminder, not only that the other characters care but that they exist; the latter has them interact organically to the point where it feels awkward to pull it apart describe it in this many words].

It’s not impossible for a show surrounding a primary cast of two [I've said it once and I've said it again, the girls are really the only ones driving the action] to be a hang-out sitcom, only that it makes it more difficult for us as an audience to react to them on that level. It’s easy to enjoy watching a group of friends enjoying each others’ company, but viewing two people can make you feel like a third wheel of sorts. So much one-on-one screentime and interaction inevitably creates some form of mild intimacy that I don’t personally want a show to be solely comprised of- like if The Office had been primarily Jim and Pam, or if Community revolved around Troy and Abed. This particular sentiment definitely isn’t true for everyone, so let me on and discuss how Han specifically holds the cast, and entire show, back.

This week’s episode is a celebration of St. Patrick’s Day, a holiday that apparently guarantees Han Lee a 100% chance of getting laid. While it’s a well-known fact that Asian men are not positively portrayed in the media when it comes to their sexuality the fact is that he gets the short end of the stick [not a pun, I swear] more often than not. “Is Han even a man?/Han is not a man” is the vast majority of dialogue concerning the character summed up in a few words. All that being said I was interested to see how this would work out for him.

About as well as I expected, it turns out.

Dressing up as holiday-appropriate mythical creature Lepre-Han is swarmed by women at the pub the gang heads to; for some reason that I can’t fathom Caroline can’t find it within herself to refer to them as female ["with all of those . . . I wanna say girls"]. Most of them are quite young and pretty, so of course Han initially opts for a “buxom paralegal” who “brought outside chicken”. That may sound appealing, but she’s not the most traditionally beautiful, if you get my drift.  He ultimately ends up going back to a woman’s “sister’s condo in Jersey City” where the two of them will have to be quiet.

It’s not enough that the woman’s entrance [seen on the right] is punctuated by the live audience’s laughter], Max makes a prophecy about their night together saying that it ”Looks like they’re going to be unlucky tonight.”

Han finally sleeping with a woman is not heralded with even a fraction of the woos that Sophie’s appearances garner, but is instead met with laughter. Han is a joke because he’s short, bossy, and ineffectual [we'll leave the uncomfortable racist humour back in Season 1] and, as a cherry on top, he ostensibly cannot gauge whether a not a woman is physically attractive.  

It’s not so much that we can’t have a character like Han, it’s that when a show takes said character and treats them a certain way it cannot attain that title of “hang-out sitcom”. Who was the butt of every joke in Friends? Was it Phoebe? Ross? Chandler? Monica? Joey? Rachel? Each one had easily mockable traits [except for Ross, because being a paleontologist is awesome] but were never reduced to them. They didn’t constantly lose in every aspect of life.

That’s all to say that if 2 Broke Girls wants to get there, to create a space where we can truly enjoy being around this group of people as a whole, at the very least Han needs to be handled differently.

Almost a thousand words in and I haven’t even really touched on what happens throughout the episode, which makes me feel like I’ve adopted more than just the burden of reviewing this show from Todd VanDerWerff. Allow me to do so in one long-ish paragraph and also apologize for overanalyzing a show that I’ve admitted to catering to the lowest common denominator and expecting more out of it. Tune in next week where I will be judging it on its own merits, as usual!

What takes place is yet another episode where Caroline comes to understand that her new life is better than her old one. After a rather unpleasant time at the pub the blonde opts to take the extra money they made selling Guinness and Irish cream cupcakes and take Max to The Plaza where they can drink Bellinis in peace. There she realizes how boring it is and they return to where all the fun is. To keep it from taking up too much of the Stray Observations Caroline is kissed several times on the mouth by an overly friendly drunk nicknamed Blarney Bill which is, suffice to say, probably an all-too-real occurrence for women on this holiday and as such doesn’t work as a joke for me personally.

Current Total: $824.

New Total: $1,150. Caroline gives Han $50 for the cab to Jersey City, so I’m not even sure if this total makes sense.

The Title Refers To: Kilts, St. Patrick’s Day, y’know. Earl wears one as well. I don’t think the play on “guilt trip” plays out in the episode at all.

Stray Observations:

• In the cold open we are reminded that Irish Catholics do not engage in birth control.
• “No one gonna pinch me today because I got all this green.”
• Eric Andre still AWOL “snowboarding somewhere called “Vale” with something called “a family.”
• The Ukrainian Oleg argues with a Russian taxi driver. This levels of political commentary are off the chain.
• His St. Paddy’s Day merch includes “Kiss Me I’m Irish” crotch t-shirts and “disposable funnel for upwardly mobile elegant young ladies who want to stand and pee in the street like a man.”
• Earl learned to play the bagpipes and drive stick after an acid trip.
• “Just so you know, if you’re an orphan, I’m interested.”
• “Are you over here making money off of me you wolves of Wall Street?”
• Lindsey Kraft, who played the drunk girl Monica, is a treasure.

“You guys, I just threw up.”

“I think I’m gonna need some water. I need to drive a school bus in four hours.”

“You’re a great American.” “I know what I am.”

• “That was before I discovered the sensation of a cool breeze circling my bag and my pipe.”
• “Told you girls, a hundred percent.”
• 2 Broke Girls Cheesecake Menu: Nothing really worth mentioning. Sophie wears some kind of sexy shamrock outfit, I guess.

As I was walking around doing errands yesterday I began to muse on one of my favourite topics: diversity in media. While this could’ve been a very pleasant stroll on an afternoon that felt much more like spring than winter, my mind felt the need to challenge itself with a question I’m sure often leaves the lips of those who are sick of “having diversity crammed down their throats”: Why is the US held responsible for all of this?

To unpack that a little bit, there’s a lot of outcry on [and off] the internet for the entertainment industry as a whole [film, television, et cetera] to showcase more minorities. While I can’t comment on what other countries are doing, I don’t think it’s too great a leap to assume that pretty much all of this discussion is in regards to American media. Does anyone think that people in India are clamouring for more Koreans in their Bollywood movies?

The answer to “why America?” is actually painfully simple, and it hurts me that it didn’t immediately come to mind on my walk [it was a beautiful day, alright]: all that’s being asked for is fair representation. In other words, all people are asking is for the media to paint a more accurate picture of the world we live in. The state of things at present is far from true to life as we know it, and I’m going to bombard you with graphs until you agree with me-

GENDER, RACE, AND TOP BILLING AT PARAMOUNT PICTURES

Graphic by Briana Higgins, using the same research from the link above

This Infographic Proves The Oscars’ Diversity Issues Are Worse Than You Thought [visit link to view the entire thing]

I’m going to let its creator, Comics Alliance writer Andrew Wheeler, explain what it is:

“One in three Americans is a straight white non-Hispanic cisgender male. That’s an estimate based on 2010 census data. The actual number is probably lower, and sliding. But if we take that number as a starting point, we can say that any team that’s more than 33% straight white non-Hispanic cisgender men is over-representative of that demographic category. A realistically representative team would be two-thirds made up of people of color, and/or women, and/or lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender people, and/or people who represent any combination of those identifiers.

In the index, for ease of reference, we call the straight white non-Hispanic cisgender men ‘Harveys,’ and we call everyone else ‘Renees.’ So the U.S. population has one Harvey for every two Renees.”

For the less comic book-inclined among you, Harveys are named after Harvey Bullock, an average joe [straight, White non-Hispanic, cisgender] cop with the Gotham City Police Department. Renees are after his partner Renee Montoya, a lesbian Latina woman.

Wheeler further explains that a group of characters will score a certain number, that being however many Harveys or Renees extra there are in addition to a demographically representative team. Really, the best way to explain this would be to demonstrate for myself. While the index was originally created to grade superhero teams it can apply to all media, so I’ll be using it on the cast of one of my favourite FOX shows [graphics taken from the CA article, and were created by Dylan Todd using artwork drawn by Michael Lark].