Jay Gatsby's Shirts

I think it was the shirt scene when my experience of watching Baz Luhrmann's film The Great Gatsby shifted. Daisy is on Gatsby's bed. He races up the stairs to a bedroom mezzanine where his innumerable shirts are stored and begins pulling them off the shelves, shouting out the names of the fine fabrics from which they're constructed (cotton! silk! muslin! linen!) while tossing them, in flutters and waves, down to her on the bed below. Daisy is showered by, wrapped up in, a pool of imported English shirts, turning and laughing and finally crying amidst these "beautiful shirts." The scene is an echo of several other shots in the film that feature impossibly long ceiling-to-floor drapes that subtract space from a room until someone finally shuts the door.

Welcome to Neverland, Inc.

Last week at a convention for Python programmers in Santa Clara, California, where I live and teach, an attendee named Adria Richards posted a tweet complaining about the "not cool" jokes being made by the men sitting behind her (something about sexualized forks and dongles, which I am the wrong kind of nerdy to get). Her tweet included a photo, presumably of the offending man, which soon led his employer to fire him. Since then, Richards herself has been fired, as well as becoming the sadly predictable object of misogynist venom. Welcome to Silicon Valley's high-tech business culture.

The Downton Abbey Guide to College Tuition

The word out from the Inside Higher Ed survey is that fully 70% of parents will restrict their child's choice of college based on cost. If there's one thing all parents can agree on, it's that college costs too much, and if my own experience is anything to judge by, precisely 100% of parents complain about it. But when your children reach SAT-taking age and the theoretical becomes the practical, the 30% complain in a completely different way than the 70%.

Hipsters, Steampunk, and Economic Nostalgia

Everyone, it seems, has become irritated by hipsters, the urban youth subculture whose members so desperately insist on distinguishing themselves from anything and everything popular or mainstream that they refuse even to lay claim to their own name. "I don't have a job, and I don't want one," says hipster style. "I will not be exploited!"

Great Covers of Bad 70s Songs

I consider it an accident of birth that I came to musical consciousness during the early 70s. And because my parents bought me a (red!) Radio Shack handheld transistor AM radio (it looked exactly like this, swear to god) when I was in fourth grade or so, that musical consciousness was moreover shaped largely by the popular songs playing on local southeast Florida stations.

It wasn't until 7th grade that we all discovered FM radio, and it wasn't until high school that we began to realize what utter crap most popular 70s music was. But by then, the damage was done. Vast portions of my brain had been deeply and indelibly marked by the sounds of Sonny and Cher, Tony DeFranco (remember "Heartbeat (It's a Lovebeat)"?), the Carpenters, and Bread, and by songs like "Kung Fu Fighting," "Disco Duck" (people, this actually became a #1 hit) and "Car Wash Song" (and I'm talking about the Rose Royce song, not the Jim Croce one, although the fact that there were two really popular songs about working at a car wash in the 70s should tell you all you need to know).

Mansplaining the Meltdown

The weirdest moment in HBO’s 2011 film Too Big to Fail is undoubtedly the one when Michele Davis, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury (played by Cynthia Nixon), suddenly announces that she doesn’t know how she’s going to explain the looming financial meltdown to the public. In response, three Treasury Department men protectively gather on chairs and sofas around her to patiently describe just how this shitstorm happened and what it means.

This might be a good moment to point out that Davis is the only woman in the entire film who isn’t a wife or a secretary. This might also be a good moment to point out that Davis’s job was to handle public relations for the Treasury department, meaning that her job description was to explain to the public what was going on in the economy. That she probably didn’t need to ask for help about how to do this, and that Paulson (played by William Hurt) was reportedly in the habit of asking her for such advice, rather than vice versa, is conveniently left out of the film. This is a textbook example of what has since come to be called mansplaining, the term coined to describe when men patronizingly explain things to women that they already understand, often better than the men attempting to explain it to them.

Gettysburg, Monticello, Homeland

It's hard to decide whether Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson is generating more public discussion this week. Lincoln, of course, because of Lincoln, a film about the sixteenth president and the Civil War that has left historians and others debating its accuracy and wondering how it manages to leave black people out of the story altogether. And Jefferson because of Henry Wiencek's recently released book Master of the Mountain--which according to some misrepresents the third president as a monster and according to others doesn't go nearly far enough in acknowledging his monstrosity. In both cases, it's pretty clear that American audiences prefer to continue revering our past presidents as mythological political heroes, figures we can turn to for stories about American moral and ideological purity, bereft of any complicating details that might taint or compromise that fantasy.

But if you ask me, the most compelling readings of both Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson this week were on Showtime's television series Homeland. I'll admit to being a bit behind on my viewing of the series (and those who are keeping up may by now have little interest in my take on what happened several episodes ago), but the show seems to me to be offering a sustained reflection on why it's a mistake to fetishize America's political figures.