Fear and Loathing in Woodley Park February 24, 2008
Posted by Lindsay in Anime, Commentary, Manga, Writing.1 comment so far
Part One: Getting In(to Character)
On the night of Friday, February 15, the day after Valentine’s Day, I took the Metro to the Adams Morgan station on the red line, with my flash recorder slung around my shoulder. It was in the early evening, and I was still dressed in the clothes I had worn to the office that day, but with the added accessory of the headphones on my flash recorder around my neck, the only place they would fit. The train hadn’t passed too many stops before I began to see teenagers dressed as pink-haired samurai and robots made of plastic and foil climbing on. They were clearly headed to the same place I was, the Omni Shoreham Hotel, for Katsucon – the biggest Japanese pop culture convention of the season.
As I rode the escalator up out of the subway, holding my coat closed in the cold, I recognized even more familiar characters from Japanese animation. At least four or five Uzumaki Narutos, ninjas young and loud; a gang of death gods from Bleach, their soul-sealing swords at their waists; Sailor Moon and the Supremes…I mean, fellow Sailor Scouts, ready to fight with love and honor against the insidious Queen Beryl. This wasn’t the first time I’d been to an anime convention – there was one every year at Smith College, just a few hours away from Amherst, my all-too-recent alma mater. But it was definitely the first time I’d gone as a reporter. (more…)
The cognitive dissonance of the Iowa Caucus. January 3, 2008
Posted by Lindsay in Comedy, Commentary, Criticism, Media, News, Politics.add a comment
Here is a handy guide to the Iowa Caucus process. Notice how much more convoluted the process is for the Democratic Party is than it is for the Republicans. Defenders have likened it to instant run-off voting, but this is anything but instant. For it to be effective, there should be a simple, secret ballot system in which a voter may mark his or her candidates in numerical order in the event that their first choices do not get the required fifteen percent of the electorate to move on to the next step. This is why Kucinich decided to give a recommendation as a second-choice for voters caucusing for him–in his case, Obama. At least he’s making an effort to avoid the “Nader effect.”
But notice the lower-right hand corner. Although the Iowa Caucus tends to predict the party nominee, those nominees rarely win the general election. So it seems to me that if the Democrats want to choose the most “electable” candidate, they need to go with anyone but the winner of the Iowa Caucus. That’s kind of how they got their beloved Bill Clinton.
For a party that claims to be about change and progress, the Iowa Democrats sure pick some ridiculous traditions to uphold.
The slope of humanity. November 1, 2007
Posted by Lindsay in Commentary, Criticism, Literature, Philosophy, Writing.3 comments
For a long time, I’ve felt it was not just the mark of the greatest literature, but a responsibility of literature, to expand the realm of what human beings consider part of the human condition. That is, to discover the concepts and ideas that make people human, especially if those concepts have not been a theme in prior canonical works. This article from Slate confirms several of my worries about the role of the members of the literary community that guard at the gates — that is, of course, the publishers.
In “The Invisible Lesbian,” Sarah Schulman, a well-reviewed novelist within the gay and lesbian literary community, discusses the difficulties she has had to face in getting her latest novel, The Child, published:
The Child is about a romantic, sexual relationship between 15-year-old Stew and 40-year-old David. Many editors’ letters explicitly pointed to this relationship as the reason for rejection. What troubled the editors was my point of view. I did not come out “against” the relationship. Instead, I was, as one blurber ultimately put it, “objective.”
Fear and Loathing in Woodley Park II March 13, 2008
Posted by Lindsay in Anime, Commentary, Writing.add a comment
Part Two: The Line That Blurs
I happened upon a group of college-age convention patrons sitting on the floor of a merchandise room and decided to see what they knew about webcomics. They were open to being a group interview, which would make for good “round-table” discussion sort of tape, so I sat down with them and began to ask them questions.
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