a sense of joy and then a panic

First, a study finding that "almost twice as many Americans would prefer to have a son rather than a daughter."  If you actually look at Gallup's report, though, this has been pretty typical since 1941.  Basically, it's because of men - 49% of men prefer a boy while 22% prefer a girl, and 31% of women prefer a boy while 33% prefer a girl.  For some people (not all) I think there's a little bit of "I want someone like me" involved in this kind of thing, both for psychological reasons and because you "know" how to raise someone of your own gender.  Like when my mother was pregnant, she wanted a girl and my dad wanted a boy - or rather, he "expected" a boy because he "could not believe" that he would not have a boy.  But women seem to have less of this than men.

This, however, is interesting - "both male and female Republicans are more likely to want a boy than are their gender counterparts who identify as Democrats."  Education level is also interesting - among respondents with a high school diploma or less, 44% prefer boys and 25% prefer girls; among postgraduate respondents, it's 32% for boys and 33% for girls. 

Anyway, the Atlantic suggests that while Americans may - like other cultures/societies - prefer boys to girls, they don't actually do anything to try to get more boys.

Second, Texas is trying to decide whether or not to allow the Sons of Confederate Veterans to have a confederate flag license plate.  The vote is delayed because the ninth member of the DMV board died and they have to pick a replacement.  Nine other states already have allowed the group such a license plate, and they sued Florida when Florida said no, leading a federal judge to decide that Florida was engaging in "viewpoint discrimination."  (My mother said "In that case I'm going to get a license plate that says the Tea Party are fuckers and if they say I can't have it then I'll sue Nebraska for viewpoint discrimination)  Jerry Patterson, a son of a confederate veteran, spoke in favor of the license plate by arguing that confederate veterans served honorably in the Civil War, just as he did in Vietnam:

"Not all things in Vietnam were done in a manner that I'm proud of. I served in Vietnam but I'm not proud of what happened. This is history and any time you commemorate history and those who served honorably, be they... the Sons of Confederate Veterans, I think they should be honored.”

Beyond the license plate thing: this is why I hate the word "honor."  Proud of what happened and yet still have served honorably.  Actions you can't be proud of, but done in an honorable way.  I think "honorable" and all its variants should be replaced in that sentence with "obedient," or some word that signifies "did what I was told to do by people with more power than I."  Then again, pretty much every military group in the world seems to call themselves honorable no matter what they're doing, so I'm not sure ethics has anything to do with "honor" now anyway.

Some poetry reading thing at the White House, a rapper named Common is invited (didn't this guy date Serena Williams?), Fox News goes crazy because he's a misogynist and a cop-killer, apparently.  Jon Stewart responds.  Title is from the first half of the segment, which is here (that half goes into how ridiculous this reading of Common's poem is). 

I posted the second half not for Jon Stewart's attempt at rapping but because the hypocrisy/double standards (Johnny Cash and Ted Nugent) are pretty hilarious/pathetic.

The Daily Show
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The comments at EW are interesting - many of them agree that Fox is going after the wrong target, but they're now disagreeing if race has anything to do with Fox's response.  It's just because he attacked Bush in a poem, not because he's a black rapper.  So now they're arguing about the race card and etc., and it reminds me of something I thought of a while ago - I think the way kids are taught about racism in this country is all wrong.  Racism is seen to equal the Ku Klux Klan and Nazis, and maybe Jim Crow, and everybody agrees that the KKK and Nazis are totally evil and crazy, so basically what it comes down to is "I'm not racist because I'm not evil and crazy."  Or, "I'm not racist because I don't literally want to kill every member of another race."  And basically it means that for the accuser, being accused of racism is worse than racism itself.  So of course we end up talking about that instead of about racism itself. 

And the whole thing is a false connection, because that isn't what racism is.  It's not genocide.  It's not "the absolute worst thing a human being can do" (not that I know what that is).  It doesn't make you a KKK Grand Dragon Whatever and it doesn't make you Hitler.  It doesn't mark you as someone who would beat up or spit at someone of another race.  All it does is put you in the company of most of the other people who share your one-ethnicity-dominant country.  It's a problem at the system-level, not the individual-level, and I wonder if maybe that's part of the problem - we don't want to admit we function inside a system, or even a society?  Regardless, painting it as this big Boogey Man that individuals are supposed to, like, ward off with torches just makes people less and less willing to admit to their own racist behavior without actually putting an end to racist behavior itself. 

Do we need a new word?  Because I think racism, as a word, is almost useless at this point.  It's just this incendiary flashpoint.  Should we start using xenophobic or some variant?  It seems to trigger less of a knee-jerk "no no no I am not that!" response, although I don't know why.

This is why racism remains a "thing" in my novel, which is post-apocalyptic (and I don't even have the apocalypse coming from across borders - it's just part of social organization in Junction Rally, as it has been for all its years of existence).  The Yellow Plague: Asians and Asian Americans in Post-Apocalyptic and Zombie Fictions by Bao Phi:

But like many brands of American horror and action genres, popular post-apocalyptic and zombie fictions tend to veer towards straight American male fantasy - many of the fictions and films in the genre operate under the assumption that, if all hell breaks loose, all issues of race, class, and gender are (supposedly) irrelevant compared to basic human survival - and consciously or otherwise, most leaders that emerge in these imagined post-racial scenarios are straight, white alpha males. In the Western pop imagination, there seems to be a desire to wipe the difficult questions of co-existence off the table - and what better way to do that, then to imagine a situation where five to ten random (and mostly white) strangers must fight off mindless brain-hungry hoards while trying to divide the bullets, bacon, and fresh water into equal shares? Where the musings and philosophies of fancy pants artists and social commentators like myself are next to useless?

Let's say that North Korea or China suddenly launched an attack on present-day America, like in the video game Homefront or the upcoming remake of Red Dawn. The popular, traditional white male western narrative would then position a white hero leading a resistance of people against the invaders, and our race wouldn't matter - because we're all Americans right?

No. History has taught us is if that shit went down, and Asians in Asia attacked America, the first people who would be fucked would be Asian Americans. We'd be imprisoned without due process, called traitors, tortured and murdered in the street. And yet none of this is ever explored in post-apocalyptic scenarios where Asians bring about doom. I guarantee you, if a science-project-gone-wrong in North Korea causes zombie apocalypse tomorrow, you can bet it's the Asian Americans who won't be getting their share of beans at the survivalist pot luck.

I think this argument - on the emotional/psychological desire for an apocalypse to "wash away" people and structures you don't like - is perfectly applicable to post-apocalyptic fiction that isn't British and isn't even all that "cozy" (i.e., involves cannibals and zombies and killer flus).  Some of the comments imply it better fits the American model anyway.  Related: "AEnema" by Tool: "Some say we'll see Armageddon soon/ I certainly hope we will/ Learn to swim, see you down in Arizona Bay." Who reads cosy catastrophes? by Jo Walton:

I argued that the cosy catastrophe was overwhelmingly written by middle-class British people who had lived through the upheavals and new settlement during and after World War II, and who found the radical idea that the working classes were people hard to deal with, and wished they would all just go away.

In the classic cosy catastrophe, the catastrophe doesn’t take long and isn’t lingered over, the people who survive are always middle class, and have rarely lost anyone significant to them. The working classes are wiped out in a way that removes guilt.

And from the comments (man, this is so why Zombieland did not work for me):

On a bad day, it could even be secretly, guiltily desirable: all those people who fit so well in the modern world, but didn't know how to deal with *real* change, would be swept away. And the people who knew how to prepare would be vindicated. The reader is implicitly in the category of people who can deal with change, of course, by virtue of having read the book.

The desire to be freed of social constraints and to get fat off humanity's detritus crosses the economic divide.  

Pop Agitprop from Cheap Truth #13, published in the 1980s, a series of scathing reviews by sci-fi authors, of sci-fi authors - I think this gets to the heart of the problem with a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction very well (and is related to that terrible Dodge Ram commercial as well, re: the sheer amount of self-stroking misanthropy that goes into crafting a post-apocalypse):

The gem of this collection is Vernor Vinge's "The Ungoverned," a sequel to his commercially successful novel THE PEACE WAR. In this ideologically correct effort, radical Libertarians defend their realm from an authoritarian army. Thanks to their innate cultural superiority and a series of fraudulent plot Maguffins, they send the baddies packing with a minimum of personal suffering and a maximum of enemy dead.

First, and very characteristically, it is post-apocalyptic, conveniently destroying modern society so that a lunatic-fringe ideology can be installed as if by magic. Vinge avoids extrapolating their effects on society, because society is in shambles.

John Dalmas contributes a decent male-adventure Western. Unfortunately this story pretends to be SF. It is set on yet another colonial planet lapsed into barbarism, a fictional convention that allows SF writers to espouse reactionary social values without a blush of shame.

Dean Ing's recent novel for Tor, WILD COUNTRY, takes a similar tack. This book, the last in a post-apocalypse trilogy, is a meandering series of shoot-'em-ups. Its hero is an assassin. The villain is a gay heroin-smuggler, as if an America devestated by nukes did not have enough problems. Ing's hasty depiction of future society is grossly inconsistent; ravaged and desperate when the plot requires desperadoes, yet rigidly organized when Ing suddenly remembers the existence of computers.

The book is a Western, set in a West Texas conveniently returned to the robust frontier values of Judge Roy Bean. Men hold their land, with lasers if possible, while women raise corn and keep the home fires burning.

The book is speckled with maps, diagrams, and lectures on the Second Amendment, which, one learns, "absolutely and positively, guarantees citizens their right to keep and bear arms."  Like his fellows, Ing treasures this amendment, the last remnant of the American policy that he is willing to respect. There isn't much mention of, say, voting, or separation of powers. Power resides in the barrel of a gun, preferably the largest and shiniest possible.

No We Can't by Hunter (this one is political, but I think it ties in nicely with the apocalyptic, and post-apocalyptic, vision, and the desire for this vision to actually happen - thanks to realthog for linking it):

Past-America could provide at least some modest layer of security to prevent its citizens from descending into destitution in old age; we in this day cannot. Past-America could pursue scientific discoveries as a matter of national pride, even land mankind on an entirely other world; we cannot. Past-America was a haven of invention and technology that shook the world and changed the course of history countless times: whatever attributes made it such a place we cannot quite determine now, much less replicate. Public art is decadent. Public education is an infringement. Public works are for other times, never now.

America of the past could build highways and railroads and a robust electrical grid. We cannot even keep them running. Of course we cannot keep them running: that was past-America. That past America had a magic that we modern Americans cannot match. Perhaps it was beholden to Satan, or to socialism, or merely to some grandiose vision of a better future, one with flying cars or diseases that could actually be cured, with proper application of effort. Whatever the case, past-America was wrong and stupid, and we know better.

We are told all the things America cannot do. We have yet to be told any vision of what we might still be able to do, or what hopes we should still retain, or why our children will be better off than we were, or why we ourselves will be better off than we were a scant few decades ago. Perhaps the very climate of the world will have changed, and the sky will be hotter, or the storms will be bigger, but none of those are things we can do anything about. Perhaps there will be nuclear disasters, or oil spills, or epidemics, or perhaps a city here or a city there will be leveled by some unforeseen catastrophe; we can be assured of it, in fact, but none of those things are things we can expect to respond to better next time than this time. Those are not, we are told, the tasks of a nation.

Richard Price, a white man who wrote predominantly black characters in Clockers:

The job of the novelist—or any creative writer—is to imagine lives that are not your own. And nothing is off-limits. If you’re writing about a group of people, and you do a clichéd job, you deserve whatever’s coming to you. If you’re just contributing to a stereotype. (via)

That's pretty much how I feel.  I get tired of hearing about white people being too "scared" to write a non-white character after they read criticism of some other white writer's usually racist depiction of a non-white character - or men getting too "scared" to write women, does that ever happen? - and the endless "you're saying I can't write X" and "no I'm not saying you can't write X, write whatever you want."  Truly, being a writer means taking huge risks, even if you're scared, and it's no one's job to shield you from your fuck-ups.  If you get scared off that easily, I'm not sure you've got enough of "the burn" in you.  So really: write what you want.  But be prepared for people to respond in a variety of ways.  How you process their responses, then, is up to you as well.  To the victor go the spoils, but like Javert says, "if you fall as Lucifer fell, you fall in flame."  Trial by fire.  If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen, etc.

my friends' list has exploded over something.

Good thing I wasn't checking LJ, cuz I wouldn't have gotten any of my many tasks done today.  I'm not going to comment on the TOC thing itself, because it's all the stuff that comes out of the woodwork once the TOC red-herring has been beaten to death that I find more noteworthy.  I've put my thoughts on "PC" as a slur on cucumberseed's LJ, so this is what I have left.  It's a little angry, but I'm a little angry.  I usually confine this type of thing to other people's LJs, but I feel the need to say something this time.  Particularly over things like "Most modern people are color-blind and gender blind and don’t care whether you’re a WASP or some dude from Argentina or a girl from that village in Togo."  That is not true of most people in Lincoln, Nebraska and it's not true of most people at Columbia University and it's not true of most people in Jakarta, Indonesia.  My own mother says she isn't color-blind, and she married "out of' her race and religion. 

Bondoni's argument advocating that we stop being oppressed by the PC parrots reminds me of a chain letter I got in middle school from an LDS friend, saying "75% of Americans believe in God.  Why can't we just tell the other 25% to sit down and shut up!!!"*  I responded with a long-ass convoluted email about how horrified this made me, and one of the reasons I gave was basically "Dude.  Are you seriously claiming that religious people in America are more persecuted than non-believers?"  But then the term "reverse racism" was born, and it seemed like every little inch, every little sign that maybe the demographics of power would shift to reflect the demographics of the country, that maybe the same people wouldn't have all the power all the time, was taken to be a sign that those people who never had power were going to rule, iron-fisted, over the people they "usurped." 

[This paranoid push/pull and desperate grip on diminishing power is true in other countries too, cuz humans love power and security, although it's a lot more complicated in places where the now-majority is descended from people who were enslaved by the now-minority, and the now-minority still has a lot of the country's wealth - that is, post-colonial countries.  So I'm not going to touch that.]

I don't think the majority social group in America is in any danger of being guillotined.  I really, truly don't.  Even if minorities wanted that (which they don't - I'm going to give everybody the benefit of the doubt here and say no one wants genocide), the reason they are called "minorities" is because there just aren't enough of them to overrun the majority group.  But I would like the majority social group to remember that these people who are suddenly "threatening to take your shit" - your job, your seat in the lecture hall, your place on that science fiction TOC - they didn't just fall out of the sky.  Or to keep with the SF theme, out of a spaceship.  They've been here the whole time.  In the ditches, in the fields.  In the shadows.  Taking the dirty jobs - or being forced to take them.  Does this mean your life's been roses?  Nope.  Civilization's a bitch, ain't it?  And if you want to start some kind of anti-capitalist revolution, you can count me in.

The End.  Shelly still loves you, she's just pissed.  We didn't start the fire - no we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it.

*: might not be 75.  It was somewhere in the 70s, so I just went for the median.  Also, I am well aware that LDS people have been discriminated against, but this was not LDS vs. the rest-of-the-world.  In fact, I'm sure if the statistic was reversed, and the conclusion was "why don't we just tell those Mormons to sit down and shut up!!!", she wouldn't have forwarded it to me.

I just watched this on Netflix Watch Instantly, and holy shit: how have I not seen this movie before?

Basic plot: People are getting evicted from their apartments in the ghetto so that the buildings can be torn down and turned into offices.  Fool, age 13, is coaxed to help his older sister's boyfriend and another burglar break into the house owned by the apartments' shitty landlords, since apparently they have a stash of gold in there.  Well, plan doesn't go so well because it turns out the people inside the house - Mr. and Mrs. Robeson - are batshit psycho murderers.  The two adult burglars end up dead quickly and Fool is trapped in the best-secured house in the neighborhood with the Robesons, their daughter Alice (who has survived because she sees no evil, hears no evil, speaks no evil), a whole bunch of mutilated, enslaved, and cannibalized People Under The Stairs, and a vicious but beloved Rottweiler. 

It's a sort of uniquely childish nightmare, the "puzzle house" that you can't get out of, and the action/chase sequences are very much that kind of hysterical, booby-trap-laden adventure that amusement parks try and fail to replicate.  And yet adventure is the wrong word, because even though it's a lot of fun to watch, the danger posed to the kids always seems real and shocking.  They actually do kill one child (not one of the main two).  Fool tells Alice, "Your father is one sick mutha.  And your mother is one sick mutha too."  And vice versa: these are not the kids from Jumanji.  By the end both Fool and Alice are ready to bash some brains in.  Are there plot holes and inconsistencies?  Quite frankly, this is a movie in which I neither noticed nor gave a fuck.

So just in that basic respect, the movie is already a success.  But what really makes this movie awesome is everything going on conceptually.  The big one, the most powerful and obvious one, is race and class.  First off, the movie sets you very firmly in the POV of the black, urban, and poor.  Period.  And that in and of itself is worth noting.  Visually, most of the movie is essentially two upper-middle class white adults screaming at and trying to kill a black child.  But of course, not any adults and not any child - the adults are already effectively destroying the child's neighborhood, with the excuse that it isn't a real (white, well-behaved) neighborhood anyway.  When the (entirely white) police are called to the Robesons' mansion to investigate child abuse claims, they're going in assuming that it's a bogus charge and barely investigate anything, while Mrs. Robeson plies them with pithy politeness and coffee.  At one point Mrs. Robeson says something about, "It's almost as if the criminals have the run of the neighborhood, and we're trapped inside."  Of course not only hugely ironic but a typical ridiculous white-flight sentiment.  And all this just escalates and escalates and escalates.  

But then on top of that you have the religious zealotry of the Robesons - "may he burn in hell" is their favorite phrase, it seems - and their abuse of Alice, who's expected to be a pure and perfect girl-child.  You first see her in a turn-of-the-century girly, ribboned dress, terrified because she's lost her dinner fork.  Mrs. Robeson shoves her in boiling water to keep her clean and Mr. Robeson - who has this psycho leather dominatrix war armor thing - is in charge of corporal punishment, and it's strongly implied that he will eventually (if he doesn't already) start sexually abusing Alice.  When the Robesons figure out that Alice has been helping Fool they call her a whore, while Mr. Robeson says "they did it, I know it!"  Because of course he owns Alice's sexuality.  This too, escalates and escalates and escalates.

I would never expect to see all of this in ANY horror movie, let alone a 1991 Wes Craven movie that seems targeted to kids.  Not only is this one hell of an action-horror, but it's one hell of a piece of social-horror too.  Thought went into this.  And I'll just come right out and say it: more horror movies need to be made like The People Under the Stairs.

Spoilers, I guess.  

For my money, the best part of this movie is a 5-minute sequence in a car featuring no member of the A-Team.  There are four CIA personnel in this car, and squeezed in the backseat is their "hostage," a military contractor dude.  The CIA has earlier been described as "wearing body armor in headquarters... which should tell you all you need to know" while the military contractor dudes, "Black Forest" (get it, get it?) have been described as "assassins in polo shirts," which I must admit is a nice touch.  So anyway, the CIA thinks that it has the drop on Black Forest guy, because after all Black Forest guy is in handcuffs, and one CIA guy makes a big show of getting a gun ready to shoot Black Forest guy with - except he can't unlock the safety, he can't screw the silencer on right, he can't even aim it properly.  And Black Forest guy is like, "Please.  Don't let him shoot me."  And the entire scene is basically this brief, wonderful little comedy of errors featuring two of the big behind-the-scenes hitters of US foreign relations - one incompetent and arrogant, one ruthless and heartless.  And oh yeah, they're the bad guys.  

For a blockbuster, this thing is hugely about the American government at war with itself - well, maybe a better word would be the American government squabbling with itself - as opposed to AMERICA fighting Obscenely Wealthy Foreign Fiends (OWFF, for short.  It's the sound they make when you punch 'em in the guts!!)  And I thought that was really great.  Black Forest isn't redeemed with a "few bad apples ruin the whole artillery" speech.  A different CIA dude tries this speech, but it's quickly undermined.  At the end, the A-Team complains that they tried to play by the system's rules, "but the system burned us again."  Similar complaints have been lodged by other super-squads in other summer movies, but it means a little more here because of how believably flawed the system really appears.  The bad guys aren't despicable, rodent-like politicos trying to cut deals with an OWFF - they're just government people trying to get rich quick, themselves sick of playing and getting burned by the system's rules.

That all is the good part.  The bad part is how lame and backward the movie's racial politics are.  There is only one minority with a speaking role (there's one Asian guy that stands around in his job working for Love Interest), and that is B.A.  And he is clearly the Comic Relief of the A-Team, except not even in that Chris Tucker black-guy-that-cracks-lots-of-jokes way.  Nope.  B.A.'s repertoire is basically (a) loud, physical anger accompanied by loud, physical threats, (b) crippling fear of flying (he's the only one that's shown as having fear of any sort) that leads to him being knocked out several times so the A-Team can take flight, and occasionally screaming in utter distress during flights (while everyone else seems to be having a good time), and (c) being bribed into calmness by being offered some kind of food in babytalk.  But there's one part where he's even trapped in essentially a cage and the rest of the A-Team is laughing at him (they claim to be scared of his anger, but they're laughing).  When he tries to guess the which-of-the-three-cups-is-holding-the-ball magic trick, he's wrong (the others are right).  Even his spiritual/ethical awakening is played for laughs and implied to be shallow.  B.A. does get the coolest kill, but I don't think that fixes, you know, everything else.  Now I don't know the original A-Team - maybe this is just how the character is - but it was embarrassing to watch.  Oh wait, there's one other minority.  A Mexican general who literally commandeers the Mexican military to chase after the A-Team because one of the A-Team dudes sleeps with (and then runs off with) his wife.  Ah, those hot-headed Mexican generals.  Always getting blown up by American missiles.  

4s Marry 4s, 7s Marry 7s: I guess, although because Romance Dude actually isn't Main Protagonist (at least from my perspective), the whole romance subplot doesn't factor in too much.

How cool is my alma mater high school, yo?

Several Lincoln East High School students were suspended Wednesday for making or distributing fake "green cards" thrown onto the field after the championship soccer game against Omaha South.

Sixty percent of Omaha South's students are Latino -- and the green cards were an apparent reference to immigration status.

East administrators have talked with administrators at Omaha South. They also have talked with students who accepted the cards, stressing they are just as culpable for condoning the actions of those distributing them, Cassata said. And, they talked to a couple of students who waved American flags because the flags hadn't been present at other soccer games.

I shouldn't have to note that East is the high school that has the second-lowest percentage of minority students, and the lowest percentage of students who qualify for Free/Reduced Lunch.  In other words, it's the old rich white high school.  Bonus from the assistant principal, who used to be my biology teacher who advocated creationism, and also got a veteran history teacher fired for showing Baghdad E.R. (HDU show injured soldiers!):

"We saw absolutely zero green cards during the game, and we were extremely proud of our students," Mann said.

Yes, the moral of the story is to be proud of the students who didn't display green cards under threat of ejection from the game.  Wow!

So, I went to the midnight last night. Wasn't my idea, but I enjoy midnight showings (except for the tight-asses that want everybody to be quiet so they don't miss a line in the oh so majestic movie). And here's the thing about the Twilight movies: I don't dislike them.

I know that's scandalous. This doesn't apply to the books, I should add. Never read them, don't want to try. I suspect what I like about the movies would not be present in the books. But I went to the first one as a joke, just to laugh at it, and I actually ended up enjoying it somewhat. I wonder if I would like it more if I was still in high school (or better yet, middle school).

A. New Moon: Demographics

Most of the people at the midnight showing fit a certain type: the tween-girl Hot Topic shopper (when I was a tween-girl, I should add, I found Hot Topic too scary and edgy, though appealing). They're not cheerleaders. They're too "intense." They dye their hair. They under-achieve. They all showed up to New Moon wearing horrific overstretched Twilight shirts, and they sit with a couple friends, probably the only friends they have, and drown in the wish fulfillment of this movie. People make fun of them, but people have probably been making fun of them their whole lives, so they're used to it. Twilight is a franchise for them, and part of me wants to say that that's great, because everybody else ignores them. They don't have any other franchises. Gossip Girl is not for them. Harry Potter has too wide of an appeal, and Harry Potter is pretty damn hegemonic anyway. A lot of movies pander to outcast boys (Zombieland being the latest I've seen), because outcast boys can grow up to be smart or secretly cool, but outcast girls have no value in society, and they don't get movie-candy. Except for Twilight. Both of my friends who unabashedly like Twilight were loser-outcasts in high school. So was I.

B. New Moon: Aesthetics

Gloomy and angsty is the vibe Twilight goes for. It's the only teen franchise that does, really. And I'm all about that shit. Bella, the heroine, mopes 24/7. She also screams in her sleep and drives a beat-up truck and slouches. She walks awkwardly, arms crossed over her stomach. She doesn't do a lot of smiling - laughs are even rarer. Her eyes never quite seem to be totally open. And because she's played by Kristen Stewart and this is a movie about wish fulfillment, she's pretty, but not jaw-droppingly so. She isn't sunny, that's for sure. Her make-up's done to make her eyes look sunken in and her face unhealthily pallid.

The landscape - a gorgeous, misty, rustic town in the Northwest U.S. - is equally morose. The sea thrashes violently, the beach consists of hard pebbles. The roads are all hair-pin curves surrounded by dense woods filled with monsters. Honestly, I would go to these movies just to see Forks, because it's one of the richest movie landscapes I've ever seen, and definitely somewhere I wouldn't mind living.

Then of course there's all the brooding. Vampire boy broods, Bella broods, werewolf boy broods. The only one that doesn't brood is my favorite character, Bella's long-suffering, clueless cop father, Charlie. Charlie (played by Billy Burke) is just a great character - essentially, a single dad who doesn't know what to do with a moody teenaged girl, but he sure tries his damn best. Back to the teenagers: there's a lot of dramatic talk about not being able to live without so-and-so, and suicide, and not talking and not eating, and running away. But teenagers - especially this subset of teenagers - are dramatic and they do talk that way. The franchise becomes laughable when it actually takes this teenaged angst seriously - but let me make a distinction here.

1. Bella's vampire boyfriend, Edward Cullen, decides that he's a danger to her and moves away. Bella goes into a very deep depression. This part of the movie is pitch-perfect. I've read a lot of complaints that Bella is pathetic and a "bad role model" for going into this depression, but seriously, I've had friends react to break-ups like this. It's not unrealistic and quite frankly it's a very honest portrayal of something that a lot of teen movies ignore. And as someone who was clinically depressed for a few of my tween-years, I found it encouraging that a movie can be honest about depression in teens. Then Bella starts hanging out with werewolf boy, Jacob, and things look up, sort of. But Jacob wants to be more than friends and Bella is just using him as a crutch; when Jacob pulls away to join the werewolf brotherhood, Bella freaks out. Is it selfish of her? Sure. Is it realistic? Absolutely. So this isn't what I mean by the movie taking teenaged angst too seriously.

2. What I mean is the ultimate plot of New Moon, which is a slipshod version of Romeo and Juliet: Edward jumps to the conclusion that Bella is dead, and then goes off to Italy to kill himself in dramatic fashion. Bella has to go and stop him. This leads to a confrontation with the vampire aristocracy and basically, the teenaged doldrums turn into something much larger and more consequential than they really are. Thankfully they don't involve saving the world, but it's still far too extreme. Edward (who is 109) tells Bella that leaving her is the hardest thing he's done in a hundred years. Seriously? Geez. The only good part about this plot line is that you get to see Dakota Fanning as an evil preteen vampire, a la Kirsten Dunst in Interview with the Vampire. Hopefully they won't share a career trajectory, because Fanning makes a good baddie.

On a couple other basic movie-review notes, the acting is shit except for Dakota Fanning and Billy Burke and to some extent (when the material gives her something to actually do), Kristen Stewart. The non-romantic dialogue is passable, but the romantic dialogue is total tripe. The pacing is poor. The narrative arc is non-existent, as is the tension. The only things the movie succeeds at are song choice (but not musical score), and landscape. But we all knew these weren't going to win any Oscars.

C. New Moon: Social Implications

The biggest problem that I have with the Twilight series: Edward and his vampire family. Bella is believable as a human girl, and Jacob is believable as a werewolf boy - by which I mean, their actions and reactions ring true. But the Cullens are these opaque monoliths. They literally look corpse-white, all have extremely vacant, stony expressions, and when they say cheerful words to Bella it's just creepy as all fuck. They certainly don't act like hundreds-of-years-old, wise-but-jaded vampires (I'll give it to Anne Rice that she makes a convincing vampire of this type). Edward is totally unreadable, and the things he says are unbelievable. I hate the Cullens. They're unattractive and snobbish. Edward looks like a cross between Edward Scissorhands and The Crow, except in chest-revealing, expensive clothes. The werewolves, by contrast, are clannish but relaxed and homey. They're clearly flesh and blood, vivacious, adventurous. Bella's healthier with Jacob than she is with Edward. I could believe that all of this is done consciously, because vampires are supposed to be undead and icy and soulless. Except the movies make it obvious from the get-go that we (the audience of Bellas) are all supposed to swoon over Edward. We're supposed to want to become a vampire, like Bella does. And I'm like, why?

The worst part of the entire franchise, in my opinion, is what it contributes to race and class issues. Here's what I haven't said: the werewolves are all Indians. The Cullens, and 99% of the other vampires (there's one evil black vampire) are white. The werewolves are, as follows, also poor. They do things like drop out of school and fall in with "bad crowds." The only example of domestic violence here is attributed to the werewolf clan. The vampires, by contrast, are extremely fucking loaded, zipping around in expensive sports cars - Bella knows that one of them is at her house because she recognizes the fancy straight-from-a-car-commercial car - and living in a huge glass mansion, something out of the special Aspen edition of Home & Garden. They're also, you know, wise beyond belief and have refined, classical European tastes. They can do a bunch of fancy tricks like flying and Matrix acrobats and memorizing Shakespeare, while the werewolves are pretty much just very strong, as Bella remarks over and over. Like they're "on steroids." All this is made painfully obvious when Jacob and Alice, Edward's sister, confront each other at Bella's house. There's Jacob, in his (sort of) ratty clothes, and then there's Alice, in her very expensive-looking white coat and professionally-rendered hair and make-up. She tells Bella that she'll come back to talk, "once you put the dog out."

Yet we're all supposed to conclude, at movie's end, that the werewolves are well-meaning but crass (and perhaps violent?), while the vampires are cool and sexy and everything-you'd-ever-want-to-be-and-more. Incidentally, Bella's awesome dad fits right in withe the werewolves, personality-wise and socio-economically, meaning to join the vampires Bella also has to cut off her own family. This is where Twilight becomes shameful and nasty. The vampires are the plasticized, photo-shopped, megamillionaire celebrities - or, if you'd like, the cold carcass of capitalism - that we as the masses are all supposed to fellate, while the werewolves and humans are all the real, normal people (like friends and neighbors and family) that we're all supposed to trample in our hurry to dote upon the vampires.

And that's shitty and stupid and has nothing at all to do with being an angsty teenager.

Heard about this from Kissing Suzy Kolber, of all places:

Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, says it is his experience that most interracial marriages do not last long.

"I'm not a racist. I just don't believe in mixing the races that way," Bardwell told the Associated Press on Thursday. "I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else."

Bardwell said he asks everyone who calls about marriage if they are a mixed race couple. If they are, he does not marry them, he said.

Bardwell said he has discussed the topic with blacks and whites, along with witnessing some interracial marriages. He came to the conclusion that most of black society does not readily accept offspring of such relationships, and neither does white society, he said.

"There is a problem with both groups accepting a child from such a marriage," Bardwell said. "I think those children suffer and I won't help put them through it."

If he did an interracial marriage for one couple, he must do the same for all, he said.

"I try to treat everyone equally," he said.

You heard the man!  You let one interracial marriage go through soon they're all gonna want an interracial marriage!  He's just tryin' to protect the little halfbreeds from being born!