Jim: We've got a lot to address this roundtable and many of it from e-mails. Our e-mail address is
thirdestatesundayreview@yahoo.com. Participating in this roundtable are
The Third Estate Sunday Review's Dona, Ty, Jess, Ava, and me, Jim; Rebecca of
Sex and Politics and Screeds and Attitude; Betty of
Thomas Friedman Is a Great Man; C.I. of
The Common Ills and
The Third Estate Sunday Review; Kat of
Kat's Korner (of The Common Ills); Cedric of
Cedric's Big Mix; Mike of
Mikey Likes It!; Elaine of
Like Maria Said Paz); Ruth of
Ruth's Report; Trina of
Trina's Kitchen; Wally of
The Daily Jot; Marcia of
SICKOFITRDLZ; Stan of
Oh Boy It Never Ends; Isaiah of
The World Today Just Nuts and Ann of
Ann's Mega Dub. Betty's kids did the illustration.
Jim (Con't): First off,
check out this year-in-review at Fork Party. I plan to do so later today or tomorrow. I'm the one who read that e-mail and I'm sorry that I haven't had time to check out the link. But, before it's two weeks after someone's e-mailed and I've forgotten all about it, I'm including it here. For the bulk of last week's e-mails, there were two themes emerging. First, Ava and C.I. are wonderful. And, second, is Third breaking up. I thought we'd spend this roundtable discussing how groovy Ava and C.I. are -- I'm joking. Ava and C.I. are wonderful. We all know that. Let's move over to the break up question.
Last week's edition featured a number of individual pieces. Trina, I'm tossing to you, the only one present who didn't participate in last week's edition.
Trina: Okay. I was sick and I had begged off. There was a chance of an economic feature and I had told Jim I'd work on that but then, Saturday night, I called him to tell him I was begging off that as well. I was just too wiped out. During the course of our conversation, Jim mentioned what had happened that day in Tuscon, Arizona and how he was afraid that might weigh down on the edition, that people might second guess everything and nothing would get a complete draft. So I suggested it be like one of the Beatles' last albums,like Let It Be, where everyone basically worked on their own song. That was my only contribution to the edition and I then went to sleep.
Jim: And that's what we did. Dona had a piece she'd been talking about writing and I had been urging her each week, for the previous two, to write it. I'd already informed Robert Knight I'd be writing about his rude little e-mail. So that was two stories right there. We decided we'd do an editorial -- that was the piece we all worked on -- and Ty and Jess wanted to cover something to do with legal. They weren't sure what. Ava and C.I. were going to do their TV piece and, since they knew House Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, we asked them to consider writing a piece about Arizona. We did that not hoping they'd do an "I Know Gabby" piece. We know that's not their style. But we thought they could hit the important points that a lot of people were ignoring. Not only did they, I'd argue that "
The Hysteria Beat (Ava and C.I.)" was, to quote an e-mail from a network correspondent, "set exactly the right tone." That's why we had the invidivdual pieces last week. We're not breaking up.
Dona: Though we are considering doing some editions which would only feature a truest, an editorial, Ava and C.I. with one TV piece, a roundtable and that's it from us. The rest would be reprints. Why? We're tired. We thought we'd just do this while we were undergrads. In the time since we started this, Jim and I have gone on to grad school, Jess to law school, and Jim and I have gotten married.
Jim: To each other.
Dona: Yes, to each other. So things have changed and will change. And I don't know how much longer we'll do Third. We never planned to do it this long. This is our sixth year anniversary. Trina's suggestion was a good one and it's one we will probably implement again. From a time stand point, it wasmuch smoother with everyone just being responsible for their own writing. I know that, as a group, we couldn't have written the piece Ava and C.I. did. It wouldn't have worked that way. One thing I am missing is our collages. Now that we don't do them, I'm glossing over how much time they took and just thinking of how, when we did them, that was two to three sentences of copy and a really strong visual.
Jess: My turn in the e-mails. Zuungar is billed as "The Holy Drum 'n Bass Duo." They're worth checking out and you can check them out on
MySpace and
Facebook and also at
Terminal Station. They're different from a lot of music you hear and that's important especially if, like Dona, you're worried about a sameness creeping in. So give a click, give a listen and maybe shake up your own expecations.
Ty: Jim's pointing at me. George Kieta e-mailed to say he's one of Ava and C.I.'s biggest fans but doesn't feel they've covered enough entertainment television since the fall season started. He writes, "Reading '
TV: How to destroy your own show' really drove home how much they could be doing on TV if they weren't also addressing politics. As one of the longterm readers who remember when Ava and C.I. only covered entertainment shows, I just want to register that opinion." Ava or C.I.?
Ava: We're aware of that feeling. We were aware of it before it was ever expressed. And George isn't the first one to raise it. C.I. and I were addressing it in a recent roundtable in fact. Our pieces were always political but political about entertainment programs. I'm going to do a little six-years-in-writing comment. The first time we ever did a public affairs program, I believe, was one that had so many outlandish lies about the Iraq War, it aired on PBS, and no one was calling it out. Iraq is our issue -- and we'd repeatedly worked it into our entertainment reviews -- so that was one we grabbed, a public affairs program that we did. Jim had long been pushing us to and we'd said no for a very good reason. After we wrote that piece, it ended up at several websites. And that was why we had refrained from those pieces. We didn't like the idea that we covered a public affairs program so now we were 'serious' writers. We think our writing is more or less than same -- and don't rate it highly -- and we didn't want to get into a habit of going for the easy praise. Pieces about public affairs will always result in more 'universal' -- male -- praise than pieces praising the accomplishments of women or calling out the mistreatment of women. In terms of the fall season, the e-mailer's correct. But we've admitted that before. It's also true that some shows we've not had a good opinion of and people with the show have been more than happy to ask us to wait. Add in that each week Jim's trying to get us to cover public affairs and there's a lot going on. This week, C.I. and I were asked by Jim to cover Barack's speech. We have no interest in doing so. We also knew, when we caught Democracy Now! Thursday, that we'd have to cover it in some way. And we do. But we also do a piece on a new NBC sitcom. We can't write two pieces every week. But we have this week and those who feel like the e-mailer does will hopefully enjoy the entertainment piece and remember we made that effort if events tear us away from the entertainment beat.
Ty: C.I.?
C.I.: Ava said everything perfectly. The one thing I'll add is that we've expanded to Hulu with the permission of our longterm readers like George. So that's broadcast TV and Hulu. And that's still not a lot. We have to do 52 pieces a year -- at least. At a minimum. And we've been doing that for six years now. With Saturdays a write-off by the networks, that's one day of programming we don't have. The WB and UPN became one network, the CW, while we've been writing. What I'm trying to point out is that Ava and I also have to keep in mind that we need to have a few shows in reserve that we can grab during a slow week. Modern Family, for example, is our safety school. We've sat it aside for the week when we have nothing else to write about.
Jim: Recently, horror films were mentioned in a roundtable leading to this e-mail from Christopher: "I was wondering if Rebecca, Elaine, Mike and Marcia had a favorite horror movie?"
Rebecca: Rosemary's Baby remains the scaries for me. Everything, including that la-la-la-la theme spooks the hell out of me. Mia Farrow and Ruth Gordon are perfect in it. For those who don't know the film, Mia's husband's an actor who sells her out for success. The neighbors are devil worshippers and Mia ends up pregnant by Satan.
Elaine: I'd agree that's one of the greats. I also enjoy some of John Carpenter's late 70s and early 80s work -- not just Halloween but also Prom Night, The Fog, The Thing, etc. I like spooky films as well. Julie Harris in The Haunting, Nicole Kidman in The Others. Of the Draculas, I'm in the minority. I think Christopher Lee was the best Dracula.
Mike: I like the slasher films early on. But as the sequels pile up, they get less and less interesting to me. I don't like newer monster films just because I scratch my head at them and think, "Wow, I guess all the good monsters were created about fifty years ago." The most recent horror film that I really loved, not just liked, was Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig in The Invasion. And I thought it was much better than Invasion of the Body Snatchers from the 70s which tried to play it sly and cute. This was actually scary. But I think the best scary movies were made in the thirties, the black and white classics with Dracula and Frankenstein and The Invisible Man. Marcia?
Marcia: I love scary movies and I love science fiction movies. Aliens, the second of the series, works best for me because it's horror and science fiction. I agree with Elaine that Christopher Lee was the best Dracula. And I'm surprised she feels that way. Those of us who do really are in the minority. But he's great in those films. In terms of atmosphere, his films largely made in England, have the atmosphere Mike's talking about even though they are in color. For US films, you really need to go back to the 30s to get the mists and the castles and the shadows. Surprisingly, I thought Mel Brooks captured it perfectly in his comedy Young Frankenstein. By contrast, that awful Frankenstein film with Robert De Nero was both boring and overblown and far more typical of the way modern film makers ruin the horror genre. 28 Days was probably the scariest horror film of the last decade for me.
Mike: And another good horror film of recent times was the British movie Jeckyll from three years ago.
Jim: Okay, Christopher also wanted to ask Stan if he'd consider writing a piece on a horror film?
Stan: I will put it on my list. It may be this Friday, it may be another Friday. No promises on when.
Jim: Still on Christopher, Ava, he notes your remarks about the kind of movie Sharon Stone needs to make from "
Roundtable" in December. Christopher wants to know, "Why long hair?"
Ava: For the atmosphere. I said she needs to make a scary movie. A lot of darkness. Long hair can both blow in the wind and drape over and add additional shadows. I really do believe that's the type of film Sharon Stone needs to make. A psychological thriller or horror.
Jim: We stayed on that e-mail longer than on others because a number have come in during the last weeks noting that we really haven't done a great deal on horror in the six years we've been publishing.
Jess: Reda Diallo wants to know why some e-mails get picked and others don't? The answer is it depends on what you're writing about and on whether the person who happened to read your e-mail found it the most interesting. Ty reads the bulk of them and the ones he prints up as possibilities generally have a common thread because he's going for the topics that are most asked about. By contrast, Jim looks for the e-mail that asks a question or raises a point no one else does. Donna and I just try to bring in the best of the batch we read.
Dona: For example, Lisa wants to know: "Is there any reason Wally and Cedric are unable to do five posts a week? Are they afraid of cracking wise in the wake of Tuscon?"
Cedric: I believe Wally and I demonstrated last week that wasn't the case, that we were not going to let Tuscon intimidate or change us. Wally?
Wally: Last week, Kat, Ava, C.I. and I were in Arizona and Colorado. Speaking out against the wars. And Thursday night we were in the mountains and had great cell and WiFi reception. Cedric and I were going to write our joint-post Friday morning. I get up Friday, C.I. and I go for a run. We get back and neither of us has coverage. We also have to be on campus in less than an hour. And we're speaking one right after the other until lunch time. That's why C.I.'s entries went up so late on Friday and why Cedric and I didn't do one.
Cedric: Wally and I write them together over the phone. I had spoken to him Thursday night and, when I couldn't get him Friday morning, I tried C.I., Ava and finally Kat -- finally Kat because I know she tries to sleep in the latest. I couldn't get any of them so I knew it was an issue with coverage. But we're not going to be intimidated in the least when it comes to how we write or what we write.
Jim: How about you Isaiah?
Isaiah: Pulling punches? No. Not at all. I knew last Sunday that
my comic would have to be Moqtada al-Sadr. I ended up working Barack and Nancy Pelosi into it because I wanted to make it very clear I'm doing my comics and doing them the way I've done them since Bush was in the White House.
Betty: I'm jumping in to bring up that WikiLeaks had donated $15,000 to
Bradley Manning's defense. The organization raised over $2 million last year but could only scrape together $15,000 for Bradley. In addition, this donation,
reported by Reuters, came only after an intense month of public shaming after Julian Assange had grand-standed for months claiming they were paying for Bradley's defense -- covering the costs. And never donating a cent. With Julian Assange now in need of legal donations, WikiLeaks' inability to donate to Bradley's defense was becoming a public relations nightmare.
Jim: Thank you for that, Betty. She found that and we couldn't think of a thing to do with it so it was decided to bring it into the roundtable. Gerald e-mails to say, "Thank you for the edition" -- he's talking about last week. "You treated me like an adult. You didn't need to play like Jon Stewart and stop your usual activities to deliver a sermon or act like movie critic Dennis Hartley and drop movies because America-has-a-ended-woah-woah-scary. If you've got a function, you should do it. Otherwise the crazy wins. Thanks for refusing to let them win." I have no idea who Dennis Hartley is. Anyone? Alright. No. Betty, you had another point you wanted to make.
Betty: I don't want to get into the Tuscon issue too much, I think it was the craze last week. In the community, Marcia grabbed it to offer critiques of and the rest of us pretty much avoided it -- Mike, for example, made a point to highlight news that was being ignored -- so that we weren't adding to the hysteria. But I want to point out something. Giffords is a woman. A woman was shot. And while all the crazies spent the week speculating, how telling it was that in a country where women are more often the victims of violence, no one wanted to examine whether there was a gender motivation. In a country where women are repeatedly attacked -- we've seen Amy Goodman, Naomi Wolf and Naomi Klein recently engage in attacks on two women who may have been raped, for example -- it was very telling that this was the response. As a Black woman, I'm fully aware that had the dead been Black, it would have been the big story. Had Giffords been Black, it would have been the big story. But gender never rises to that level in this country, does it?
Ruth: I would absolutely agree with Betty. Like Betty, I did want to go there all last week but tried to find other topics to write about because it was the endless blather. And,
as Marcia pointed out, by the time you are 'live blogging' a memorial service, you're beyond tacky. It really was disgusting last week.
Jim: There was a lot of great work in the community last week. In many ways, we had the easiest job here. We just had to publish one edition the day after the shooting. The rest of you were publishing all last week and trying to stand up to the mob frenzy. I think Marcia offered some great criticism, but I think there was strong work done at all the websites. Kat, what stands out to you from last week?
Kat: A great deal. But I'm going to reduce it to C.I. because she's not going to let us give her "Truest statement of the week," I know. In
Thursday's snapshot she took on Joseph Massad's grudge against Christians, ending with this hilarious line:"And, if no one ever told you, Joseph Massad, you have neither the body nor the sex appeal to pull off a grudge f**k." That still makes me laugh. And then there was Tuesday's "
Iraq snapshot" where C.I. called out the claims by the GOP that, if given control of the House, they were going to work!!!! But, reality, the House Veterans Affairs Committee has no hearings scheduled for this month but, last year under Bob Filner's leadership, they held four hearings in January. And, I'll add, C.I.'s the only one who made time to notice that.
Jim: Has anyone not spoken? Ann? Okay, sorry, Ann, you're going to come in a topic you may have nothing to add. We had an e-mail asking why gay cinema is never discussed here. Ty, any thoughts on gay cinema?
Ty: Actually, this is a good week for that question. My boyfriend and I were watching a British film -- gay themed, not gay porn -- called Shank. It's a 2009 film directed by Simon Pearce and Cal's in a gang and hooking up on the side to keep everyone from finding out. He has two hook ups. In the first one, he sucks off a guy, pulls him into the woods, drops his pants and gets the guy to screw him. The second one -- both are met online -- hooks him by promising to top him extremely. And does. So then he moves out of the gang and ends up with Oliver, an art student, and -- apparently this is 'maturity' -- Cal's topping Oliver. And only topping. Now we've seen him beating off online to thoughts, porn -- including porn starring himself -- of bottoming but all the sudden he's a top? It made no sense at all.
Ann: Jonno and Nessa? That's the film, right?
Ty: Yeah, it is.
Ann: I've seen it. I saw that about a year ago with a family member who is gay. We had a movie night and that was one of the romance films we watched. Let me just note Nessa for a second. Nessa is Jonno's girlfriend. Jonno is Cal's best friend. The three are in the gang and Nessa really is the ringleader. She's got an obsese cousin that she goes off on and smashes her face up at one point, with glass, because her cousin is snorting coke off a photo of Nessa's baby that died -- her baby with Cal. At one point, she's in a grave yard spraying Nazi signs on tombstones and kicking over tombstones, she's just a terror. Cal meets Oliver when Nessa and Jonno are beating him up. And Jonno was attracted to Cal, that's what the whole shotgun pot in the car that is like a long attempt at a kiss was.
Ty: Agreed. Jonno was big time attracted to Cal. That's why he couldn't get up when Nessa wanted him to have sex with her in the grave yard. That's why, spoiler alert, he rapes Cal. But, the whole 'maturity means topping' subtext made no sense.
Ann: And we talked about it and wondered what the hell that was? As Ty's explained -- accurately -- it was very clear in Cal's encounters that he enjoyed bottoming. In fact, he didn't even want to get a blow job. He got pleasure out of giving and out of getting screwed. So it made no sense and seemed more like a writer or director had their own sexual anxieties which required that the lead character be a top. Other than that, though, I would recommend it. It was a very interesting film.
Ty: Yeah, I'd agree.
Jim: Ann, you never cease to amaze me. Okay, so that's gay cinema and on that note we're wrapping up this roundtable.
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