ISA HOPKINS
// laugh-wrangler // idea-maker // community-builder //
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Too Much Information
- Born in Cleveland, raised in various Northeastern(ish) American cities, and educated at Caltech and Georgetown, Isa Hopkins is your typical half-Cuban (but pure awesome) writer-activist-comedian. A Bay Area resident since 2005, she loves tacos, In-N-Out Burger, and the city of Oakland.Isa is a co-founder and editor-at-large of the quarterly humor magazine HOBO PANCAKES, creator and host of the YO! Welcome to SCIENCE! podcast, and a founding member of the sketch comedy troupe Femikaze. She worked as a correspondent and writer for VidSF and has performed stand-up comedy in clubs, bars, and laundromats across the country. Her writing has appeared in The Molotov Cocktail, Gadling, AOL Travel News, RustWire, and Grist, and she previously ran the website Totally Kickass Parties.Isa is also a two-term Americorps member, with Habitat for Humanity and, later, Rebuilding Together. She is easily romanced by well-constructed jokes, a cultural appreciation of the Rust Belt, and any references to Jane Jacobs.
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Posts
- Jan 12, 12
So, at long last: my final post on “Buffy”. (Posts one, two, and three, for those who need a refresher.)
Before delving into any of the show’s politics, this much needs to be said: season seven — the show’s last — is terrible. Not just mediocre, or bad, but truly, genuinely shit-tastic, such that any greater point is undercut by the horribly contrived narrative mechanics. To wit:
– Caleb, evil preacher and agent of the First Evil, has super-strength enough that in Buffy & Co.’s first battle against him, he kills several potential slayers, gouges out Xander’s eye, and neither Faith nor Buffy is able to inflict any injury against him. But after Buffy is cast out of her house, she returns to Caleb’s lair, where she defeats him by… running really fast. No, seriously, she outruns him, in what might well be the most cartoonish moment of the entire series.
– When the potential slayers (and Buffy’s friends) vote her out of her leadership role, choosing Faith instead, Faith acts reasonably, listens to input, and takes decisive action, but then OH NO A BOMB!!!! Of course. Because nobody else but Buffy can be the leader, for any reason, even valid ones. BUFFY 4EVA!!!
– Buffy finally kills Caleb using some super-special, mystical axe, the origins of which are never really explained (someone starts to explain it, but then oops she dies mid-sentence!) — but from what little we learn, it has no relevance to any slayer-mythology that has been presented previously, and is pretty much the definition of deus ex machina.
– Or, wait, there’s an ever better example! In the show’s finale, Angel shows up from LA with a mystical amulet, and although his presence is a relief — he is pretty much the sole character in the entire season to whom Buffy does not condescend — his purpose is ludicrous. See, Angel’s got some mystical amulet to deliver that just might help save the world! Good thing, too, since everything else we’ve heard all season long is that there is no way, ever, in the history of the universe, to defeat the First Evil. Pretty handy for this amulet to show up, huh?
– What I remembered most clearly from the finale was Buffy (and Faith) sharing their Slayer strength: using Willow’s mad witch skills and the power of the Magic Axe, Buffy and Faith break down the traditional line of secession and allow all potential slayers to participate fully in Slayer-dom. It’s a great idea, and there’s a sappy but sweet montage of girls around the world awakening to this newfound strength, and if this were the solution to defeat the First Evil it would have some real poetic resonance. Except… it doesn’t do a goddamn thing. No-longer-potential slayers still get killed by the vampiric agents of the First, and what ultimately saves the day — by turning the town of Sunnydale into a giant crater — is that stupid goddamn amulet (worn by Spike, not Angel, because even the insufferable merit redemption). The slayer-share concept is so cool, and so beautiful, and such a perfect ending to the series, but as played out it is also useless, and that’s a damn shame.
– Also, Buffy gets mortally stabbed in the abdomen, but then picks herself up and manages to parkour her ass across the entire rooftop landscape of Sunnydale, outrunning the formation of the aforementioned crater. What? Yes, Slayers are supposed to heal faster than the average joe, but they’re not immortal, and this is just lazy and stupid.
And why such gymnastics of plotting? To foreground Buffy, at all times, and at no cost to the character. See, when Buffy gets voted out of leadership, the motivations of the other characters barely matter: she’s the hero, and so even voted out she’ll defeat Caleb while silly Faith is leading her charges into bombs. At no point does Buffy have to seriously confront the idea that she doesn’t always know best; at most she grapples with messaging.
This is a shame, because what made the show great in its earlier years was its acknowledgement of everyone’s strengths, demonstrated best in the conclusion to Season Four — in order to defeat the mongrel monster Adam, Willow (“the spirit”), Xander (“the heart”), and Giles (“the head”) perform a spell to combine all of their powers and act through Buffy (“the hand”). The idea that Buffy can be enriched by others’ contributions, or that she has anything to learn from others, is rejected in season seven, and to disastrous (and humorless) effect.
Seriously, you guys, “Buffy” was a great show for a while, but its last season sucks.
- Jan 10, 12
I have been meaning for several weeks now to post my final piece about “Buffy” (which I finished re-watching), but I was sick over the holidays and, since my return to Oakland, I have been busy BLOWING UP ALL OVER THE INTERWEBS.
(Well, sort of.)
I wrote this piece about Cleveland for RustWire, which turned into this piece about second-tier cities for Grist, which got picked up by the Internet’s most famous half-Cuban blogger (FOR NOW!), Matt Yglesias, here.
And now I’ve come back to my own blog, just to brag about it.
- Dec 19, 11
In spite of record unemployment, many employers in the US have been making the claim for the past few years that, in fact, their lack of hiring is due not to their own unwillingness to hand out jobs like candy — no, it’s because we feeble employees just aren’t up to snuff! Kevin Drum puts the lie to this particular line. For anyone who has recently heard their boss utter the phrase “It’s a buyer’s market out there” when discussing the decision to let a competent employee go so that they might hire someone with more skills and training (but for the same wage as the last guy), well, it’s pretty satisfying to see this one shot down.
- Dec 17, 11
Isa: please help me to be less of a jackass to the dude i am trying to bang. PLEASE.
Kelly: Do you have a photo of the young man in question? And/or a brief description of his interests?
(Isa sends a link to the Facebook page of the gentleman under discussion.)
Isa: also now i feel like a stalker for looking up those photos. is that more or less normal than punching somebody?
Kelly: Internet stalking is now an acceptable part of the dating process. Punching’s uses in the dating environment have been eroding for years. You’re fine.
- Dec 15, 11
It is comforting to believe that we, through our sheer will, could transcend these bindings — to believe that if we were slaves, our indomitable courage would have made us Frederick Douglass, if we were slave masters our keen morality would have made us Bobby Carter, that were we poor and black our sense of Protestant industry would be a mighty power sending gang leaders, gang members, hunger, depression and sickle cell into flight. We flatter ourselves, not out of malice, but out of instinct.
Still, we are, in the main, ordinary people living in plush times. We are smart enough to get by, responsible enough to raise a couple of kids, thrifty to sock away for a vacation, and industrious enough to keep the lights on. We like our cars. We love a good cheeseburger. We’d die without air-conditioning. In the great mass of humanity that’s ever lived, we are distinguished only by our creature comforts, but on the whole, mediocre.That mediocrity is oft-exemplified by the claim that though we are unremarkable in this easy world, something about enslavement, degradation and poverty would make us exemplary. We can barely throw a left hook–but surely we would have beaten Mike Tyson.-TNC (of course) - Nov 30, 11
From deep, deep in my Gchat archives:
me: remember how i almost lived in that socialist puppetry theater collective?!?!
Ruth: yes!me: and then i totally just ditched them??Ruth: DID IT BURN DOWNyes!me: THEY FOUND ME ON MYSPACE!!!!! - Nov 29, 11
The problems of democracy, like the problems of monogamy, are very real. In championing both (one for myself, the other for my country) I’ve never done so out of sense of ultimate solutions, but out of a sense that each presents a better set of problems.
- Nov 26, 11
Generally, I’m a big fan of dialog — although I may disagree with a position, and vociferously so, there’s not a lot that someone can say that will cause me to shut down listening to that person altogether, particularly if they’ve already proven themselves to be a fairly rigid and compassionate thinker on the whole. But this week, a feminist blogger who I had followed regularly committed the highest act of intellectual abuse in my world, and has been banished forever from my Google Reader. What could she possibly have done, you might wonder?
It’s my own personal version of an Unforgivable Curse, and it’s called the Feminist Dismissal of Dana Scully.
You see, what this blogger was particularly upset about was that during a PBS series about archetypes on television, Scully was chosen as the only female profiled in-depth for the “Crusader” episode. Other notable Crusaders included the racist alcoholic Sipowycz (from “NYPD Blue”); Jack Bauer, “24″‘s war criminal of a protagonist; Omar, the street vigilante of “The Wire”; and Dexter. The serial killer. From “Dexter.” Amongst such company you might have thought Scully the single unequivocal hero, but not to the feminist blogger in question, who dismissed her as a “baby-obsessed killjoy,” a description which only makes sense if you are talking about the way Scully was written in MacSpooky fanfic. (That is the probably the nerdiest reference I will ever make on this blog, and also the most obscure. If you really want to encounter fanfic at all of its most awful cliches, google it. Preferably while drunk.)
In the actual show, Scully did make occasional reference to a vague desire for a family and a “normal” adult life, in season 4′s “Home” and season 6′s “Dreamland”; she stated explicitly in season 5′s “Christmas Carol” that she wanted a child, in the context of expressing her resentment that the choice had been taken from her as a result of her abduction (and medical experimentation upon) by a cabal of old white dudes. Saying once in seven years that she wanted a kid — CLEARLY THE WOMAN CAN THINK OF NOTHING BUT THE BABIES! As for the “killjoy” charge, well, if being a rational, intelligent, highly competent professional who demands proof from one’s (possibly) clinically insane partner before leaping to belief about aliens — and if expressing that sentiment most commonly with big words and sarcasm — if that’s being a killjoy, well, then I have no idea what words even mean anymore.
Here’s the thing: there are problematic elements of “The X-Files”‘s treatment of its female characters. Scully was awesome, but we might wonder why she had to be the secondary lead; why there were so few female regulars relative to the number of dudes; and why so many of the women we met in individual episodes were victims. We might even ask of the show’s fans why the second movie, which places Scully’s psychological journey at the forefront (ahead of Mulder’s), was so roundly panned — OH WAIT I ALREADY HAVE A MULTI-PAGE ESSAY EXPLORING THAT SAME QUESTION, written last year, as-yet unpublished by any of the feminist publications to which it has been submitted because apparently, they like things like this better:
“8 Obnoxious Cliches About Men, Women, & Sex in Otherwise Good TV Shows”
This piece asks some good questions, particularly about abortion — no primetime American series has shown a character having an abortion on television in something like thirty years (Ruthie, I trust you can fact-check me here, and/or excerpt your thesis at any length below), and that just doesn’t pass the smell test. But chiding “Parks & Recreation” for April and Andy’s wedding? Claiming that “the climax of the show centers around Leslie giving up her cherished feminist beliefs about delaying marriage until maturity and joining in a sentimental celebration of two very immature people making an important decision they’re clearly not ready for”?
What Leslie gives up on is the idea that she can prevent two young people from living their own lives. Whether she still considers the marriage to be a mistake or not isn’t really the issue — the issue is that Leslie finally recognizes that however much she scolds, April and Andy are going to get married regardless, and that while their decision might be stupid it isn’t dangerous, and people need to make their own mistakes. (The essay also bizarrely claims that this season “doesn’t allow that the characters could ever be really wrong in their decisions,” even though the two biggest story arcs have both been about complete failure — Leslie’s failure to end her relationship with Ben, and the total implosion of Tom Haverford’s entrepreneurial dreams with Entertainment 720.)
Similarly, the essay’s discussion of Britta declaring her love for Jeff on “Community” is odd, in that the moment itself is excoriated, but the resolution is praised — even though one of Britta’s key character traits is her awkwardness and compulsive need to have an opinion about everything, making her ill-advised declaration well in keeping with things the character would actually do.
The final element of the essay which really chapped my hide came in its discussion of “Veronica Mars”, where some very, very valid points are raised, but only after this introduction:
“The first two seasons of “Veronica Mars” nicely helped feminist TV fans minimize the withdrawal symptoms from the end of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” The show followed a teenage girl who chooses to live a life of a private investigator instead of simply being content with high school and college. Sure, Veronica could never fully compete with Buffy in a one-on-one competition of witty, badass ladies with surprising vulnerabilities, but as a 21st-century Nancy Drew, she still provided the audience with mysteries to solve and a fun and clever heroine to root for.”
I haven’t posted about “Buffy” in a while, because Season 7 is SO horrifically bad that it is taking me forever to get through (seriously, the last episode I saw had me wishing I could pull a Xander and get my eye stabbed out, just so I could stop watching), but: can we stop with the feminist fellating of “Buffy” already? (The cunnilinguing? Does that word even have a gerund form?) Buffy was a cool character, and the universe of “Buffy” was populated with other cool lady characters, but the story went to great, contortionist lengths to show that Buffy was Better Than Everyone even when that meant punishing the other cool lady characters for precisely the traits which made them cool — and that, my friends, is not cool. Buffy also operated in a nearly all-white landscape (Leslie Knope is very white, but every other regular female character on “Parks & Recreation” is a woman of color), dominated by rigid beauty standards (how many of Buffy’s witty quips are predicated on physical judgments? A lot.), and she had her power — her much-celebrated feminist superpower — handed to her by a group of old white dudes.
In the PBS episode which prompted the Feminist Dismissal of Dana Scully discussed above, the blogger initially expressed her contempt at the idea of Scully-as-Crusader with anger that Buffy hadn’t been chosen instead. But Buffy is problematic too, not the least because the entire series is based on the idea that she requires (male-gifted) mystical superpowers to be a badass. Veronica Mars? Dana Scully? Leslie Knope? These characters are awesome without any magical assistance. Take away Buffy’s divine right, and she’d get her ass handed to her by any one of them. Plus, all three could outsmart her in any conditions.
Here’s what I’m saying: I dig feminism. I dig “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” But the idea that “Buffy” is the only correct feminist show or heroine seems disingenuous at best and dangerous at worst — making a size-00 blonde girl with mystical superpowers a feminist totem is like calling Superman a serious role model. Yes, women have every right to be portrayed just as improbably as male superheroes, but making that some kind of standard — against which any other female character will fall short — is just as limiting as all the previous rules that have held for female characters throughout TV’s short history.
TV is awesome. It can tell a lot of stories. There is room for all kinds of awesome ladies on it.
- Nov 22, 11
“I think, though, that the failure of responsibility was linked to a failure of agency—the individual’s ability to affect the course of events. An enormous number of people today feel as if they have very little economic agency in their own lives: often, they are right to feel that. The decisions that affect their fates are taken far above their heads, and often aren’t conscious decisions at all, so much as they are the operation of large economic forces over which they have no control—impersonal forces whose effects are felt in directly personal ways.
It is difficult to feel responsible when you have no agency. Many of the people who did stupid things—who did things on that 0–10 scale—did so because everyone around them was doing them too, and because loud voices were telling them to carry on…
The collective momentum of a culture is, for more or less everybody more or less all of the time, overwhelming.”
-John Lanchester, “How We Were All Misled,” New York Review of Books
The author is talking explicitly about debt, but the sentiment is relevant to so much more.
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Tweets
- by far the scariest kind of person to see on public transit is the middle-aged white dude with a trench coat and a ponytail.
- dear pittsburgh: except for the snow & the strange omnipresence of phil collins on every radio station, you made for a pretty kickass week.
- oh... oops. @mlroach your story sounds much, much less embarrassing than my story.Jan 15, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- oooh @mlroach are we sharing getting-kicked-out stories? once, i was asked to leave the vietnam war memorial...Jan 15, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- YEAH I GOT PJs WITH RAW FISH ON THEM CAN YOU DEAL WITH THAT?!?! http://t.co/Bj2XKFZM (probably you can, but i'm still gonna talk about it.)
- Under pressure from no one, I decided to bring back Hot Men & Breakfast Foods: http://t.co/ApUq9Lwi
- People behind me at the bus stop are confused about why the bus is late... Newbies are so cute!
- @LindsayMcNamara Thanks, glad you enjoyed... and good luck!
- Here is a thing that I wrote for @grist, which also got checked by @mattyglesias: http://t.co/Nyd53szzJan 10, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- also, i made this: http://t.co/ST4wcPLt (and y'all should listen. and LEARN SOMETHING!)
- i've decided: 2012 is gonna be the year when i finally live the dream. the dream of being as awesome as balki bartokomous.
- if only i could tap my sinuses like a vermont maple tree. i promise i would not try to sell the product.
- first a uti, then a broken toe, now a head cold: this year, i decided to celebrate the holiday known as 'sickmas'.
- why x-files is the greatest show ever: in their 'very special' xmas episode, the 2 leads shoot each other. and then argue about it. awesome.
- i have done more cross-multiplying today than at any point since leaving high school. next up: driving donuts in a school parking lot!
- dear church billboard: "he made it personal" sounds less jesus-y, & more liam-neeson-revenge-movie-y.
- coughing all day long. starting to think this whole "running is good for you" thing is just a big prank from the "medical establishment".
- my debit card has been de-magnetized. it now serves as the world's most frustrating coaster.
- you know it's a good high-five when it ends with somebody getting hit in the face. (and by "somebody", i mean "me.")
- i'll have the "i am unimpressed by your efforts to scapegoat labor law", please: http://t.co/lfJLjFQM
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