Mixed Media

Armitage Gone! performs Three Theories

They call her the Punk Ballerina. For her 1978 choreographic debut, Karole Armitage, who once danced with the Ballet Theater of Geneva and later with modern dance luminary Merce Cunningham, shocked the classical vocabulary by setting ballet to punk music. Her website says Armitage is still "dedicated to redefining the boundaries and perceptions of contemporary dance." She maintains that "music is her script." 

I was therefore a little mind-boggled by Three Theories, the piece that her company, Armitage Gone!, just performed in San Francisco following shows in Chicago and New York. According to the program notes, the piece "looks at the poetry underlying the pillars of 20th century theoretical physics: Einstein's General Theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics and String Theory." It goes on to explain that the choreography is derived from "scientific principles" and creates dance that, I kid you not, "reflect[s] the points of view held by physicists about the fundamental nature of the universe."

While anyone could be forgiven for failing to illuminate the theory of everything with dance, you'd think that at the very least Armitage would push some of those pesky boundaries—or even elevate the music beyond just an arbitrary metronome for the steps.

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Karen Roach/Shutterstock

With bullying in the news this week after the Washington Post's investigation into Mitt Romney's private school years (more on this here, here, and here), I polled the Mother Jones newsroom for their favorite long-form journalism on bullying. For more long-form picks from the MoJo staff check out our shiny new page on longreads.com. For more long stories from the pages of Mother Jones, check out our longreads archive. And, of course, if you're not following @longreads and @motherjones on Twitter yet, get on that. Have a great weekend, readers!

"What Really Happened to Phoebe Prince?" | Emily Bazelon |  Slate | July 2010

Bazelon has owned the bully beat over at Slate the last few years and this deeply reported and brave series pushed back on the initial narrative of the Phoebe Prince suicide. 

"I'm upset and angry that bullying wasn't taken more seriously here before this," says Nina, almost 16, who was taunted for being a "poseur" by a group of girls in middle school. (I have changed the names of kids who talked to me but have not already been identified in the press.) But Phoebe's death "has been turned into this Lifetime movie plot. It's so unlike what actually happened."

Recommended by Mother Jones co-editor Monika Bauerlein.
 

Queer and Loathing: Does the Foster Care System Bully Gay Kids? | Jason Cherkis | Mother Jones | November 2010

The crisis facing gay foster kids told through the story of Kenneth Jones.

As a gay foster child in Washington, DC, Kenneth spent most of his weekends alone. By the summer of 2009, the isolation had gotten so bad that he'd started calling his cell-phone carrier's help line with imaginary complaints, just so he could vent to somebody about something. He would even text himself encouraging messages, like "Good job," or "Damn you so strong."

Recommended by senior editor Michael Mechanic.

"How to Bully Children" | Sarah Miller | The Awl | March 2012

A hilarious and moving account of the writer's experience sitting in on an anti-bullying class for 5th graders.

In an attempt to convey that I have literally nothing to do with the world of punishment and rewards that they currently inhabit, I add, out of laziness more than anything else, "I'm totally cool." This is a mistake.

Recommended by creative director Tim J Luddy and social media intern Nicole Pasulka.
 

"A Boy's Life: For Matthew Shepard's Killers, What Does it Take to Pass as a Man?" | JoAnn Wypijewski | Harper's | September 1999

Recommended by co-editor Clara Jeffery.
 

"The Teen Suicide Epidemic in Michele Bachmann's District" | Stephanie Mencimer | Mother Jones | July 2011

Two years. Nine suicides. Why critics blame the congresswoman's anti-gay allies for contributing to a mental health crisis.

The first was TJ. Then came Samantha, Aaron, Nick, and Kevin. Over the past two years, a total of nine teenagers have committed suicide in a Minnesota school district represented by Rep. Michele Bachmann—the latest in May—and many more students have attempted to take their lives. State public health officials have labeled the area a "suicide contagion area" because of the unusually high death rate.

Some of the victims were gay, or perceived to be by their classmates, and many were reportedly bullied. And the anti-gay activists who are some of the congresswoman's closest allies stand accused of blocking an effective response to the crisis and fostering a climate of intolerance that allowed bullying to flourish. Bachmann, meanwhile, has been uncharacteristically silent on the tragic deaths that have roiled her district—including the high school that she attended.

Recommended by online editor Sam Baldwin.

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Even as popular culture becomes increasingly geekified, it's still fairly easy to find examples of mainstream cultural criticism that curls its lip in disgust at anything vaguely associated with fantasy or science fiction.

New Yorker film critic Richard Brody's latest effort, however, represents a welcome exception to that snobbish trend. Brody largely grasps the real politics behind the latest geek triumph The Avengers, and behind much of the post-9/11 appropriation of geek culture in blockbuster films:

"The Avengers" is an impressive feat of cinematic engineering, a work of prodigious skill and efficiency that carries out its cartoonish mission while addressing graver concerns—the construction of a post-9/11 revenge fantasy that takes place against the backdrop of unpopular foreign wars.

The war of the worlds is ignited by the rebellion of Loki against Thor— the wrathful perverter of a distantly alien religion that preaches peace with Earth. The story builds to an attack by the upstart and his myrmidons that lays waste to a swath of streets in a heavily trafficked Manhattan business district. The preface to the attack is a midair hijacking. The supergroup’s climactic, heroic last stand takes the form of legitimate defense, harking back to Second World War movies (earlier on, Captain America even has an interlude in Stuttgart, accompanied by the water-lapping rhythms of Schubert's great "Rosamunde" quartet, that alludes to the war against Hitler); and a commando mission against the enemy's mother ship resembles nothing so much as the daring assault on Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad complex.

Brody is probably reaching with that Abbotabad comparison, but his observation about The Avengers as a kind of post-9/11 "revenge fantasy" could be applied to the superhero film genre writ large. Conservatives embraced Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy as the invasion of Iraq went south because imagining that the war in Iraq was an existential battle between the forces of light and darkness helped them avoid the reality that it wasn't. Superhero films provide a similar reassurance for a nation that, more than a decade after 9/11, still seems willing to forfeit just about any freedom in exchange for the feeling of safety. Superhero flicks often tell us that matters of good and evil are relatively simple to discern, and that in the end, someone is always going to save us. The closest we get to moral ambiguity in The Avengers is the Hulk, whose uncontrollable, monstrous instincts nudge the audience ever so slightly into considering the danger of an angry, omnipotent child.  

As Chris Hayes wrote shortly after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, "In the wake of 9/11, the phrase 'bad guys' infiltrated our national conversation, and its continued prevalence serves as a testament to the ways the trauma has warped our national character."

The phrase is self-consciously playful but also insidious. An adult who invokes it is expressing a layered set of propositions. What "bad guys" says, roughly, is this: "I'm an adult who has considered the nature of the moral universe we live in and concluded that it really is black and white. I've decided that my earliest, most childlike conception of heroes and villains is indeed the accurate one, which only later came to be occluded by nuance and wishy-washy, bleeding-heart self-doubt. I reject that more complicated, mature conception as false. I embrace the child's vision of the world."

With films like The Avengers, we get all the unambiguously evil "bad guys" we want, and we get to see them lose, over and over again. That attitude would be fine if we were able to leave it in the movie theater along with our 3-D glasses. But most of us don't. We take it with us whenever we think about our wars, whether literal,  cultural, or metaphorical. We frequently "embrace the child's vision of the world," because it's easier to want to keep fighting wars that way. There's only one thing to do with "bad guys," after all: beat them.

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