On Monday, December 12, it was hard for a Californian to escape talk of the (at the time) impending execution of Stanley "Tookie" Williams. The story was so prevalent on people’s minds that it even entered the conversation at my office’s year-end party, despite the desire to maintain a festive mood. The next day, I got an e-mail reminding me that the due date for my GLAAD media award nomination scores was coming up, prompting me to purchase that copy of Capote in Kansas that I wanted to include in my evaluations. That turned out to be a moment of synchronicity where current events gave greater resonance to art.

I believe that, in considering the death penalty, there are two horrors to confront. One is the horror of the crime involved, the other horror is to face the idea of a killing being committed in your name. Capote in Kansas depicts Truman Capote researching his "non-fiction novel" In Cold Blood and shows Capote struggling to face those two horrors for the sake of his art.

When Capote first arrives in Kansas, his attitude is flippant and haughty; he seems proud at the disdain he holds for the residents of this small town. The advice of Harper Lee sets him straight as he realizes that he has to understand these Kansans if he is to write about the crime properly.

As his research progresses, we see him connect with the city’s residents and conversing with the ghostly Nancy Mae Clutter, one of the young victims. As he gets to know the victim, Capote also gets to know one of the killers, Perry Smith, finding a connection with the criminal due to similar childhood experiences. Capote in Kansas depicts the strenuous intellectual journey that he takes in researching In Cold Blood, one where he finds the humanity in all of his book’s players and finds himself drained for facing parts of human nature that civilized society works to avoid.

After In Cold Blood, Turman Capote didn’t finish any full length novels, an indicator — according to Capote in Kansas — of how incredibly drained the experience was. What he worked so hard to achieve, however, is a lasting tome that demonstrated Capote’s painful realization of the fallible humanity in all of In Cold Blood’s subjects.

Supplemental tags: Capote in Kansas, Truman Capote

Okay, reading this humorous post about potential Microsoft MP3 players leaves me wondering why I haven’t seen a merging of the iPod with a heart rate monitor. Considering how many of the people I know use their iPod to work out with, that seems as obvious a merging of technologies as an iTunes capable cell phone… then again, I do live in the fitness conscious Bay Area (even if I don’t look like I live in a particularly fitness conscious part of the country) so perhaps my perceptions are skewed.

Okay, it’s a double entry this time for the 52 Crushes feature to play catchup (who knew finding pictures of hottie celebs would turn out to be a challenge?

I thought of Paul Rudd this week as it was announced that he’s joining the cast of Reno 911: Miami, a theatrical spin-off of the Comedy Central series. I remember going to see The Object of My Affection (a painful movie that never manages to make the characters — who are just as bad in the book — likable) hoping to see him and Tim Daly smooching. It was sadly unsurprising that we saw more his gay character getting steamy with Jennifer Aniston than any guys in the cast.

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Part two of my playing catchup on the objectifying men focus is new Footballers Wives cast member Ben Price, who plays the randy and bisexual Conrad Gates. Having included a character from the beginning who reminded viewers of Victoria Adams Beckham (aka Posh Spice), the show gets around to adding a character that invokes Mister Posh, David Beckham. Price doesn’t really fit my usual type, but there’s something about how he carries himself on the show that’s so incredibly sexy.

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I usually don’t write memorial remembrances out of fear that an unintentional message may be taken when I don’t say something, but Butler was a powerful writer who’s work had a lasting effect on me.

Butler was an African-American woman who wrote science-fiction in ways that mined the genre for its potential. She used speculative worlds to explore bigotry, classism and humanity’s failings. Her skill with words made her work powerfully dramatic and her plots were compelling.

I was initially exposed to Butler’s work through my old reading group. That was one of the months when our pick was a general selection from the author’s body of work. I picked up her first published work, Patternmaster. Set in a future where some people have developed psychic abilities, the series’ main conflict is a battle to sit at the top of the highly hierarchical society. Her next novel, Mind of My Mind, was a prequel looking at how Patternmaster’s world came to be. Mind of My Mind’s most powerful moment comes soon after the newly-awakened, African-American psychics meet up. When one of them hears the others refer to people without mental powers referred to as "mutes" she quickly objects, "Don’t you realize what you’ve just done? You’ve created a new kind of n****r!" (Sigh, I gave good thought about not censoring that word out of respect to Butler’s work — and her use of it is completely fitting for what she’s trying to say in the Patternmaster books — but then the though of what kind of Google searches might be brought here if I didn’t censor it got me to rethink that.)

Her Parable books are the ones I remember best. Set in the most horrifically-believable post-apocalyptic world I’ve encountered, (one where environmental erosion collapses the American economy), Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents are books that are powerfully spiritual, in spite of viewing humanity at its worst.

Parable of the Sower is a sorrowful tale of doing what you have to do in order to survive while keeping hold of your faith. It is a very bleak tale — Butler pulls no punches in her portrait of this grim world and does not cop out. The follow up novel, Parable of the Talents, sets its religious protagonist against a fundamentalist politician.

Octavia Butler was a writer who demonstrated the potential of science fiction to speak about the nature of humanity without sacrificing an interesting story. While her voice will be missed, her contributions to science fiction are a contribution to the genre that will be remembered long after her demise.

Thanks to Mely for letting me know.

Hopefully, back on Sunday:

• Heh, heh… Comic book titles Mike Sterling doesn’t want to see

• Ewww! My loyalty to Golden Gate Meat Company strenghtens after learning how some supermarkets are packing meat to keep its "fresh" red color longer than it would naturally.

• Hm, Springfield:Shelbyville::San Francisco:Highland?

• Okay, DC, you’ve figured out a way to get me to check out the One Year Later JSA.

• Calista Flockhart playing Rachel Griffiths’ sister? Okay, I am so checking out Brothers & Sisters if it goes to series.

• Okay, this got a few giggles out of me… a Toy Story 2/Requiem for a Dream mash-up trailer. The musical montage at the end is really great.

UGO takes a look back at the history of Sonic the Hedgehog (via Joystiq) taking a year-by-year look at the SEGA mascot’s rise, fall and… well, truthfully I’m still not feeling a comeback.

The look back fills a lot of nostalgia for me, who really enjoyed the first few Sonic games — it took me a while to recall the time travel aspect of Sonic CD (wow, I remember the days when "It’s a Sonic the Hedgehog game — but with CD quality sound!" was pretty damn exciting… then again I’d probably get excited at the mention of a new Sonic game that didn’t try so hard to be so modern, like the current releases) but now I remember how that was a cool idea that stopped me from finishing the game.

The recap notes that Sonic’s downfall came with SEGA’s doomed Saturn and Dreamcast systems (which was probably doomed by lackluster support for the SEGA CD and 32X add-ons for the Genesis). At that point Sonic went from being the mascot for a gaming console to just another video game franchise.

Meanwhile, another Joystiq post, asking (again) about what kind of games women enjoy gets me to reflect on what the early Sonic games did so well:

The characteristics of
female-friendly games include: easy to learn but hard to excel at; easy to pick up (i.e. can be played interstitially);
mentally rewarding.

Generally, these are qualities I seek out in games, qualities that seem to be getting rarer with time.

"Easy to learn, but hard to excel at" was something the first Sonic games did quite well — the entry barrier wasn’t high, but there was a lot to discover and the process was very rewarding. The journey to finding Sonic’s secrets was as rewarding as the prize. I find myself thinking that "They just don’t make games like that anymore."

Sigh, I really need to go buy one of those Sonic collections out there…

The Project Runway auctions are finally finished (well, with the outfits, at least, I don’t feel like bothering with the sketches they’re currently auctioning) and that means its time to see who’s outfits had the most allure… sorta. Today I ask who brought the highest bids in total, next week I’ll take a look at the average sale.

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It turned out that my third sampling of Brit soap Footballers’ Wives would be the time I finally get what the hype was all about. Suddenly, I’m addicted.

The show does soapy scandal with a flair and zeal that American producers — who are, in the end, ruled by the focus group and a reliance on sticking to established formulas (including formulas formed by breaking away from other shows’ formulas) — couldn’t ever accomplish. Enough happens in the second season’s eight episodes to fill twenty-six episodes of Lost or Desperate Housewives but with fewer episodes to fill, the show ends up jumping from scandal to scandal with aplomb. The writers are quite adept with cliffhangers, often ending commercial breaks on the kind of high note that most shows save for the episodes end — only on Footballers’ Wives there’s often an even higher note waiting to shock before the closing credits roll.

Footballers’ Wives is also adept at handling its genre’s cliches. A storyline focusing on a baby’s complicated lineage (one of the most mocked traits of the genre) keeps focused on the character conflicts it generates, understanding that a complex family tree is hardly a shocking development nowadays. Even better, when its discovered that baby was born intersexed, the development skips the shocked reactions and quickly moves onto the conflicts that follow.

The most tantalizing tidbit about Footballers’ Wives, though is the credit that appears at the show’s beginning. For some reason, the show’s creators get a “Devised by” credit. Now that’s a great title — instead of creating characters and storylines, they’re attributes as having devised the whole thing… it seems a fitting bit of wordplay.

Ragnell is spot-on in identifying the biggest challenge in writing Wonder Woman:

Diana’s problem isn’t her gender, it’s that she’s from an alien and ancient culture. Not simply in attitude and philosophy, but in the religion. I think that’s where it breaks down.

Most of the writers and editors (though not all, I’m sure) can be presumed to be from a monotheistic religious background. Supreme Deity, pitch perfect in all ways, representing the good and only the good in the universe, that’s the measure of divinity. Most of their readers are from this background too. From this background, Diana’s Pantheon seems like a kindergarten class with cosmic power. Hardly respectable or acceptable in their view of divinity (even though it’s supremely unfair to judge a foreign religion in terms of your own). Divinity is good, and anything that’s bad is not divine, after all. And if anyone finds the behavior of the Greek Pantheon acceptable in polite society, they need serious counseling. It’s bad sometimes, therefore it can’t really be divine.

Ragnell hits on what I usually find lacking when I check out Wonder Woman, something Ragnell believes (and I agree) Greg Rucka managed quite successfully. From there, Ragnell  continues to break down the way Diana’s Pantheon has been handled through various creative teams. It’s a compelling assessment of the franchise.

Until Rucka’s run, I’ve always had problems with the post-Crisis Wonder Woman (yes, even the Perez run that everybody else loves), issues I could never fully articulate. Ragnell’s analysis gives me an interesting angle to consider.