{"id":1039,"date":"2009-07-14T18:59:00","date_gmt":"2009-07-14T18:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2009\/07\/1039\/"},"modified":"2009-07-14T18:59:00","modified_gmt":"2009-07-14T18:59:00","slug":"1039","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2009\/07\/1039.html","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE POLS<\/strong>: Reviews of this and that.<\/p>\n

Christopher Bram, Gossip<\/em><\/strong>. A New Yorker and a Washingtonian meet in a gay chatroom. (We call them \u201cWashingtonians\u201d when they\u2019re not from \u2019round here.) Their sex life flourishes even though one is a left-leaning ex-activist and one is a rising-star Young Republican type. But how long can you sleep with an enemy who doesn\u2019t even know he\u2019s the enemy?<\/p>\n

This is nearly <\/em>perfect summer reading: just intelligent enough to give savor to its lurid, trashy elements. (Bram\u2019s narrator bashes the New York Post<\/em>, but this book reminded me more of that tabloid than of any other literary production.) I enjoyed it until the very <\/em>end, when its suspense turned into melodrama via a too-neat (though well-foreshadowed) resolution.<\/p>\n

Here I reviewed Bram\u2019s Exiles in America<\/em>,<\/a> a much better book. Gossip <\/em>did hit on one of the major themes of that book: the stark, sociologically-inflected differences between how a couple looks from the inside and how it looks from the outside. Exiles <\/em>takes as its epigraph Robert Frost\u2019s line (from memory, too lazy to look up, sorry) that marriage is \u201ca type of friendship recognized by the police.\u201d Gossip <\/em>shares that sensibility, though the nature of marriage itself isn\u2019t at issue in this book the way it is in Exiles<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll note that while the leftists in Gossip<\/em> were recognizable human types, the right-wingers resembled exactly zero right-wingers I\u2019ve ever met. But I\u2019m willing to posit that I have not met a representative sample. It didn\u2019t keep me from enjoying the novel until it was over, at which point I did start to feel a bit curdled.<\/p>\n

Kings<\/em>, episodes 6 \u2013 10<\/strong>: I reviewed previous episodes of this \u201cIt\u2019s about King David only alternate-universe only we\u2019re not going to tell you any of that because we don\u2019t want you to watch this show, apparently\u201d NBC drama here<\/a>. The first ten episodes are up at IMDB.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the later episodes, some things are better: The David actor is growing on me. \u201cChapter One\u201d is tense and intriguingly meta-narrative-y; the final twists of \u201cJavelin\u201d left me wanting to know what happens next. They\u2019ve continued to pepper the show with lines and speeches which come from within <\/em>a monarchist worldview, which fascinates me! This is one reason I like the Saul-figure\u2019s ruthless action at the end of \u201cBrotherhood.\u201d It feels alien<\/em>, old, simultaneously human and eldritch: personal.<\/p>\n

The romance between the king\u2019s aide and the guardsman is both endearing comic relief and poignant character shading.<\/p>\n

Other things, though\u2026 not so much. All the other younger actors still bother me, especially the Jonathan one. It would kill you to move your face? Express an unspoken emotion or an internal conflict, now and then?<\/p>\n

During \u201cPilgrimage,\u201d in which various nonmarital sex scandals threaten, I found myself saying out loud, \u201cWhy is it so easy to make liberalism sound saccharine<\/em>?\u201d Whenever the series touches the intersection of sex and publicity it tends to sound contemporary-bien-pensant rather than alien-monarchist.<\/p>\n

I still really, really <\/em>hate what they\u2019re doing with the David\/Jonathan relationship. They\u2019ve chosen to prettify David (in \u201cChapter One,\u201d the Saul-figure does to show-David what the Biblical David did to Bathsheba\u2019s husband, so the show\u2019s David remains an overperfect farmboy with no need for penitence) and make Jonathan a conflictedly-gay conflictedly-villainous waffler with an obvious redemption arc in sight. I hate every one of these changes! \u2026There\u2019s also still little sense of God as a moral force rather than merely a source of power, although I admit we\u2019re getting subtle outlines of God\u2019s commandments as the series progresses. I wish David, rather than Silas (=Saul), had become the focus of God\u2019s moral attention earlier on\u2013I get why they\u2019re doing it this way, but again, it makes David look cute rather than astonishing.<\/p>\n

I should maybe note that I can\u2019t be rational about the \u201cSabbath Queen\u201d episode because it depicts a family dealing with a critically-ill daughter. I have no idea if that episode is good or not, and I don\u2019t plan to watch it again.<\/p>\n

Batman: The Animated Series<\/em>, all seasons<\/strong>. I hate Batman comics; I loved this series!<\/p>\n

Batman as a genre tends toward sickly child-abuse storylines and exploitive portrayals of mental illness. (I know why you\u2019d mine mental illness for metaphors, and that can really work; I just want it to be completely cartoony, or much more realistic, or unruly genius\u2026 not the Uncanny Valley into which a lot of Batman stuff falls for me.) In comics which purport to be Serious Business, I really cannot handle that stuff. For the most part, this show didn\u2019t hit those buttons for me, although there were occasional moments when the bottom dropped out and I couldn\u2019t help but remember that Arkham Asylum is scary because we\u2019re supposed to fear \u201cthe weak and the wounded.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

But the thing I loved about this series\u2013the reason I Netflix\u2019d it, and the thing on which it completely delivered\u2013was its look. This is a hot, gorgeous show. It\u2019s all angular and expressionist and deco and\u2026 basically honey for the bears, where I\u2019m concerned. It\u2019s dark and spooky-fun and stupidly <\/em>beautiful.<\/p>\n

I loved basically any show with Harley Quinn. I was expecting to like her and ended up adoring her. She\u2019s having so much fun<\/em>! \u201cHarley\u2019s Holiday\u201d might be my favorite of those, although the one with the Joker Fish, which I think is her first or second appearance, is also adorable, as is \u201cHarley and Ivy.\u201d I liked Poison Ivy\u2019s eps generally as well. I love that they paired the clown and the femme fatale, and kept both of them recognizably noir-girl types!<\/p>\n

I think you\u2019ll know immediately whether this show is for you, since as I said, its look is its main appeal. (At least for me.) Most of the special features are commentary tracks, which I love!\u2013the most fun for me were the ones for the first episode, where they laughed at how dark the coloring is (it\u2019s really startling), and for \u201cCritters,\u201d which is apparently one of the most reviled episodes of the series. I liked it! And I liked it even more after the commentary track. I think they actually avoided the problems of making a dark deco Batman fight a giant chicken, you know? It\u2019s an incredibly creepy <\/em>chicken! On the other hand, it\u2019s part of a weird run of episodes where Batman fights dumb stuff\u2013there\u2019s a dinosaur in the previous episode, and later we get gorilla-villains. \u2026Speaking of villains who don\u2019t work for me, I hated all things Ras al-Ghul except for the one which is really a Jonah Hex episode. <\/p>\n

The later discs are a \u201crevamped\u201d version. Og like: I think they use a lot more red in the revamp? Not sure. If I\u2019m right, it made the show even hotter; if I\u2019m wrong, something else made it look extra spectacular. Og no like: People\u2019s faces mostly became more masklike, whiter and more acutely-angled, and I missed the curves.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE POLS: Reviews of this and that. Christopher Bram, Gossip. A New Yorker and a Washingtonian meet in a gay chatroom. (We call them \u201cWashingtonians\u201d when they\u2019re not from \u2019round here.) Their sex life flourishes even though one is a left-leaning ex-activist and one is a rising-star Young Republican type. But […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nEve Tushnet<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE POLS: Reviews of this and that.Christopher Bram, Gossip. A New Yorker and a Washingtonian meet in a gay chatroom. 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