Times like this truly do make me wish superheroes were real.

There’s an affecting moment in J Michael Straczynski’s recent run on the comic Thor. The Norse god of thunder’s been dead for three years, but has come back to life, as only gods and comic book superheroes can.

One of the first places he goes is New Orleans. Thor was dead when Hurricane Katrina hit a year earlier, and he knows he could have stopped the hurricanes, the floods, or otherwise saved the city and its people. But he wonders where the rest of the superheroes were: “Why were not force fields erected? Why were tides not evaporated by heat and blast? Why were buildings not supported by strength of arms and steel?”

Just then, Iron Man shows up, to tell Thor that all superheroes need to register with the federal government to prevent superpower-caused disasters. Instead of preventing Katrina or repairing New Orleans, Iron Man and his fellow superheroes have been fighting each other over this registration requirement, part of what Marvel Comics called Civil War.

There’s some meaning to be drawn from this, that I can’t fully articulate. Something about thinking too small, thinking about short-term hurdles and squabbles rather than the big picture; a blindness to the fact of habitual human suffering that would be willful if it weren’t also somehow sickeningly necessary.

I’m not sure. But I think I know why I’ve been reading more comic books lately.

I like old Law & Order episodes — there’s a reason why I put the show smack in the middle of my Showroulette pitch — but wasn’t heartbroken when I’d heard that the flagship series was cancelled. (The quirkier, more salacious spinoffs, like “Law & Order: Freaky Sex Crimes Unit,” remain.) The show had been losing its edge for a while, in writing, acting, and even casting. I mean, how are going to cast the judge from The Wire as … a judge on Law & Order? That’s just lazy. At least the guys from The Sopranos didn’t always play mobsters.

A couple of things I’ve seen lately, though, in the wake of the show’s cancellation, suggest that Law & Order wasn’t quite as sharp because the city itself had lost its edge — in a good way, at least for New York (if not procedural dramas). This New York Times article notes how the show helped improve New York’s image to tourists and parvenues (“This Crime Spree Made New York Feel Safe“):

In 1990, when the show made its debut, 2,245 people were murdered in New York (a high-water mark), and several of those victims became emblematic of the haphazard, senseless violence that gripped the city…

[But] as [the detectives] pulled on the threads of the case, a pattern and motive always emerged. Unlike in the real New York, there is almost no pure street crime in “Law & Order.” In a show obsessed with the city’s class structure, you were far more likely to be murdered by your financial adviser than by a drug dealer. Crime has no single cause, the show seemed to argue, but crimes do, and they can be solved one at a time…

Mr. Wolf portrayed a city in which there were no senseless crimes, only crimes that hadn’t yet been made sense of. He took the conventions of the English country murder mystery and tucked them inside the ungovernable city. In so doing, for a national audience, he de-randomized New York violence.

The plunging murder rate has to help too — just 466 homicides in all of New York City in 2009, an all-time low. For a city of almost 9 million people, it’s pretty impressive that fewer people were killed in New York last year than follow me on Twitter. Let’s put it this way — Philadelphia and Baltimore, which also had record-low homicide numbers, together easily beat New York even though the two cities combined have something like half the population of Brooklyn. New York went from one of the most dangerous cities in the country to one of the safest.

The Wire’s David Simon, though, argues that the rising wealth and lowered danger of New York skews New York’s sense of what’s happening in American cities nationwide — and because New York dominates America’s media imagination, that has a disproportionate effect on how we understand what’s happening elsewhere. (Make sure you watch this video to the end, where he gives Law & Order a pop):

Some of this is familiar anti-NYC stuff, particularly from people who 1) live/grew up elsewhere and 2) work in/adjacent to media and publishing. But I think Simon’s bigger point, that the “urban experience” in America has become much more heterogeneous, both within and between cities, is 1) true and 2) has consequences, is really worth paying closer attention to.

One of the problems with studying any medium is that it’s too easy to mistake the part for the whole. Literature professors can confidently chart the development of the novel over centuries by referencing only a tiny well-regarded sliver of all novels published, some immensely popular and others forgotten. When you turn to the broader field of print culture, books themselves jostle against newspapers, advertisements, letters and memos, government and business forms, postcards, sheet music, reproduced images, money, business cards and nameplates, and thousands of other forms that have little if anything to do with the codex book. We tend towards influential, fractional exemplars, partly out of necessity (raised to the level of institutions) and partly out of habit (raised to the level of traditions). But trouble inevitably arises when we forget that the underexamined whole exists, or pretend that it doesn’t matter. It always does. If nothing else, the parts that we cut out for special scrutiny draw their significance in no small part by how they relate to the other, subterranean possibilities.

The culture of digital technology, like that of print, is impressively broad, thoroughly differentiated, and ubiquitously integrated into most of our working and non-working lives. This makes it difficult for media scholars and historians to study, just as it makes it difficult (but inevitable) for scholars to recognize how this technology has changed, is changing, and should continue to change the academy. Self-professed digital humanists — and I consider myself one — generally look at digital culture, then identify themselves and model their practices on only a sliver of the whole.

Digital culture far exceeds the world wide web, social networks, e-books, image archives, games, e-mail, and programming codes. It exceeds anything we see on our laptops, phones, or television screens. It even exceeds the programmers, hackers, pirates, clerics, artists, electricians, and engineers who put that code into practice, and the protocols, consoles, and infrastructure that govern and enable their use.

This is important, because digital humanists’ efforts to “hack the academy” most often turn out NOT to be about replacing an established analog set of practices and institutions with new digital tools and ideas. Instead, it’s a battle within digital culture itself: the self-styled “punk” culture of hackers, pirates, coders, and bloggers against the office suite, the management database, the IT purchaser. Twitter vs. Raisers’ Edge. These are also reductions, but potentially instructive ones.

For my own part, I tend to see digital humanism less as a matter of individual or group identity, or the application of digital tools to materials and scholarship in the humanities, but instead as something that is happening, continuing to emerge, develop, and differentiate itself, both inside and outside of the academy, as part of the spread of information and the continual redefinition of our assumptions about how we encounter media, technological, and other objects in the world. In this, every aspect of digital technology, whether old or new, establishment or counter-establishment, plays a part.

I’m writing this as part of the Center for History and New Media’s “Hacking the Academy” project, filed under the hashtag #criticism. Check out the other submissions here.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has been my favorite writer to read on this Rand Paul mess. (Short version – Ron Paul’s son won the Republican primary for a Senate seat in Kentucky, after which his candidacy kind of fell apart after some really clumsy and embarassing interviews where he tried to say that he was against the Civil Rights Act banning segregation, but that he wasn’t a racist, would have marched with MLK, and thinks a free society means people/businesses are free to do despicable things.) Here are the key bullet points:

• Why can the media only focus on how bad this looks for Paul politically, rather than try to engage with his opinion as a serious position? “[W]hile I expect politicians and their handlers to think in terms of messaging, I also expect–perhaps foolishly–for media to be in the business of pushing past that messaging to actual ideas. What we get instead is a faux-objectivity, that avoids the substance of issues and instead focuses on how that substance is pitched. In that sense, much like the relationship between entertainment and many entertainment journalists, it’s really hard to see media as more than quasi-independent extension of campaign apparatus.”
• Why can’t Paul and his conservative/libertarian supporters actually engage with this stuff more seriously? “What I’m driving at is raising the question about methods is never wrong, to the contrary it’s essential. That process is undermined by people who raise those questions, without having thought about them, without being able to speak to their nuances, and are mostly concerned with tribal signaling. People were dragged from their homes, raped and murdered over civil rights. Talk about it, by all means. But talk about it with the intellectual seriousness it deserves.This is not a third grade science fair project.”
• This post, “Towards an abstract courage,” is my favorite, because it addresses the idea that certainly, Paul and every other decent person would have been allies with King and other desegregationists to bring segregated businesses down, without the federal government stepping in. “Now, after the police dogs, night-sticks and fire-hoses have been beaten back, Rand Paul wants to reopen the question, while, to be sure, claiming that he would have had the ‘courage to march with Martin Luther King.’ This is a common strain of courage. It chiefly shines through in men born 50 years too late. Presently among the crowd, they are distinguished at that decisive moment when queried about wars they won’t have to fight, in times they will never live. These men populate our history books. They are all on the wrong side.”
• To that end, “Towards a manifested courage” tells the story of Joan Trumpauer, one of the white freedom riders arrested in Jackson, MS for integrating a lunch counter.

Coates links to Charles Lane in the Washington Post, who writes:

Suppose an African American customer sits down at a “whites only” restaurant and asks for dinner. The owner tells him to leave. The customer refuses and stays put. What are the owner’s options at that point? He can forcibly remove the customer himself, but, as Paul concedes, that could expose the restaurateur to criminal or civil liability. So he’ll have to call the cops. When they arrive, he’ll have to explain his whites-only policy and ask them to remove the unwanted black man because he’s violating it. But they can only do that on the basis of some law, presumably trespassing. In other words, the business owner’s discriminatory edict is meaningless unless some public authority enforces it.

Conversely, it is precisely because of this nexus between private discrimination and public enforcement that the larger community, through the political and judicial process, acquires a valid interest in legislating against discrimination. The public is entitled to say whether their tax money should pay for arresting black trespassers on whites-only property.

This, for me, is a huge point, since it establishes that segregation and desegregation aren’t at substance purely a matter of freedom of association or the content of characters/hearts, but a matter of recognition under the law. What we see are the people, those angry faces — but what makes the invisible infrastructure for all of that anger is the law.

To see how important — and how slippery — this point can be, read this NYT editorial excoriating Paul, then Chris Bray at History News Network, who justly slams the NYT:

[T]he American history of racial oppression and brutality is a history of government. The founding document of the republic privileged slavery as a lawful institution, and government served that institution for another seventy-eight years after that. The Emancipation Proclamation didn’t free all American slaves; it freed slaves in states engaged in rebellion…

After the abandonment of Reconstruction, “redeemed” southern governments rebuilt structures of oppression through law and the institutions of government. Jim Crow laws were laws; the regime of racial segregation was not simply a set of social choices. That guy standing in the schoolhouse door? He was a governor. Why is that so hard to figure out?

I think it’s because we’ve seen the pictures of the dogs and the firehoses and the angry men and women behind them, and we’ve assumed that that’s what discrimination looks like, to the point that we can’t understand anyone or anything as racist unless it looks like that.

But I don’t think that’s it at all. It’s a secret history of the invisible that we’re tracing. And the thing about being invisible is that it’s pretty easy to be everywhere.

Henry Jenkins riffs on He-Man and other 80s-era action figures, offering a reading that starts out as largely charitable but ends up somewhere that’s actually quite beautiful:

When I speak to the 20 and 30 somethings who are leading the charge for transmedia storytelling, many of them have stories of childhood spent immersed in Dungeons and Dragons or Star Wars, playing with action figures or other franchise related toys, and my own suspicion has always been that such experiences shaped how they thought about stories.

From the beginning, they understood stories less in terms of plots than in terms of clusters of characters and in terms of world building. From the beginning they thought of stories as extending from the screen across platforms and into the physical realm. From the beginning they thought of stories as resources out of which they could create their own fantasies, as something which shifted into the hands of the audience once they had been produced and in turn as something which was expanded and remixed on the grassroots level.

The impetus for Jenkins’s generational meditation (besides an impending deadline for a keynote) is this io9 piece on “The 10 Most Unfortunate Masters of the Universe Toys,” which 1) I linked to a ways back on Twitter, and 2) is hilarious. Sample:

Stinkor was an evil skunk. How do we know he was evil? He has the suffix “-or” appended to his name. If his name was just “Stink,” he’d be kicking back in Castle Greyskull, pounding Schlitz with Man-At-Arms and scheduling baccarat night with Man-E-Faces.

This Ask MetaFilter thread is the most gripping thing I’ve read in a very long time. It begins:

A Russian friend of mine may be in a dangerous situation in Washington, DC.

My friend and former student K arrived in DC yesterday, along with a friend. She came over on some kind of travel exchange program put together by a Russian travel agency called ‘Aloha’. They paid about 3K for this program.

The program promised a job offer in advance, but didn’t deliver. They said they would send one via email, but failed there, too.

Her contact in the USA barely speaks English, doesn’t answer her calls but does answer mine. He has asked her and her friend to meet in NYC tonight around midnight, with promises of hostess work in a lounge. Yes, I know how horrific that sounds- that’s why I am working all possible angles here.

She is not going to NYC but I need some help handling and understanding how to handle this- I have a friend helping them with a cheap hotel for the night, but that’s all at the moment. I am presently driving to LA and could fly her and her friend to meet me there on Saturday, but couldn’t house them indefinitely. I will be monitoring this thread over the next hour.

The ~200 comments that follow are epic. A must-read.

Big ups to the Banksy documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop, which feels very Snarkmarketian to me. The movie unfolds in three distinct chapters, slowly developing an aesthetic and an argument, and finally posing a provocative question, or a few.

The first third of the film uses the lens of aspiring documentarian Thierry Guerra to give us a tour d’horizon of the universe of street art. We hear from a diverse cross-section of street artists from Shepard Fairey to a mosaic artist known as Space Invader to Banksy himself, while we’re watching footage of people taking to rooftops and subway stations to decorate the urban landscape.

Then we delve into the story of Guerra himself – this dude who channels his obsessive impulse to film everything in his life into a thorough record of the street art movement, compiling thousands of hours of footage of artists on the make. For such an ephemeral art form, this archiving is invaluable. Prominent artists cheerfully accommodate Guerra and his omnipresent camera, despite the heightened visibility it brings to activities that might not be entirely licit.

Guerra’s profile rises as the world he’s documenting starts to become more and more celebrated by the mainstream art community, which introduces tension: Street art is almost by definition a critique of mainstream consumer values. The movement rests on this fundamentally anti-consumerist premise of reclaiming private property for public expression. A mural on the side of a building defies our notions of commerce; the canvas can’t easily be carted off and sold, right? So what happens when the art does become property, bought and sold like any other commodity, auctioned off for tens of thousands of dollars at Sotheby’s, pursued by collectors?

The answer: Mr. Brainwash.

Guerra, realizing that his payday is not going to come in the form of a smash hit documentary, decides he’s going to cash in on his work a different way. By now, of course, he’s become a devoted observer of the process by which street artists accrue mountains of hype, use industrial production techniques to replicate their work on a massive scale, and make their subversive and ubiquitous art a sort of viral marketing campaign for their brand. So he takes the logical next step of turning this fundamentally anti-capitalist movement into the ultimate post-industrial capitalist phenom: developing an alter ego he calls “Mr. Brainwash,” who slickly deploys the street art system in a scheme to mint millions overnight.

(Side note: I say “slickly deploys,” but one of the facts the documentary makes hilariously clear is that Guerra is anything but slick. He’s this endearingly inarticulate, possibly kind of dimwitted, organization-challenged geek, basically. In other words, there’s no Evil Genius at work here. Or is there? This is one of the more fun implicit questions the film poses.)

Reviewing the film, a lot of critics have raised the question of whether this is all a monstrous hoax engineered by Banksy. The events in the film – including Mr. Brainwash’s LA art opening – are of course genuine, documented occurrences. But to what extent might Banksy have set up the rules of the game and forced the outcome? Lots of fun speculation to be had there.

If the documentary ended up simply asking “What is art?” it would have been a let-down. (Don’t get me wrong. It gets asked. Warhol comes up more than once.) A more interesting question is, “What is Thierry Guerra’s / Mr. Brainwash’s artistic masterwork?” Is it the footage? The anti-anti-capitalist art opening? The documentary itself, and the worlds it contains?

By the way, Mr. Brainwash lives.

The photos at The Big Picture are always stunning, but these pictures of Mount St. Helens are, I think, especially so. Sometimes it feels like we’re living in an age of one ecological disaster after another, and then it’s always instructive to remember the sheer, uncanny, unearthly power of these things. (It helps to have a great Mirah song for your soundtrack.)

I love constellations. Therefore, I love this post from Liz Danzico. It’s got me thinking: Isn’t the spangling of stars in the sky just basically random noise onto which we’ve projected patterns and then stories? And if that’s been successful—and it toootally has—doesn’t it imply that you could do the same with just about any kind of random noise? What sort of weird wacky stuff could you spread across your desk to tell stories with?

IDEA

• Instead of endlessly moaning about the supposed lack of serendipity on the internet, why can’t we try new ways to automate it?

STORIES

• When I started college, you could watch Simpsons reruns for 90 minutes straight. The dorms picked up two different Fox channels that syndicated the show; one played it at 6 and 7, the other at 6 and 6:30. So if you were watching at 6, you could also pick which episode you wanted to watch. Sometimes, if both weren’t that interesting, or if you’d seen them recently, we’d just cut out for dinner and pick up the later episode. Usually, that wasn’t a problem; the Simpsons had been on for nine seasons, and nearly every episode was a classic.
• If The Simpsons didn’t work, you could watch Law & Order on A&E. Or Bravo. Or TNT. Or Lifetime. I may be misremembering all of the channels the show was on at once, but there’s a reason why people (like, say, writers on The Simpsons) would joke about watching 14 straight hours of Law & Order on basic cable. The show was on a lot. And again, it hadn’t been on for twenty years with multiple spinoffs yet. Not every episode was great, but every episode was classic Law & Order, usually better casual dramatic entertainment than 90% of what was on then, let alone now.
• If neither The Simpsons nor Law & Order were available, you could always watch The Shawshank Redemption. ALWAYS. I’ve seen this movie at least fifty times; I’ve probably seen it from-the-beginning, not-edited-for-TV once or twice.
• Have you ever noticed what PBS does during pledge season, at least every other year? They play Ken Burns’s The Civil War. Or some other crazy-ass, awesome, twenty-year-old documentary or costume drama series. And I watch it. Randomly, in pieces, over and over again.

IDEAS

• When people talk about serendipity, they’re not always talking about discovering something that’s totally brand-new. In fact, I’d hazard that they’re USUALLY talking about randomly unearthing something that’s comforting and familiar.
• This is ten times more true with television.
• But it’s true in other media, too. People like being able to browse through their own physical book and music collections, because you never know what might suddenly force itself upon you. The real anti-serendipitous edge to social networks like Facebook isn’t that they don’t introduce us to anyone new; it’s that they eliminate the unexpected meeting-up with a friend or former classmate. You don’t get to catch up because you’ve never fully lost touch.

PITCH

• You actually can’t watch really old episodes of The Simpsons or Law & Order online. They have the new shows on Hulu and NBC.com and whatnot, but the syndication is a completely different deal. This saddens me.
• Watching a syndicated Simpsons or Law & Order rerun isn’t actually random. It’s chance, which is different. Why not make it actually random?
• This is Showroulette. You pick a show — let’s say that every show’s gotta have enough episodes to be in syndication, and only the backlist shows are available. Save the new ones for your running-show website — and you get a random episode.
• This is the genius part, at least for me. Say you don’t like the episode you got. (I mean, sometimes Law & Order kinda stunk.) You can change it out for a different show, also picked at random. But every time you switch, you’ve got to watch an ad.
• There are ads for the act breaks, too. Here, though, you can switch to a different episode without starting over – kinda like flipping the channel.

Come on! Tell me you wouldn’t try this! Tell me that 10% of you wouldn’t become obsessed with it.

Tell me there’s a better way to sell ads for older shows in syndication. Tell me there’s a better way to make a little more money off of long-running TV series without cannibalizing DVD sales. Tell me why this wouldn’t actually be better for most casual TV-watching (i.e., 90% of TV-watching) than any other online TV.

Tell me it wouldn’t be better to spin to a random episode of Soap or Hill Street Blues or Star Trek or The Bernie Mac Show than some random dude or chick or cat who might not even want to chat with you.

But mostly I want you to tell me ways to make this idea better. Or bigger. Or, just, more.