2009 PCA/ACA National Conference: My Experience

Some general thoughts on the 2009 PCA/ACA conference.

• Having gotten back from this year's PCA, I have to wonder if the people there have gotten friendlier, or, much more likely, I've learned to relax a lot better. Met some seriously great folks.


• I'd never been to the South before -- Southern hospitality is exactly what it's cracked up to be.


• Of the panels that I went to, a distinct pattern emerged: the music papers mostly sucked, while the sci fi panels were excellent; to my mind, the lesser papers were overly fannish -- so-and-so is cleary a genius, omg! -- while the better, memorable ones argued a stronger, more provocative thesis. (And in my opinion, the less theory, the better -- reading Lacan is hard enough, trying to understand him during a lecture is whole different, hopeless matter.)


• Presentation on My Bloody Valentine was probably the best music paper, though another one that I missed, talking about Muzak(!), seemed very promising.


• Best panel from first to last presenter was for me the one on sci fi and dance(!) -- the ballerina as a cyborg(!) (apparently, pointe work came about when ballet developed technology to suspend dancers from wires to enhance the illusion of their lightness by dancing "on" their toes, after which point (pun) prostheses (pointe shoes) were developed to let the dancers do same on their own) with regards to Glaubot on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, physical hyper-virtuosity in Matrix and The Transformers and various aesthetics of authenticity in the former (the actors doing their own stunts) contrasted against the seamless (and if you ask me, excessively detailed) CGI in the latter, and the waltz as a mode of cinematic seduction in fantasy films.


• The panel on The Wire was less critical and more of a particular exercise in fandom and its attendant compulsion to catalog moments from the show we love, which actually turned out to be for the best (since another isolated paper on The Wire centered on Foucault and surveillance was one I couldn't follow). Following the more fannish approach to The Wire, I actually got into a vigorous internet-style argument about the nature of Omar Little.


• One bad thing about the panel on The Wire was that I missed a paper on SYTYCD scheduled at the same time.


• I have a LONG list of people whom I need to email so I can get their papers, both those which I missed or those which were awesome.


• One person showed a clip of the final scene from Wall-E in the 10am session, and I cried -- that's how amazing the film is, that it can make a groggy, cranky person in the morning cry without any of the emotional setup supplied by the rest of the film.


• I attended four separate Wall-E presentations.


• If you don't follow my Twitter, then this is news to you: my paper was heard by all of seven people, four presenters (me included) plus three audience members. Everyone else had more mature papers than me -- one of them actually conducted field studies (i.e. interviewed Nigel Lythgoe(!)) and conducted focus studies(!) (/me shakes fist at ethnographic research) -- and the one other English major paper mentioned Zizek = I lose. I didn't even get any questions in the subsequent Q&A, it was split mostly between the paper on American Idol and Kid Nation (!?) -- is ANTM so played out already? (Yes, though you wouldn't ever find me admitting that.)


• There was a fascinating paper on Bjork and Alexander McQueen that I only caught a part of -- in fact, judging by its Q&A, that panel (which was titled "Film, Fetishism, Bjork and Performativity") seemed like a great forum in which to develop, explore, and work through applied theory. I probably could've made it to a PhD program if my master's work had been on fashion! I was also the worst-dressed, worst-groomed person at that panel (I hadn't showered at that point in the day.)


• I am positively thrilled that I am not getting a PhD, and probably never will. Doing the PCA itself was fun, but everything leading up to it was a grind that I don't miss.

Indie rating: Heidi Berry - "Little Fox"

I Blog Every Episode of The Wire 07

Each entry opens some general notes if I have them before I launch into spoilers that might either be for that specific episode or span the entire series. In other words, readers who have not reached the end are urged to return to these posts only when they have.

"One Arrest" (1x07)

No, I haven't given up on this project, but I have been stupid-busy with other important and boring things.



Read more, albeit not a whole lot, after the jump.

Remember that moment in "The Buys" (1x03) when the police come down on the low-rises and Bodie punches Det. Polk? Herc and Carv start beating on Bodie, and when Kima spots what's going on, she sprints over and we all think that she's going to break up the brutality? Except she actually joins in?




Now, four episodes later, when Bird's in the interrogation room and let's say not exactly cooperating with the police, our mindsets have changed and as Landsman rips up that pre-beatdown polaroid and Daniels closes the door to the room, we aren't thinking police brutality anymore, but that Bird's bringing it on himself. Maybe we're even a little edified that they didn't even take his handcuffs off.

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The first appearance of Senator Davis. Sheeeee-etc.
Indie rating: Tarnation – "Game of Broken Hearts"

I Blog Every Episode of The Wire 06

Each entry opens some general notes if I have them before I launch into spoilers that might either be for that specific episode or span the entire series. In other words, readers who have not reached the end are urged to return to these posts only when they have.

"The Wire" (1x06)



Read more after the jump.


A major theme in "The Wire" is how a set of characters react and carry on from certain developments, some particularly traumatic: Bodie gets out of juvenile hall, Johnny Weeks hits the streets again, Omar mourns for Brandon and looks to begin to pay back the Barksdales.

After Bodie is released from custody, Herc and Carver roll up on him thinking he skipped out on juvie again. A smack or two later, Bodie explains that the judge let him go because, in the hopper's own words, "He saw my potential. He expects big things from me." While he's clearly mouthing empty platitudes -- though he is perceptive enough to criticize the failure of a city institution: "the juvenile system in this city is fucked up, it's a big-ass fucking joke" -- the show's explicitly balancing the liberal audience's belief in criminal rehabilitation against what Bodie ultimately does to Wallace, and it's a cold, cruel joke that feeds into the paranoia that liberalism is being gamed by thugs.

In terms of his character, though, Bodie's skating that fine line between the life of a taxpayer and the life of drug dealing, or at least paying lip service to a reformed life: "I don't know, college, law school, medical school, all that good shit." However, he only reached a position at which he could say that through the means enabled by Barksdale's dirt-playing, i.e. having Maurice Levy smooth-talk Bodie out of the courts and back onto the street, so in that respect, he's made his decision.

Being a junkie without the wiles and wisdom of Bubbles, Johnny jumps straight back into the same old when he finds out that he's HIV-positive. That death sentence is so monolithic and incomprehensible that it's hardly any wonder that he goes back to the squalor of a fiend's life, in which he comes up with the plan to steal some copper pipes. Thinking that he and Bubbles have outmaneuvered the system, they're brought back down to earth when they get shortchanged on the pipes, and to top things off (bad choice of words), Johnny gets arrested when he goes back out to score. He's caught in a karmic circle of hell without caring that he's headed for a sad end.

Only Omar decides to go outside of his immediate world, if only briefly, by going to the police. However, his path to the McNulty and Kima and vengeance first has to go through the morgue to identify Brandon's brutally murdered body. Once he gets through that tribulation, Omar sets in motion the events that will later undermine the whole Barksdale operation, though, individual that he is, he fails to upset the system, which of course he doesn't want to do away with in any case (since he profits by it), and which will inevitably do him in.

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D'Angelo echoes his uncle's paranoia from the previous episode.

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Take a good look at Polk (about 9 in the morning), the last of the drunk humps in the proto-MCU.

Indie rating: Russ Gabriel - "Mutations"

I Blog Every Episode of The Wire 05

Each entry opens some general notes if I have them before I launch into spoilers that might either be for that specific episode or span the entire series. In other words, readers who have not reached the end are urged to return to these posts only when they have.

"The Pager" (1x05)



Variations on domesticity. Click Landsman's delicious hams to read more.




"The Pager" shows a lot of people away from their jobs and at home, though even there most of these domiciles have been compromised in one way or another. The episode opens on Avon staying at a girlfriend's place, but of course it's a paranoid simulation of middle-class home-life: an elaborate ritual for signaling him by phone, making sure that nobody sees him there, etc. What's more, she's just one of many girlfriends he has. All further illusions of Avon's middle-class domesticity -- which is a home-life version of the ghost of legitimacy that Stringer keeps chasing -- fall away when he and nephew D'Angelo visit his brother, comatose from being shot. "Family is what counts, family is what it's about," he reminds D. "Family gonna always be there, 'cause it's blood." These words return near the end of the season, compelling D to shoulder Atlas-like weight in the name of family, but at the moment, they also characterize Avon's mentality: he may try to buttress himself against the dangers of the street in the outward normalcy of suburbia, but his past is always there, asleep but undeniable, bearing the scars of that life.

We also see D try to navigate a world that would hold a better life for him when he takes Donette to a tony restaurant. He asks Donette, "Think they know? ... What I'm about." The question might as well be rhetorical because of his complicated envy for and resentment at the skin he wishes he could inhabit as opposed to the body he actually wears.

It's like... we get all dressed up, right? Come all the way across town. Fancy place like this. After we finished, we gonna go down to the harbor. Walk around a little bit, you know? Acting like we belong down here, know what I'm saying?

He tries to wrap himself in braggadocio to protect him from his envy, but his soliloquy is an excuse to imagine that he shakes off the street and enters a different world, though with the caveat that even in his imagination, he's tied to the street. "I'm just saying, you know, I feel like some shit just stay with you. You know what I'm saying, like, hard as you try, you still can't go nowhere, you know what I'm saying?"

Strangely, the only stable domestic scene that we see is Omar and Brandon's nest, though, clearly, given their trade, their situation is fundamentally volatile (which is about to come to a head by the end of the episode). That said, we get a parodic mirror image of domesticity through the two of them (parodic more for their line of work than their orientation): Omar goes shopping for Brandon, Brandon models his new bling, an affirmation of love, before they go to work together.

Strangely enough, "The Pager" also offers a parody of a parody with McNulty. He approximates Omar and Brandon's love with his own kiss, which only simulates genuine affection, and which informs the shallowness of his domestic situation. In his wasteland of a bachelor pad, he wrestled heroically with Ikea so that he can have a decent place for them to sleep, but underscoring just how barren his life is outside of work, they don't show up and he's left alone in his ersatz living quarters.

The most normative domestic mise en scene belongs to Tywanda, the friend of Deirdre Kresson, whom McNulty and Bunk interview. But even her current home, to which she ran to escape the Barksdale crew, isn't completely out of the orbit of Avon's reach; when the detectives come in, she immediately asks them, "You weren't followed here?" The mere presence of Jimmy and the Bunk, who are chasing down a murder case, reminds Tywanda that "some shit just stay with you."

---

Part whatever of my Bubbles/Charlie Chaplin comparison:



Indie rating: The Pentangle - "Omie Wise"

10 Hours: 1. The Wire, "Late Editions"

"Late Editions" (5x09; HBO, 3/2/08)



Read more after the jump.


The previous 48 episodes -- covering nearly five seasons -- of the best show to ever air on television all lead up to this. ("-30-" is the denouement and coda.) "Late Editions" manages a tremendous narrative feat, taking what should be, in hindsight, events so utterly overdetermined -- Lester and McNulty, the would-be heroes with their romantically desperate, ill-fated, and naive plan to make a difference unraveling, crash headlong into ignominy, while Michael and Duquan, the innocents, pass the point of no return, unmistakably headed toward lives inseparable
from the drug trade -- and miraculously make the viewers wonder what will happen next without feeling like they have the slightest clue. A devastating sociological critique of how the margins cities are manhandled, forgotten, and swept away,
swept away, shepherded by storytellers compassionate enough to let the
unforgettable voices of the city speak through.

I Blog Every Episode of The Wire 04

Each entry opens some general notes if I have them before I launch into spoilers that might either be for that specific episode or span the entire series. In other words, readers who have not reached the end are urged to return to these posts only when they have.

"Old Cases" (1x04)



In which I'm tempted to abandon this project so that I can get on with watching this show in bunches.

Read more after the jump.


The famous "fuck" scene isn't as fun to watch when you already know what and how it happened. However, I did notice the chip on McNulty's shoulder with his aggressive outward-directed "motherfucker"s, as though whatever bogey- or bossman he has to buck against was literally in that kitchen, personally thwarting him and his idea of gratification. As a contrast to Jimmy, Bunk mines that curmudgeonly, grumpy old man sort of profanity.

---

An idle musing. Beyond simply showing how empty his life is, McNulty's late-night drunken visit to Kima and Cheryl's apartment and his impromptu Bring Your Snitch to Your Kids' Soccer Game Day point to the collapse of the domestic sphere and the work sphere. While in certain areas of employment (like law enforcement), work can affect the home front in dramatic ways (e.g. Kima's shooting leading to her and Cheryl splitting up), McNulty's example more generally illustrates how different institutions are all interconnected, and how a change in one sphere can ripple out to others. In an inverted sense, we'll see how Duquan's domestic situation dictates which aspects of life are open to him (almost none), but for now, we'll have to make do with McNutty using his sons to trail Stringer.

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When Bodie slipped out of the juvenile detention facility, he demonstrated how invisible black youths can be -- people who are part of the system (i.e. most of us) already don't want to acknowledge his presence, but when you put a mop in his hand, he completely disappears.

---

More echoes from The Corner: Bubbles reminds me of Gary McCullough; smart, resourceful, but fallen on very hard times.



Unlike Gary, Bubbles is tied in with the drug trade at multiple levels -- he's there on the consumer level, obviously, but he also has his ear on the criminal activity (schooling Kima on No-Heart Anthony Little, noting Omar's getaway van when the crew was ripping and running from the previous episode), because of which, he works as a criminal informant for the cops -- which I'm tempted to say in my less rigorously thought-out state is David Simon's way of saying that the drug trade itself is the nexus around which criminals and police revolve.

Indie rating: Electric Wizard - "Vinum Sabbathi"

I Blog Every Episode of The Wire 03

Each entry opens some general notes if I have them before I launch into spoilers that might either be for that specific episode or span the entire series. In other words, readers who have not reached the end are urged to return to these posts only when they have.

"The Buys" (1x03)



This is The Wire.

Read more after the jump.


The internal politicking, the real police work, the bureaucratic intrigue and righteous insubordination, Omar -- this is The Wire.

Internal Politicking
Burrell shows us that while he may be no more than a self-interested political hack, his hackery is nearly unrivaled. He asks the FBI to investigate Daniels' finances, and when they turn up "a couple hundred thousand ... in liquid assets," ready to dive even deeper, Burrell preemptively thanks the Bureau for a job well done, perfectly happy to have this rainy-day chip to use against the department's rising star. A thing of Machiavellian beauty.

At a far lower scale of hackery, we also get the first appearance of Valchek, the delightfully venal gnome of a police brass, mostly interested in protecting the interests of his and his own, leaning on Daniels to not cut Prez loose in the aftermath of blinding the projects kid. And what do you know, Valchek was also right about Prez in a stopped clock kind of way, saying that his son-in-law "needs a little guidance, a little supervision." (What Prez needs is Lester.)

Real Police Work
After the head-busting debacle of 2 a.m. field interviews in the high rises, we get to see some real detection from real police. Lester shakes off his years of desuetude in the Pawnshop unit to find that elusive picture of Avon. Then, while mixing business and pleasure at Ronnie Pearlman's, McNulty edges the unit closer to getting surveillance on the Barskdale crew. And speaking of McNulty's insistence on surveillance...

Bureaucratic Intrigue and Righteous Insubordination
McNulty's anti-authority streak shines through when he openly rebels from the raid the projects in Burrell's attempt to get the drugs on the table. Not to be outdone in internal maneuvering by someone he hates, Rawls commissions Santangelo to narc on McNulty. And Special Agent Terrence "Brother" Fitzhugh gossips about Daniels with McNulty. Who doesn't like to watch a circular firing squad from the outside?

Omar


And the miscellany! Bubbles holds court, dispensing his gutter-philosopher's wisdom, holding forth on the ontology of the drug fiend to the eternal battle of the sexes. Kima and McNulty start to build their relationship which makes her shooting that much more heart-wrenching. (Honest question: Are they as tight in later seasons as they are in this one?) D'Angelo teaches Wallace and Bodie to play chess, giving the two younguns (Bodie especially) the vicarious thrill of controlling the Game, when in fact all three of them are pawns.



This is The Wire, dense and encyclopedic in its offerings. Granted, some aspects of the show are still in its embryonic, unrefined stage -- e.g. Omar isn't exuding his trademark drawly charisma, and he swears ("Some real raggedy-ass shit here, boy")! -- but "The Buys" features everything from a typical episode of The Wire, especially the gallows humor that I somehow had missed or forgotten about (e.g. one of the drunk, overtime-lusting cops holding a cigarette for his equally drunk knocked-on-his-ass buddy during the drug raid).

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I wonder if Lester's brief encounter with the dealer asking him if he wanted blue tops was a reference to his character from The Corner.

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Bubbles = Charlie Chaplin?

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Next: Fuck.

Indie rating: Basic Channel - "Octagon"

I Blog Every Episode of The Wire 02

Each entry opens some general notes if I have them before I launch into spoilers that might either be for that specific episode or span the entire series. In other words, readers who have not reached the end are urged to return to these posts only when they have.

"The Target" (1x02)



While "The Target" has its admirable qualities, it's not really an enjoyable episode even the second time around. Of course, The Wire unfolds over seasons and accordingly isn't paced to engross viewers on an episode-by-episode basis, especially not in the season opener, but once I saw "The Detail," I got a more concrete sense of why "The Target" didn't hook me.

Read more after the jump.


The reason: We get a little taste of police work in "The Detail." Not that police work is in itself all that absorbing, but the raison d'etre of The Wire -- at least on the law side -- is the surveillance. So when Kima was skulking on a rooftop snapping pictures of Bubbles running his Hat Game on Wee-Bey et al, it brings us that much closer to the wire tap, which is when we get to see the cops at the best of their game (the dealers at their strategic best, too), where we see professionals go up against professionals on a playing field that's, miraculously, unbalanced for both sides.

As another bonus in this police-oriented episode, watching the detail come together was great, even with the two drunks whom nobody remembers now. However, Prez in his unreformed state is kind of horrible -- I'd forgotten that he blinds the project kid in his very first episode. With all the head-busting police brutality early on, I'm quite anxious to see some real policing, though it's interesting to note that Prez parallels D'Angelo in how ill-suited he is to his respective institution (didn't take long for me to say the I-word). Where D overreacted when he shot and killed Poo Blanchard, Prez overreacted when he cold-cocked the kid with the butt of his gun; when threatened aggressively, both guys responded to the situation with excessive, hypertrophied machismo because they were overwhelmed by the rules and exigencies of their institutions (AAAAHH SECRET WORD). And, of course, both Prez and D get rudely ejected from their worlds in the end in phases. Prez is first stripped of his gun and shoved behind a desk where he rehabilitates himself (who knew that he had a brain behind that quick trigger?), then kicked out of the police force altogether. D'Angelo is first sent to prison on a 20-year sentence (and who knew that he'd school a lot of us on the finer points of The Great Gatsby?), then kicked out of life altogether. Neither of them were cut out for the Game, though somehow, because American institutions have completely broken down, they end up playing it anyway.

In more fannish developments, "The Detail" marks Lester's debut.



His only line in the whole episode is "Armoire. Louis Quatorze," but in what I presume is classic The Wire bait and switch, Daniels dismisses him as a "cuddly house cat" (=^_^=) while hyping up Sydnor -- remember how hard Daniels was pushing to get Sydnor on his detail, and that in exchange he was willing to bear the onerous burden of keeping Prez in his unit? And strangely, both Prez and Freamon contribute substantially more to MCU than Sydnor does, and ultimately, they are linked together by the type of work that they do and for gradually rising from the depths to become the brains of the detail.

Finally, let me just offer a silhouette of the Little Tramp or else I might forget to offer the visual evidence for his similarity to Bubbles:



A visual echo, no?

Next episode: Omar comin. And hopefully Lester will have more than three words to say.

Indie rating: Crystal Castles - "Courtship Dating"

I Blog Every Episode of The Wire 01

I have now the one thing that I could ever truly want in this lifetime (true love, world peace, an end to climate change, a co-headlining reunion tour from Sleater-Kinney and Electrelane, and a removal of the laugh-track from the early episodes of Sports Night can all go the backseat (no, not like that)), and as befits the Best Thing Ever, I'm going to try my best to Blog Every Episode of The Wire as I begin to rewatch it from start to finish. (Hopefully, this enterprise will not take almost a year -- i.e. one episode per week.)

Some formatting notes: I'll open each entry with some general notes if I have them before I launch into spoilers that might either be for that specific episode or span the entire series. In other words, readers who have not reached the end are urged to return to these posts only when they have.

"The Target" (1x01)



It doesn't start easy -- that's what I remember when I first started watching, and even though "The Target" is the pilot episode and actually shows the beginning of the Barksdale saga, we might as well have entered into the thickest part of the story. After all, we're thrown into the deep end with the jargon- and slang-filled dialogue and the nitty-gritty of police bureaucracy and drug dealing; what's more, "The Target" sets up the entire aesthetic scope of the series, where even the procedural minutiae become intricate components of the story.

Read more after the jump.




Beginning at the beginning again, I couldn't shake the pervasive sense of Joycean parallax -- I don't simply mean being better able to follow the sometimes byzantine plot, but instead, knowing what happens to certain of the characters (and given the level of Realism on the show, my experience was eerily like knowing the fates of quasi-real people) resonated in very strange ways, and the parallax also allowed me to see symmetries in the story itself that I hadn't noticed the first time. In both cases -- that is, my experience of characters' resonances and narrative symmetries -- were deliberately crafted by the writers (those stone-cold writers' writers), but in some instances, they were inescapably accidents.

The resonances then. You know, seeing McNulty prowling the scene, not yet in full raging drunk mode, oh how low he's going to fall, etc., that's a given. But stranger, more affecting and haunting was seeing Det. Cole and Maj. Foerster, because the actors who played both of them actually died in the middle of the show's run, which were actually incorporated into the show itself, and in seeing Cole and Foerster, all these weird relations in The Wire's blend of fiction and journalism rippled out in a creepy, elusive way.

As for the symmetries. McNulty sparks off the entire move towards the creation of the Major Crimes Unit, but the action that spawned MCU is also the prototype for his inimitable brand of passive-assholery, i.e. positioning himself into a situation (into which, if he's been sober enough, he's put a modicum of thought) that's sufficiently fubared that others around him have to clean up his mess. In this case, he sat in at a court hearing even though the case didn't belong to him, which of course piqued Phelan's interest (Phelan flagged McNulty down, remember), which in turn led to the Judge to come down on the police department, etc. Clearly, Jimmy's "plan" this time wouldn't be the last stunt he'll pull, and eventually, the consequences of another plan, considered in half, bound to piss off a lot of people, would finally exceed his intentions in season 5.

Moving along, I've come to think of Bubbles as late capitalism's answer to Chaplin's Little Tramp. Both persevere in the heart of the oppressive circumstances of their respective times (impersonal urbanity for the Tramp, the war on drugs for Bubbles), without giving up their faith in human decency. Bubbles even has the similarly frumpled, oversized, sagging motley outfit -- and you can think of his hair as a weird approximation of a bowler. I will proffer visual evidence when I come to a serviceable shot of Bubbles.

Meanwhile, in his debut, Rawls kept his most raging, next-level, acid-ringed asshole in his pants -- to our collective loss.

Lastly, I've puzzled for a long time about D'Angelo, how he carries himself in this episode so differently from how he carries himself throughout the rest of the season. My first impression of him was that he was an emotionally volatile and undependable flake; after all, we initially see him on trial after he twitched out and killed a guy -- in front of witnesses, in a Barksdale-controlled building. He's hardly any different than that panicked, homiciding manchild when he's hanging around with the upper echelon of the organization, all overeager and ingratiating overcompensating, trying to act harder and bigger than he is, which is no real wonder considering how physically imposing Stringer, Avon, Wee-Bey, et al are. But once D gets moved to the Pits, his demeanor promptly calms down, which, I thought, was at odds with his initial characterization. He's no doubt smarting from the demotion, but all of a sudden he's cool D, he's sage D dispensing wisdom to Wallace, Bodie, and Poot. Yet the episode's final image of him backing away from the scene of William Gant's murder shows us it's all a front, that while he wants to maintain credibility and face in front of the young hoppers, and while he wants to prove his street-hardened worth to Uncle Avon, we're seeing just how badly the Game is tearing him apart.

(I know, kind of obvious.)



Indie rating: Born Ruffians - "I Need A Life (Four Tet Remix)"

What Has Two Thumbs and Owns the Complete Wire Boxset?

Indie rating: The Blind Boys of Alabama - "Way Down in the Hole"

San Diego Comic-Con International 2008 - Never Again

Here's the highlight of SDCC...



How's that for a hook?

Actually, the fact that Aeon there was the acme of my time at SDCC speaks both to the con itself and my tastes, which together have conspired to make 2008 the last con I'm likely go to. Before making my annual hajj to Nerd Mecca, I told a few people that this would be my last Comic Con. To a person, they didn't believe me, but the hassles involved with the pilgrimmage now far outweigh the geeky euphoria that's becoming more and more remote to me. I mean, traffic was so bad inside and outside of the convention that even Spidey had to resort to public transportation.



More reasons why SDCC has jumped the shark after the jump.


On the surface, SDCC looks like it's becoming ultra-commercialized thanks to enormous Hollywood productions squeezing out the insular world of comics and reorienting the entire convention around pop culture in general. This summer, though, comics have reasserted themselves, infiltrating the upper echelons of Hollywood and commercial viability and reclaiming its cetnral role at the Con (e.g. lots of cosplayers inspired by the Joker of The Dark Knight). And fine, I don't mind commercialism so much, not when my enduring love for tv forces me to embrace the fruits of corporatism -- SDCC is probably the best opportunity for regular folks to be wooed so directly by actual tv producers, actors, and other sundry poobahs.

But as a result of its ever-rising profile and cachet as a pop cultural event, SDCC has at the same time been transformed into a perverse Disneyland; for popular panels that you want to attend, you have to line up an hour beforehand to make sure that you get in. Maybe I was naive, but I thought that True Blood (Alan Ball's upcoming HBO vampire series) wouldn't be hard to get into and tried to get in just before it started, but by then the meeting room was already at capacity and I couldn't get in. For especially landscape-changing pop phenomena like Heroes or Battlestar Galactica, you could hardly take any chances. I had no pretensions about getting into Heroes, but with BSG in its last season and me at my last SDCC and having missed 2007's BSG panel, I went to into its meeting room before 11am while The Simpsons panel was still in progress (BSG started at 2:30), and sat through a Dean Koontz panel (I listened to my mp3 player) and Joss Whedon's The Dollhouse panel (hey, my mancrush Tahmoh "Helo Agathon" Penikett is in it). (In the process, I had to abandon my place in line for Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and any delusions of seeing WTF new recurring guest star Shirley Manson. Opportunity costs. :\)




At this point, I have to make an admission: I'm not even much of a BSG fan anymore; my interest in the show peaked in the middle of the second season, so it was hard for me to get into the "So Say We All" festivities, though my state of sleeplessness had a lot to do with how distant I felt from everything. See, I wasn't kidding about my Doctor Who marathon; I'd been slowly getting through the revived series when I actually looked at the SDCC lineup less than a week before the Con and saw that it was holding a Doctor Who panel, including outgoing showrunner Russell T. Davies. I was only through the first two seasons, though, and through a combination of dwindling credits and balky servers, I still had almost a full season (or about 10 episodes) left by the time I got settled into San Diego at 10pm Wednesday night. So I plowed through them until 6am Thursday morning, napped for 45 minutes, then went to the Con. As you'd expect, I've been paying for the sleep deprivation ever since, and I'm sure it wreaked havoc with my ability to enjoy anything.

However, even if I wasn't a zombie, in some cases, a panel might've proved to be a sore letdown. I heard that the Heroes panel, for instance, was no more than a glorified test screening for the season 3 premiere and that the audience didn't get to interact at all with the cast. Meanwhile, the BSG panel was moderated by Kevin Smith, who, while funny, bogarted the bulk of the time that could've, should've been given over to the audience in an open Q&A session.

All the same, my convention malaise was underpinned by my increasing apathy towards comics, which rendered the proposition of Comic-Con a little pointless. I used to love to get convention sketches from artists -- the most I've ever gotten at one con was, I think, 13 -- but this time I barely got five. Since my faculties weren't engaged in nerd ecstasy, I had time to think about what used to appeal to me about conventions, and I concluded that they rebalanced the relationship between creators and fans. In short, they give the audience a voice. Maybe (probably) I don't affect the official narrative of a tv show or a comic, but I was able to broadcast my own narratives (or better yet, zings) to my peers -- which is what I do on my blog, only with more stammering and sweating. But if I'm a nerd without anything over which to geek out, then I don't have any narratives to offer (or I do have a narrative -- a pithy suggestion about a possible crossover between BSG and SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER FOR YOU WHO AREN'T CAUGHT UP WITH BSG UP TO THE FINALE OF THE FIRST HALF OF THE LAST SEASON Cormac McCarthy's The Road -- but Kevin Smith made it his business to cockblock me). So as a nerd ronin, a geek without a master, or even a gathering of similarly sweaty dweebs with whom to commiserate over a fictional narrative, is it finally time for me to acquaint myself with the Whedonverse?

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SDCC wasn't a total loss, of course; hottie cosplayers can go a long way.











And although he wasn't wearing that sexy Justin Timberlake hat, I was stoked to see Scott "Pete Hornberger" Adsit at SDCC.



I can confirm that he will appear in some capacity in the third season of 30 Rock. I bring you news that you can use.

As for Doctor Who, Russell T. Davies never did make it to the panel (he was locked away working on scripts for Torchwood), but I did find out that Stephen Moffat -- the new showrunner and the writer responsible for "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances," "The Girl in the Fireplace," "Blink" (aka the episode which he packs with not one but two mind-scrambling sci-fi conceits), and "Silence in the Library"/"Forest of the Dead" -- speaks with the exact same inflections and rhythms as the Tenth Doctor.

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I got to take a photo with one of my favorite writers from Justice League Unlimited, Dwayne McDuffie.



I also got my JLU DVD signed by both him and Bruce Timm.

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Lots of Cobra this year.

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And my sketches made up for the low quantity with pretty good quality.




Mike Mignola -- a vampire.




Dave McKean -- I asked if that was Satan or Pan, and he answered, "Yes."




Ryan Dunlavey -- Karl Marx.




Philip Bond -- Venus Dee Milo. I adore Bond's art, but when I asked him for a sketch, I couldn't think of anything, only that I really loved his work with Grant Morrison and Peter Milligan. "That's practically everything that I've done," he said. "Would it narrow things down," I replied, "if I suggested something you did for Vertigo?"




Steve Lieber -- Omar Little. I'd known Steve Lieber from his work with Greg Rucka, but he caused an Internet sensation with his Simpsons-style caricatures of characters from The Wire. We chatted about The Wire, too (Rucka hasn't watched it yet! But Ed Brubaker has), and he ranked his favorite seasons: 4, 3, 1, 2, 5. He also mentioned Generation Kill and how much he enjoyed Ray Person on his constant ephedra-high.

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Last, but not least:




Indie rating: Paula Fraser & Tarnation - "Now It's Time"

The Wire - 5x10 "–30–"

So this is how it ends -- not with a bang, but with a montage (or two).

The Wire was unbeatable when I couldn't tell exactly what would happen next; sure, after a couple seasons I could imagine where all its characters would end up (i.e. dead), but the stuff between season's start and season's end thrilled me in the ferocity of its volatility, all of which was usually uncoiled by the finale's denouement. Unfortunately, this valedictory season was governed by outcomes so fundamentally predetermined that they overshadowed and drained the vitality out of all the storylines, which is the point I was flailing towards in my previous post on The Wire.



So the fiery apocalypses that we witnessed in "Late Editions" were the exception to the inescapable gravity that pulled the rest of the season down into the hole of mediocrity, the anticlimactic finale included. The ultimate fates of some of the characters, the kids in particular, seem to repudiate the authenticity that The Wire strived for as the finale tried to jam them neatly into just-vacated roles. Instead of growing into those roles, they were starkly shoved into them, whether or not these new characterizations had been earned. Previously meek Sydnor suddenly became the new Detective Asshole; Kima became Bunk's partner in policing and repartee (and skirt-chasing?); Dukie became the new Bubbles; and most blatantly of all, Michael became the new Omar in all his charismatic glory, even though up to that point Michael had mostly been aloof with a sullen, suspicious chip on his shoulder -- a far cry from Omar's winking Robin Hood. I can buy Michael as a stickup boy, but not the way he carried himself as he knocked over Vinson's rim shop as too artificially Omaresque. I know that The Wire can't resist throwing in some symmetry to break up its verisimilitude, but they never got this contrived just to reinforce the "Individuals and individualism are crushed by institutions" philosophy.

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The finale wasn't all contrivance and unearned shifts in characterization. After sending Jimmy and Lester off into The Wire version of happily ever after, it still had enough left in the tank to devastate with the most fleeting of scenes in the montage. The Wire wouldn't be The Wire if it didn't end with someone being substantially worse off -- and no, Alma being exiled to the Bumblefuck County desk doesn't count, nor does McNulty finding domestic bliss with Beadie after his forced retirement, nor Lester with his stripper better-half. So it fell to Dukie to fall farthest and hardest, and the image of him shooting up stayed with me the most out of all the tableaux the finale had to offer.

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What happened to Dukie summed up once again the central argument of The Wire, that we live in a society of rules, both legal and tacit, which are primarily interested in self-preservation and self-perpetuation; try to buck the system, and the system fucks you. So I can be angry at Poot for getting out of the game but offering the obliviously ominous advice to Dukie to grind on the corner longer till he was old enough to work a tax-paying job, but Poot just underscored his powerlessness, Dukie's powerlessness, against institutional conventions (like how I put off using the I-word that long?), and if I direct my anger at an individual, then I'm playing right into the hegemonic hands of the institution.

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Was it just me, or after she and Daniels came out of the meeting with the mayor, talking out about the career-threatening consequences of stabbing their bosses in the back and going public with the fabricated serial killer revelation, did Ronnie Pearlman actually look excited?

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Of all the characters to bring back for a cameo, we get Commissioner Valchek? Who wouldn't have preferred instead Comissioner Mouzone? O-o-o-or better yet, Commissioner Theresa "Va-va-vavoom" D'Agostino?

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Which is where this hot filly of a reporter figured into the finale.

Indie rating: Eluvium - "Requiem on Frankfort Ave."