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Monday, April 30, 2012

My War: A Girls Recap

April 30th, 2012Top Story

My War: A Girls Recap

By John Cook

My War: A Girls RecapThe appropriate response to Girls, a television program about whiteness, Twitter, and the irreducible sexual magnetism of abusive men, is to drown your mobile phone in the bathtub. But you need to call your mother, and today is the 21st anniversary of Nirvana signing to Geffen, so here's a recap.

The only opinion on Episode Three of Girls that really matters is that of Henry Rollins, who wrote sang of the show in 1981:

Understand we're fighting a war we can't win
They hate us, we hate them
We can't win, no way

We open with Brian Williams' daughter talking to her boyfriend, who has shaved his head in solidarity with a co-worker suffering from cancer which is such a pussy move because this dude is just a pussy with a vagina just like a girl, Brian Williams' daughter telegraphs facially.

Laurie Simmons' daughter dresses up like an 11-year-old hooker to go have sex with her woodworking actor, who is ravenous and manly and has pectoral muscles.

The next morning, Laurie Simmons' daughter gets a call from her gynecologist informing her that, like 50% of sexually active adults, she has contracted genital human papillomavirus. She accuses the woodworking actor of giving it to her. "Hold your roll!" he says. She holds it.

Someone says, "Oh yeah, have fun. Go Tweet that."

Laurie Simmons' daughter calls Brian Williams' daughter to tell her the terrible news about contracting the most commonly sexually transmitted virus on the planet. "I kind of can't believe that I'm saying this, but I have HPV, so."

Brian Williams' daughter cries. What if Laurie Simmons' daughter becomes barren on account of having contracted the most commonly sexually transmitted virus on the planet? It's all so unfair that Laurie Simmons' daughter, of all people, would contract a disease that one out of every two sexually active human beings will contract at some point in their lives.

Meanwhile, the Drummer from Bad Company's daughter has a babysitting gig. She is looking after the daughters of a documentary filmmaker. They are named Beatrix and Lola. Lola has written a novel about poverty, death, and AA.

OK HERE WE GO KIDS.

Brian Williams' daughter goes to an art party. She meets an artist. His name is Boothe Jonathan. Boothe Jonathan is small and dresses like one of the Small Faces circa 1965. But he is a man! Brian Williams' daughter uptightly tells him not to smoke, because that's just how uptight she is. Boothe Jonathan says—and I want to be perfectly clear here that this is a direct and 100% accurate quote from the television program Girls on HBO—"I want you to know, the first time I fuck you, I might scare you a little, because I'm a man. And I know how to do things." Then Boothe Jonathan walks away. BOOM. Skrillex.

And this is the part where Brian Williams' daughter, a character in a "sly," "brave," and "radical" television program on HBO called Girls, slyly bravely radically runs to the nearest bathroom to fingerbang herself while grabbing her stomach and making a face like she has to poop. In the bathroom of an art party. Because some guy just told her that he was going to fuck her until it scared her. By us, for us.

So that's all you really need to know about Episode Three of Girls. There is an amusing scene where Laurie Simmons' daughter confronts her college boyfriend about giving her HPV, only to find out that he is gay, and goes through an increasingly humiliating and hostile debriefing about the truth of their relationship until he ends the conversation by saying "It was nice to see you. Your dad is gay." But then Laurie Simmons' daughter sits down to DRAMATICALLY WRITE SOMETHING ON TWITTER and dances to that fucking Robyn song by herself until a freshly self-fingerbanged Brian Williams' daughter comes home and they say "Yo girl!" to each other, urbanly, and dance together, just two girls making their way in the big city.

Watch this space for next week's recap of Girls.

Last week's Girls recap: 'I Don't Want A Baby That Looks Like That'

Image by Jim Cooke

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What Your Pronouns Say About You (and Power)

April 30th, 2012Top Story

What Your Pronouns Say About You (and Power)

By Katie J.M. Baker

What Your Pronouns Say About You (and Power) When you talk to someone for the first time, either in a professional, social, or potentially date-y situation, it's easy to pay attention to the proper nouns peppered throughout your discussion — pop culture references, mutual friends, the places where you grew up or went to college. But can you remember how many times you said "I" as opposed to "You"? Probably not. That's why psychologist James Pennebaker is so interested in function words, or "filler words," the ones we don't think about, such as The, This, Through, I, And, An, There, and That; they're practically invisible to us when we're in the moment or replaying conversations through our head, but they connect our sentences, and therefore act as a barometer of how comfortable we feel around each other. After studying pronouns for decades, Pannebaker believes it's possible to predict future romances and analyze power dynamics based on those tiny words. And I can't remember the last time I was so fascinated by a linguistic study.

So what do pronouns tell us about our love lives? Well, it's all about how we subconsciously mimic the way other people speak when we're interested in them. Pennebaker and his team recorded and transcribed hundreds of speed date conversations, then fed those interactions into a "Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count" program along with information about how people thought their dates went. He told NPR that humans automatically use language in the same way when they're into each other:

"The more similar [they were] across all of these function words, the higher the probability that [they] would go on a date in a speed dating context," Pennebaker says. "And this is even cooler: We can even look at ... a young dating couple... [and] the more similar [they] are ... using this language style matching metric, the more likely [they] will still be dating three months from now."

Whenever I spend a lot of time around someone — boyfriend, platonic friend, whomever — I can't help mimicking their cadence and picking up their slang, and I've always been really self-conscious about it; am I not fully-formed enough to retain my own manner of speaking? But now I know I'm just really into them!

But even more interesting to me is Pennebaker's research on power dynamics — he thinks it's possible to tell who has a higher social status or holds the power in any situation based on who uses the word "I" more often. You'd think it would be the person who thinks he's more important, but it turns out it's actually the person who feels more insecure. When we're fixated on how we're coming across, our language reflects our self-consciousness. Pennebaker said he was shocked when he realized that even he acts differently depending on who he's talking to; for example, here's how he corresponded with a young student:

Dear Dr. Pennebaker:

I was part of your Introductory Psychology class last semester. I have enjoyed your lectures and I've learned so much. I received an email from you about doing some research with you. Would there be a time for me to come by and talk about this?

Pam

Note how many times she uses "I" or "me," as opposed to Pennebaker:

Dear Pam -

This would be great. This week isn't good because of a trip. How about next Tuesday between 9 and 10:30. It will be good to see you.

Jamie Pennebaker

Now look at his emails back and forth with a "famous professor":

Dear Famous Professor:

The reason I'm writing is that I'm helping to put together a conference on [a particular topic]. I have been contacting a large group of people and many have specifically asked if you were attending. I would absolutely love it if you could come... I really hope you can make it.

Jamie Pennebaker

Now he's the one talking about himself! And here's the professor's response:

Dear Jamie -
Good to hear from you. Congratulations on the conference. The idea of a reunion is a nice one ...and the conference idea will provide us with a semi-formal way of catching up with one another's current research... Isn't there any way to get the university to dig up a few thousand dollars to defray travel expenses for the conference?

With all best regards,

Famous Professor

There are some fun tools on Pennebaker's website, like a service that analyzes your tweets — apparently, I'm very upbeat but also very worried, and luckily "average" when it comes to "Spacy/Valley girl" — and an exercise where you can copy/paste emails or chats and get a Language Style Matching (LSM) score — the more that the two people are paying attention to each other in their interaction, the higher the LSM. (Remember "Love Calculator"? It's totally like that, but mature.) First, I put in an email exchange I had with a younger girl who asked me about going into journalism after she graduated. We scored a .74, which is below average — most LSM scores range between .75 and .95, with an average around .84. Next, I entered in a Gchat conversation I had with my best friend; we scored an .89, which is above average.

The other day my friend told me she thinks that people who say they're not good at remembering names are so concerned with how they come off in social situations that they fail to pay attention to their surroundings. I'm horrible at name recall, and this article futher convinced me that it's probably because I think too much about myself when I meet someone for the first time. Pennebaker doesn't think we can use his research to change ourselves — "The words reflect who we are more than drive who we are," he told NPR — and I would feel like a wannabe pickup artist if I started constantly mimicking other people, but I doubt I'll ever write a professional email again without thinking about how much I use the word "I," and I feel like I might pay more attention to the way I talk about myself when I'm meeting people for the first time. Wait, I just said "I" like fifteen times. Okay, starting now!

To Predict Dating Success, The Secret's In The Pronouns [NPR]

Image via olly/Shutterstock.

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Top 10 Albums Every Self-Respecting Science Fiction Fan Should Own

April 30th, 2012Top Story

Top 10 Albums Every Self-Respecting Science Fiction Fan Should Own

By Cyriaque Lamar and Charlie Jane Anders

Top 10 Albums Every Self-Respecting Science Fiction Fan Should OwnScience fiction changed music. And music saved science fiction. Most of our favorite flights of fancy and epic adventures are bound up in our minds with amazing musical scores, or epic theme songs. But some of the greatest pieces of music ever created were also inspired by science fiction and fantasy.

Over the past week, we've counted down the 100 albums that every science fiction and fantasy fan should listen to. And now, here it is: the top 10 albums that genre lovers should already adore.

Click to view 10. Daft Punk - Discovery (2001)
You know an album's audio magic when basically every damn song could carry its own single. With this shiny, spacey hour of disco nouveau, the DJ duo of Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo cemented their personas as night-clubbing robots. This music is so addictive it will close out every Sweet 16 for the next billion or so years, until the Sun's rising temperature turns our planet into a desiccated hellhole. Hopefully humanity will be jamming across the stars by then, not unlike the aliens from Leiji Matsumoto's anime adaptation of Discovery, Interstella 5555. (And for more Daftness, their Alive 2007 live album also slices and dices the best parts of their robo-inclined 2005 LP Human After All.) - Cyriaque Lamar

Click to view 9. Vangelis - Albedo 0.39 (1976)
We adore electronic pioneer Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou's work on 1975's Heaven and Hell (which gave us the theme to Cosmos) and the Blade Runner soundtrack, but this cosmic concept album makes our minds to turn to Carl Sagan, on the sheer force of "Pulstar" and "Alpha" alone. The title track is also a suitable proxy for a piece of disembodied alien AI floating by, shouting factoids in our planet's general direction. - CL

Click to view 8. Radiohead - OK Computer (1997)
Even before they name-dropped The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and gave Bob Dylan an extraterrestrial veneer, Radiohead had already written history's greatest dystopian prom song. But when OK Computer came out, its (now-iconic) brand of pre-millennial malaise was a shocker — nobody expected this sort of album from that one-hit-wonder band who sang "Creep." Steeped in themes of technology-driven alienation and consumerism gone amok, OK Computer is the wail of a civilization that has yet to evolve the psychic organs to keep up with its own progress. Waiting for the Singularity sucks, but at least this album will commiserate with you in the meantime. - CL

Click to view 7. Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon (1973)
The record that launched a thousand laser planetarium shows, it's way easier to sync up Dark Side with the stellar flickers of the countryside night sky than The Wizard of Oz. After all, this loopy prog rock classic was written to organically represent the passage of life, from the inexorable march of time to the vicissitudes of the economy to the, hey, is that the International Space Station? Nope, just my flashlight. Whoa. Where was I? Oh right, The Wall. It's. Far. Out. - CL

Click to view 6. Kraftwerk - The Man-Machine (1978)
The truth is, we could populate half of this final ten with Kraftwerk albums — thanks to immortal tracks about radioactivity, synthetic romance, living mannequins, and the technological marvel that is the German highway system — but we're going with this particular cyborg-and-futureplex-tinged masterpiece due to our self-imposed rules. This Düsseldorf troupe has put an indelible robotic mark on the past four decades of music history, laying the groundwork for everything from synthpop to techno to hip-hop. If you require proof, here's six hours' worth. - CL

Click to view 5. Parliament - Mothership Connection (1975)
This album defined a whole generation of science fiction funkateers, along with its sequel The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein. This is like the greatest jazz party album about flying up to a giant mothership in space you'll ever hear, featuring insane Fred Wesley horn charts, Bernie Worrell synthesizers and the tightest band on Earth in full swing. Two years before every other R&B band started doing Star Wars/Close Encounters spoofs, Parliament was pouring its heart and soul into begging the Mothership to swing down and let us all ride. They even built an actual working Mothership, to land on stage during concerts. (See video.) This is one of those albums where you still hear freaky, fascinating new stuff on your thousandth listen, but be warned — you'll find yourself quoting the album's many catch phrases to your bewildered friends and coworkers. — Charlie Jane Anders

Click to view 4. Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of the War of the Worlds (1978)
Next to Orson Welles' famous radio broadcast, no other audio phenomenon has done so much to dramatize H.G. Wells' famous novel for mass audiences. Wayne's exciting, bouncy version is still being performed as a stage show today. The incredibly intense voiceover by Richard Burton perfectly complements the fuzzed-out guitar and driving rhythms, especially when the Martians actually show up and start slaughtering everybody with their heat rays. And then the synthesizers blare into eerie life. It could all be unbelievably goofy, if it wasn't so horrifying and spellbinding. Sealing the deal, the whole thing is gorgeously illustrated by some of the coolest science fiction artists of the time, including Roger Dean. - CJA

Click to view 3. Rush — 2112 (1976)
Rush is one of those 1970s bands whose proggy sound and fantasy/scifi lyrics appealed to Tolkien fans and Star Wars lovers alike. One side of this album is devoted to the tale of a dystopian future ruled by "the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx," whose "great computers fill the hallowed halls." The priests' symbol is the glowing red star on the album cover (which became a famous piece of Rush iconography). Basically this is one of the original scifi prog rock concept album moments, and to enjoy it you'll need to take out your irony earbuds and put on your earnest puffy headphones. — Annalee Newitz

Click to view 2. Janelle Monae - the ArchAndroid (2010)
Janelle Monae is one of the freshest musical voices to come along in years. In an era when everybody from Kanye West to Lady Gaga is invoking science-fictional themes, Monae still has a unique vantage point, a focus on the rights and subjectivity of posthumans, whom others seek to turn into objects. This album, with its themes of android liberation, manages to cover a ton of musical styles, from classical to classic R&B, while defying all of our preconceptions about gender and race. It's joyful and amazing and the music you'll dance to when the Singularity happens. Read our interview with Monae here. — CJA

Click to view 1. David Bowie — The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972)
There was never really much debate about who would get the top spot — more about which album. Space Oddity? The Man Who Sold The World? But really, Ziggy Stardust is the album where Bowie creates his most complete science fictional, mind-expanding transformation. It's full of sadness and androgyny and friskiness and apocalyptic passion. Starting with the announcement that the Earth is ending in just five years, Bowie's masterpiece takes us through soul love and extraterrestrial salvation, but it all leads to self-destruction, long before the Earth is gone. The apocalypse, aliens, and a rock star who soars too high and then crashes to Earth — in most people's hands, this would be another zany rock opera. In Bowie's, though, it becomes one of the most thrilling albums ever made. — CJA

Further reading:
100 Albums Every Science Fiction and Fantasy Fan Should Listen To: 11-30
100 Albums Every Science Fiction and Fantasy Fan Should Listen To: 31-50
100 Albums Every Science Fiction and Fantasy Fan Should Listen To: 51-70,
100 Albums Every Science Fiction and Fantasy Fan Should Listen To: 71-100

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