Oh God

They are coming. From all angles.

Cue Up Your Kent Brockman Impressions...

Now!

Seriously, this is bad. We need to find the - the what? empresses? - and kill them, lest our inaction ensure our doom.

Your Childhood And Mine, On Jimmy Fallon

This would've been more awesome with a less awkward host.

Also, since the show doesn't apparently have the rights to re-air the promo clip of Raising the Bar that they played on the live broadcast, there's a weird meta effect on top of the actual meta on display here; there's an awkward cut, and indeed it feels as though we, the Online Viewer, have been placed in a Time Out.

It's On Your Face

Fox's new show Lie to Me, starring Tim Roth, should be fluffily entertaining and satisfying, but it pretty much isn't; it's kind of dull. However, I'm just babbling out loud and surely not the first person to snarkily observe that the show depends on the ability of its main characters to spot miniscule facial movements that are involuntary even in people who are presumably practiced liars who are prepared for the fact that they're going to lie, to the extent that the main characters can also call out when people are faking emotions they're not feeling, like sorrow or surprise. The show isn't un-nuanced about the realities of this - I saw an episode where at first they think somebody's lying, but then they realize that she's using Botox - and I presume that at some point they're going to engage with somebody who's both a practiced and a knowledgeable liar, somebody who knows the tells Tim Roth's character looks for (or is really, really innately good at it). But the show also depends on the ability of a large number of guest actors every episode to accurately sell all these emotions that they're not actually experiencing.

There's any number of directions to take that essential paradox, either to complicate or to resolve it, but in brief I think it's a nifty illustration of one of my hobbyhorses: how what's actually real and what seems to be realistic have a complicated and fractious relationship in a fictional context (if not outside of one as well).

I Can't Even Begin

I don't even have anything to add to this, but ... wow ... I'm ... what is there to say? This is where I'd normally come up with some sort of clever outlandish comparison, but there isn't one that can compare while staying remotely plausible. We've got the inappropriate appropriation of an exploited and (depending on how you want to look at it, previously) oppressed culture by an element of the culture which did the exploiting: that's pretty run of the mill. Neither is the fact that the appropriations are, apparently, not very good or accurate (I really wouldn't know, personally), but what I can't really begin to wrap my head around is that DeBeers isn't merely an element of the culture which exploited the "African" culture whose art is now being haphazardly and inexpertly appropriated; it was a major agent of the exploitation! In its corner of Africa, DeBeers was THE agent of exploitation! And this isn't past exploitation - I mean, whatever you want to say about the way European-Americans interacted with the Native Americans, and whatever you want to say about the current state of Native American societies as a result, we're not still going around violating treaties and destroying villages and giving them smallpox.

The capstone, of course, is that the medium in which this appropriation is being effected is the very fucking material for which much if not all of the horrific exploitation was done. Okay, I've got an analogy. DeBeers "celebrating" the spirit of Africa by producing these diamond-studded replica-mask jewelry pieces is like if:

We imagine that Hanes was founded by a conglomerate of powerful American slave owners (in actuality, it was founded in 1901 in North Carolina, so Hanes undoubtedly did benefit from share-cropping, so this part at least doesn't have to be totally fictitious). Now imagine that Hanes decided it was going to celebrate the spirit of African Americans' considerable cultural influence on the USA by producing a commemorative line of T-shirts with images of generic and stereotyped African Americans doing things like playing a saxophone or catching a football or dicking around with some peanuts. And these T-shirts were going to be made from ACTUAL COTTON which was hand-picked by ACTUAL SHARECROPPERS who are ACTUALLY SHARECROPPING TODAY. How fucking unbelievable and, frankly, unacceptable would that be? That's what this is.

Wow.

May, December

If you want to, you can find with no effort whatsoever the music video for Hayden Panettiere's new single "Wake Up Call." I watched about half of it; the song's fine generically - I wouldn't wince if it came on in public somewhere - and her voice reminds me of someone else's that I can't place right now, but it's also OK. I mean, good enough for pop starlet-dom, but (to judge her by the standards of people who are now, shudder, her elders) it's like Britney-good (though they don't sound alike), not Mandy Moore good, and nowhere near "restrained Christina Aguilera good". The notable thing about the video though is, well, the video, which I gather is getting press because Ms. Panettiere seems to be trying to play up her public barely-legal-maybe-sexpot image (which heretofore I'd thought of as having been unwillingly, uh, thrust upon her) vs. her cheerleader image from Heroes. Anyway, the point is that she's rather inept at it. In an interview with Britney Spears from the post-Timberlake pre-Federline era, Chuck Klosterman spent some time trying to untangle Britney's appeal from a variety of angles, but one dominant throughline is that however immature she may be (have been) in so many, many ways, she either intentionally or intuitively was able to walk a line between mature and frank sexuality and girlish innocence. Not a girl, not yet a woman is basically the whole point of the first five or six years of her career, and it's all there in the "Hit Me One More Time" video and etched in granite by the time we get to "Oops!...I Did It Again". (Aguilera, only one year older, by my estimation basically hit the big time already jumping to a youthful but definitely adult take on her sexual image [which went with her more overtly R&B-influenced music], although the Dirrrrrrrrrrrrrrty era kind of became a caricature of this. Of course, with that voice, it's not like she really had the option to play the coy sixteen year old.) By comparison Panettiere's underwear-flashes and attempts to eyefuck the camera are embarrassing because it's clear that she's trying, which is pretty much the antithesis of everything she's shooting for. I don't know her in her personal life, obviously, but as a performer she can't summon up "smoldering" and shoots right to "glaring". I stopped halfway through the video because I felt bad for her.

If you want to, you can find with no effort whatsoever the recent pictures of Dame Helen Mirren in a bikini. Now, if you know me in real life then you probably have gathered that I'm pretty frank about the fact that I look at pornography and stuff that can be observed for similar purposes (like, say, non-porn pictures of attractive women). However, I don't intend for this to be That Sort of Blog. Nonetheless: Daaaaaaaaaamn. The Dame is literally days away from her 63rd birthday and in addition to her ever-luminous face (evident in umpteen-hundred red carpet photos) has a figure that's...I'm not even going to try to put it politely. Let's just sidestep the descriptions and say that she has a body suitable for a woman half her age. A really hot woman. Sexual attraction is actually almost edged out by pure curious amazement. I must confess that I've never actually seen one of her films (which I intend to rectify, and no, not just because she's beautiful now and was beautiful forty years ago), but I'm pretty sure that by this point in her life, at least, when Helen Mirren sets out to eyefuck you, you stay eyefucked.