Further Musings on the Media: Typologising the Media

There are several types of media. The first type is corporate and commercial. They are owned and run by for profit corporations. Their reason to be is to sell "copy", and by selling you copy they also, because they are commerical, sell you tootpaste and lifestyles the things that allow them to sell copy hence their sensationalism: did you know Marion Morrison wore a toupee and had sex with n, and may have even smoked some Mary Jane?

The US's CBS, NBC, NY Times, Washington Post, Canada's CTV and the Globe and Mail, and Britain's ITV and The Times (owned by oligarch Rupert Murdoch), are examples of corporate media. There are variations in them given the political contexts in which they operate. I think ITV, British commercial TV, still fills 50 minutes of a 60 minute time slot (instead of the 42 minutes on US commercial stations, something that points up the power of corporations and the nature of the commercial media in the US) because of government regulation. With the rise of right wing populist Toryism in the UK, however, regulation has been relaxed and ITV, which initially had something like fourteen somewhat autonomous regional bodies within itself (example: London Weekend TV), is now controlled by two.

The second type of media is public and corporate. They are also supported by advertising revenue in the form of ads at the beginning and ends of programmes. They do, however, tend to be much less sensationalist in their selective journalism and hence often subscribe to parochial ideologies of journalistic practise. They are, in other words, embedded and inscribed within, thanks to sociallsation, certain ideological grounded "realities".

America's PBS and NPR, Britain's the BBC, Canada's the CBC, Australia's ABC, and Denmark's DR, are examples of public corporate media. Some corporate media, like PBS, gets private funding via ads at the beginning and ends of TV programmes. The CBC, in addition to government funding, has advertising. It has a mandate to emphasise Canadian content hence Heartland and Murdoch Mysteries and Schiitts Creek. The BBC is funded a licence fee, that the Tories want to do away with, and has no commercials. All that said, the Beeb has to cowtow to the oligarchic powers that be thanks to their control of the extent or even the existence of the licence fee. Needless to say, the Beeb has been one of the most significant media for years producing things like Doctor Who, Monty Python's Flying Circus, and Fawlty Towers.

A third form of media is the sensationalist and targeted type of media. They are interested in selling product (political and ideological product rather than toothpaste) to an ideologically and sometimes ethnically segmented audience. They tend to influence true believers and their viewing numbers are exaggerated. Like the sensationalist corporate media the politically and ideologically correct media mirrors the lowest common denominator. Additionally, they don't create divisions, they mirror them. Fox and MSNBC are examples of corporate segmented politically and ideologically correct media. UK Murdoch owned The Sun, a host of Murdoch media in Australia, and, though not as much as it used to be Canada's National Post, are examples of politically and ideologically correct newspapers.

A last form of media is independent media which is not corporate. It is widely present on the internet but not widely read. Thanks to their limited sensationalism, their dissident nature (making them more factually accurate), and the fact that Mericans don't read much, independent media are at a significant disadvantage in the early twenty-first century "media market".

Examples of independent media include The Guardian (UK), which has its own endowment fund. It, however, as bureaucracies tend to do, has become more like other media over time (isomorphism). The Sanctuary for Independent Media in Albany, Substack, which Chris Hedges and Glenn Greenwald now write for, are examples of independent, independent of corporate and corporate political control. They function largely because of contributions and, presumably, their reporting is sensitive to funding realities.

These are all ideal type forms of the media. Ideal types, a method developed by Max Weber, is a helpful analytical tool that allows one to break down and define similarities and differences in bureaucracies, such as the media, across space and time. In practise, however, as The Guardian points up, there is much similarity between some independent media forms and the corporate and corporate political media forms because they often share the same ideologically constructed understandings of how to do journalism and they exist within and are affected by market and funding realities. Additionally, we should never forget that ITV, because of the Beeb and its monopoly until the 1950s, produced and produces high quality very intellectually oriented shows like Inspector Morse and Lewis.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: More Musings on YouTube Music Criticism

One of the unfortunate aspects of the brave new digital world and its brave new digital media like YouTube, at least for me, is that it seems to provide a forum for those who fancy themselves film, television, or music critics but who are actually apologists and polemicists of the I like it or I don't like it school of "criticism". Ultimately, in other words, YouTube's critics aren't that different from another species of "critic" one finds in multitudes on YouTube, a group of YouTubers who initially seem different from the critics, reactors. 

There are, of course, differences in both quality and quantity when it comes to critics and reactors on YouTube. Some reactors and critics seem, at least to me, better than others in that some of them actually do pay attention to what they are watching and listening to and some, if generally only a few, do actually grasp the various levels of meaning in what they are watching or listening to. SoFieReacts reviews of Buffy, for instance, are, to me, quite impressive. SoFieReacts reactions consistently reveal a reactor/critic who grasps what is going on in a very complex television show like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a show that works on several different levels, and who can explain quite succinctly what she sees and hears going on in the show. This makes these reactions much more interesting to me than the usual reactions one finds on YouTube, reactions which seem to me to be YouTube's simulation of Gilligan's Island.

My take on most reactions on YouTube doesn't mean that there isn't anything I find interesting about the mass of reactions on YouTube. Most of the mid quality reactors on YouTube are interesting less because of their specific reactions and more because of the nature of reactions themselves. By watching Buffy reactors react to Buffy, for instance, the viewer is able to hold a kind of mirror up to oneself, a mirror that allows one to recall what it was like to see a specific episode of Buffy for the very first time in his or her viewing lives.

YouTube critics, a least hypothetically are a somewhat different species from YouTube reactors. Many of them, well at least the best of them, take the music they are listening to seriously and try to, if not always successfully, analyse it. Here is the rub, however. The problem is that even the best and brightest of these critics seem to me to be latter day versions of critics like Pauline Kael, Lester Bangs, and Robert Christgau from the 1960s and 1970s. I really don't like, for intellectual reasons, the autobiographical and personal form of criticism that characterises the "criticism" of Kael, Bangs, and Christgau as it has always seemed to me a type of criticism that is little more than a form of criticism grounded in the assumption that you deal listener should like what I like because I am Pauline Kael, Lester Bangs, and Robert Christgau, and I am oh so witty and oh so cool.

There are two Kael, Bangs, and Christgau style critics who ply their critical trade on YouTube that I have problems with. I have already discussed my problems with one of them, the two bright College StudentsYouTubers who call themselves Alex and Andy. In this brief essay I want to talk about another clearly bright critic who I sometimes have problems with, JustJP. Now don't get me wrong, I like JustJP and I find almost all his critical reviews interesting.  He is clearly bright, clearly attentive to the music he is listening to, and he often listens to more challenging and less popular genres of music than do mainstream YouTube critics who wouldn't touch this music with one of those proverbial ten foot poles. Additionally, he often brings a degree of cultural capital and of music appreciation to his YouTube videos, something I really appreciate, There are, however, other moments when I  just don't think JustJP really gets it. For instance, in his review of Yes's "Cans and Brahms" and "We Have Heaven", JustJP doesn't seem to fully grasp the intentions and functions of psychedelic head music like that of the British band Yes.

Yes, of course, arose in a popular music scene in which psychedelic music was prominent. There was, for example and perhaps most prominently in this genre, The Beatles "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "I am the Walrus", both songs which experimented with sound, music, and words.  JustJP doesn't seem to get the fact that some late 1960s and and early 1970s psychedelic music was experimental, as was the era, itself, that the psychedelic music of the era, music like "We Have Heaven", played with soundscapes in such a way as to try to expand the minds of its listeners, and that when one listens to "We Have Heaven", Jon Anderson's piece on the seminal Yes album Fragile from 1971, one has to let this consciousness expanding song and its play with words and sound wash over you. When one does, I think, and let me emphasise the I think here since ultimately beauty and value is in the socialised eyes of the beholder, it is absolutely clear how astounding this head song is.

My sense is that many young people, including JustJP and the two college students, Alex and Andy, come from younger birth cohorts and as a consequence of historical distance and a lack of education in music appreciation, simply don't grasp, intellectually or emotionally, how psychedelic art music works and how it functions. This is a pity since, after all, if we want to appreciate music (or anything else for that matter), we have to kind of go native and try to understand the context in which the music was written and the meanings the writers and musicians were trying to convey to the listener, before we can go all me, me, me loved it, couldn't get into it, or hated it on its arse.
 

Musings on Bliblical Studies, Ancient Near Eastern Studies, Classical Studies, Social Theory, and Comparative History

 

When I first matriculated at college I specialised in Biblical Studies. As a consequence of specialising in Biblical Studies I inevitably developed an interest in Ancient Near Eastern Studies and in Classical Civilisation Studies, the study of Ancient Greece and Rome. I developed an interest, in other words, in the Mediterranean World because it was this Mediterranean world that was clearly the near or close context in which the Hebrew and Jewish Tanakh came to be.

It quickly became clear to me, as it did to others of my Biblical and Ancient Studies colleagues at the time, as it clearly did to earlier students of modern Biblical Studies, that to understand and comprehend the Tanakh one had to grasp the cultural, political, demographic, and economic contexts of the Ancient Near East and the Mediterranean world of which it was a part. It quickly became apparent to me, for example, that Ancient Judea, when it was conquered by the Persians in 538 BCE, was impacted extensively by imperial Persian culture and that the nascent Judaism that developed out of the Ancient Hebrew faith around this time was impacted by the Persian Zoroastrian faith, particularly its dualistic monotheism, its manicheaniam, and its apocalypticism. All of these, of course, became important and central parts of the Jewish faith that developed after the Persian conquest of Judea, the Hellenistic conquest of Judea, and the Roman conquest of Judea. One can readily see these Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman influences not only in the Masoretic Tanakh but in the so-called Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha and in the "scriptures" of other Hellenistic and Roman syncretic religious groups like the Gnostics, the devotees of Mithraism, and the devotees of Early Christianity including Paul of Tarsus.

It wasn't only about the broader Mediterranean contexts of Ancient Israel and later Judea that I learned about. Sometime in the 1970s and 1980s I learned, about Alexander the Great's excursions into Persia and India. I learned about the trade routes between the Mediterranean, India, and China including the famous Silk Road. I learned about the trading and cultural centre of Dilmun in parts of what are today Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. I learned, in other words, that there were economic, political, cultural, and demographic contacts between the Mediterranean, the Indus Valley, and China, and that there was a kind of large-scale geographic area characterised by economic, political, and meaning culture interactions before there was modern and postmodern globalisation, a fact seemingly forgotten by many of the analysts of globalism and the polemists and apologists for globalisation these days.

Eventually, though I don't know exactly when this happened--sometime in the late 1970s and 1980s, I suspect--I learned that there was a period some scholars referred to as the axial age. According to scholars like Karl Jaspers the axial age ran from the 8th century BCE to the 3rd century BCE (and perhaps beyond to Platonism and neo-Platonism). The axial age, I learned, was the era of Zoroaster, the age of samsara and karma, the era of the Buddha, the age of Jainism, the era of the Hebrew Nevi'im or Prophets (that sect within early Judaism that appealed to me), the age of Confucius, the era of the mysterious Lao-tse, and the age of the Greek Presocratics, Socrates, Plato (who, so the argument goes, was impacted by Indus Valley meanings systems), and Aristotle. The axial age was an era of cultural interaction, culture change, and cultural hybridity, a hybridity that is reflected in, for example, Mediterranean Mithraism and Early Christianity in the Hellenistic and Roman eras. It was also an era that some have seen as proto-modern or postmodern given its diversity, its syncretism, and its critique of animism, animatism, and theism, a kind of proto-secularism.

I didn't stick with Biblical and Mediterranean Studies. After a brief fling with the idea of becoming a rabbi, hardly a realistic profession for a misanthropic introvert like me, I moved beyond Biblical and Ancient Studies. I learned a lot from my engagement with Biblical Studies, however. Biblical Studies forced me to ask historical, ethnological, and sociological questions about the origins of the Hebrew and Jewish Bible and the Christian Bible and those questions, in turn, led me to hermeneutics. I will never forget sitting in James Ackerman's seminar on the Tanakh book of Exodus at Indiana University in Bloomington, and reflecting on the many interpretations of that book that revealed themselves in that class of non-Jewish Jews like me, Reform Jews, high church Christians, and evangelical Christians. I was fascinated by the fact that those brought up in largely the same America could interpret the text of Exodus in such a variety of different ways, interpretations I tied, at the time, to the various religious and non-religious cultures of the participants in this seminar. Biblical hermeneutics, in turn, led me to Max Weber, one of the fathers of hermeneutic social theory, and to social theory in general. I was particularly thrilled by and enthralled with the semiological theory and practise and structuralist theory and practise that were at the height of their influence and impact when I was an undergraduate in university. This, in turn, heightened my interest in cultural anthropology--which I had already done extensive course work in--and in sociology and history. All these, in turn, foregrounded for me the necessity of comparative study and research because, as I learned, you can't understand Ancient Israel and Judea without understanding their historical contexts and you can't understand a British settler society like the United States without comparing and contrasting it with other British settler societies like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. 

I learned a lot of things from all these intellectual experiences. One of the things I learned from all this social theorising and comparative research was that notions such as exceptionalism, be it Jewish, Chinese, American, Canadian, Australian, or Pakeha exceptionalism, are more ideologies, are more the products of culture than they are a representation of "reality". Humans do like to fetishise and universalise after all, something that should be apparent to any of those embedded in the examined life in this brave new digital delusional world.

 

The Books of My Life: The Existential Joss Whedon

 

One can, I think, distinguish three broad ideal type frames through which academics and intellectuals have interpreted and continue to interpret Joss Whedon's television programmes Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly. The first such approach, a cultural one, that I think we can isolate by analysing and systematising the hundreds of publications in Whedon Studies since 1997, the year Buffy began, is what might be called the mythological approach. This approach reads Buffy inductively and often through the lens of psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung's archetypal approach to myth, and, given its relevance to a fantasy superhero television show like Buffy, through Jung's follower Joseph Campbell's analysis of the universal archetype of the hero's journey. That this inductive approach is relevant to an understanding of the Buffyverse is clear since, as Buffy's creator Joss Whedon has noted on several occasions, the shows writers intentionally created a mythological world with a slayer, the one girl in all the world with the strength to fight vampires and demons, a hellmouth, and various and sundry types of demons, some of whom, like the Master in season one of Buffy, have their own systematised mythology and rituals, for cultural, explanatory, and motivational reasons.

A second approach that can be distinguished in scholarly approaches to the Buffyverse might be called the crystal ball approach. This approach to textual analysis is more deductive than the more inductive mythological approach, regardless of which mythological approach one utilises in order to explore the mythological level of the Buffyverse. Crystal ball textualism is a form of textualism, the analysis of a text, that deductively applies concepts like gender, ethnicity, and class to any "text", including the texts of Joss Whedon, because they are presumed and assumed to be universal and considered to often negatively impact a text, consciously or unconsciously. It is through this emphasis on concious and unconscious representations that crystal ball textualism links up with Freudianism and its later variants and it is because of this coding of a text in either positive or negative terms, depending on how a given text represents and portrays gender, ethnicity, and class, that crystal ball textualism links up with other sometimes if not always normative approaches to a text, such as post-1968 Marxism, feminism and feminist studies, and ethnic and racial studies.

A final approach to Whedon Studies, another cultural approach, might be called the social ethical approach. Like the mythological approach the social ethical mode of analysis is inductive since social ethics, and particularly its existentialist and Christian social ethical forms, have been present, as Joss Whedon has said on several occasions, in the Buffyverse from day one. In the two part "Welcome to the Hellmouth/The Harvest", for instance, our hero Buffy the vampire slayer has to make an ethical and moral choice and choose whether to become a slayer once again after the killing of a student by a vampire at Sunnydale High School, or stay retired, as she tells her watcher Giles she is in the first forty or so minutes of the episode. 

There is, by the way, a fourth approach to the texts of the Buffyverse, that of Deborah Thomas, one of the heirs of the Movie school of film criticism, a school that emphasised and emphasises the need for a close analysis of the mise-en-scene of a film in order to isolate a directors signature, in her superb monograph on Buffy entitled "Reading Buffy" in Close-Up 01 (London: Wallflower, 2006). Thomas's close narrative and mise-en-scene analysis of Buffy, however, seems to have had, sadly, only a very limited impact on Whedon Studies scholars who have followed in her wake which is why I don't think it merits inclusion with the mythological, crystal ball, and social ethical approaches to Joss Whedon. Still it is worth noting that David Lavery did engage in a bit of mise-en-scene criticism in his auteurist oriented biography of Joss Whedon, Joss Whedon, a Creative Portrait (London: Tauris, 2014), and most of the essays in Seven Seasons of Buffy (Dallas: Benbella, 2003) and Five Seasons of Angel (Dallas: Benbella, 2004) are focused on the narrative and character arcs of both of those shows.

As its title and subtitle indicates, the book The Existential Joss Whedon: Evil and Human Freedom in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly and Serenity (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007) by English Studies scholar J. Michael Richardson and philosphy professor J. Douglas Rabb, approaches Buffy and Angel, and, if in less compass, Firefly and its movie continuation Serenity, in social ethical terms. Like Gregory Stevenson's excellent Televised Morality: The Case of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Dallas: Hamilton Books, 2003) a text Richardson and Rabb reference on several occasions and disagree with on a few, Richardson and Rabb, rightly in my perspective, place an existentialist social ethics with an emphasis on the freedom of choice, a kind of beloved community, and an exemplary, though hardly infallible, moral guide at the heart of the work of Joss Whedon. Using episodes of Buffy and to a lesser extent Angel, and to an even lesser extent Firefly/Serenity, and case studies of characters in Buffy and Angel like Buffy, Willow, Xander, Faith, and Angel, Richardson and Rabb foreground the free moral choices our heroes sometimes fitfully make--some of them initially make the wrong choices and later make the right choices on their road to redemption--to fight the good fight against the real evil, the real never fully defeated evil, present in the Buffyverse, an ever present and never fully defeated evil that, is an external metaphor for our own internal struggles to make the right choices in our individual and interactional communtarian struggles with the demons and evil within us (a rather Niebuhrian and Yoderian perspective, it seems to me).

As was the case with Stevenson's book on the social ethics of the Buffyverse, I found Richardon's and Rabb's exploration of existentialist beloved community ethics in the work of Joss Whedon superb. It is grounded in sound textual exegesis, reasonable textual interpretations of the shows, and nicely reflects on the often breathtaking television shows Whedon created, shows that make one think not only about their narrative inventiveness, the outstanding acting in them, and their superb often produced on a shoestring mise-en-scene, but also about the non-paternalistic, non-authoritarian, and non-simplistic complex ethical messages Whedon wants use viewers to think about and reflect on. Highly recommended despite my not being sure if Richardson's and Rabb's attempt, drawing on Sartrean scholarship, to ground Whedon's social ethics in an embodied chosen community thus allowing them to escape the bogeyman of relativism--ethical relativism, of course, as opposed to descriptive and empirical relativism, which seems to me unassailable--really matters since humans are simultaneously irrational and rational and particular and global, and engage in all variety of cultural divination practises, some of them seemingly inconsistent with each other, including science and magic, all at the same time. If one prefers their social ethic universal it would seem to make more sense to me to ground them in an intellectual recognition of a common human ontology or a universal human beingness assuming, of course, that we can delineate a common set of criteria by which we can define a human as human or not.

The Fable of the Marching Morons

 

Once upon a time in a far away and magical land of beneficent aristocrats there lived a porcelain skinned and raven haired goobette called Eve. One night while home alone Eve tuned in her television set to one of the 300 same as they ever were and same as they always are channels that broadcast on the screens of the delighted subjects of the Kingdom of Evermore. That evening Eve watched a film called My Left Foot starring Daniel Day-Lewis, and an episode of the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer directed and written by Joss Whedon, the creator of the show, both of which, following the dictum of Oligarch Kings that ruled Evermore were broadcast in order to display for all Evermorons to see the ignorance, arrogance, and decedence of the demonic outside world. The next morning Eve, wrote a blog of no more than the 140 simple declarative characters--no more that 140 characters by divine command of the Kingdom's kind rulers--for Evermore's curated state blog, on "why" Daniel Day-Lewis was such a horrid (her words, my emphasis) actor and why Joss Whedon was such a horrible writer and director. In a later blog post Eve revealed that god had revealed to her what right acting, right writing, and right directing were one night while she was watching a docudrama on Elon Musk on the Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow Gospel of Wealth network.

Meanwhile a few cottages down the street from Eve's perfectly delightful pink cottage, there lived another porcelain skinned Evermoron in yet another of the little pink cottages that dotted the urban areas and rural landscape of the flat barren lands of Evermore named Adam. Though the flaxen haired and stern Adam had never been to college, had never studied "ancient" languages like Hebrew, koine Greek, or Aramaic, the languages in which the Evermore Bible were written in, and had only been somewhat sentient during his mandatory presence in the Kingdom's many civics classes over the years, Adam proclaimed, and proclaimed that he was sanctioned to do so by the kind oligarchs of Evermore, that he was not only an interpreter of holy writ, but that he was the interpreter of the Kingdom's holy writ as correctly handed down, of course, by Evermore's divinely inspired oligarchs. Like Eve, Adam discourses daily on the Kingdom's only blog, again in no more than 140 characters, on why the ramblings of eggheaded scholars from outside the Kingdom trained in Hebrew, Aramaic, common Greek, and Ancient Near Eastern history and culture are wrong and he is right. What need do I have of egghead scholarship, Adam contends again and again in his online discourses, when I have direct access to the timeless and spaceless words of the thus saith our Oligarchic Lords.

That evening as Eve and Adam sat at home they recited the Evermoron daily mantra of who needs acting experience or education, writing experience and education,  and education in general when we, as our divine benefactors have told us, are better actors, writers, and interpreters of sacred scripture than anyone else in the whole wide world because? As always they praised Jeh thirty-thee times before they climbed into bed.

One day a dark and dirty stranger in ragged clothes came to the hamlet of Bliss in which Eve and Adam lived. If Eve was such a specialist in the arts of acting and writing, she asked, why wasn't she in the employ of those who hired actors, writers, and directors? Why wasn't she, he queried, displaying for all the world to see how good acting, writing, and directing should be done? If Adam, she queried, was such a authoritative interpreter of holy writ why did he not know the divine languages in which the divine holy writ was written in or know anything about the contexts in which Jeh worked in order to reveal truth, right, and the Evermoron way to the world? And why, she asked, did both deny those who did each night before they snuggled into the comforts of their beds?

The inhabitants of the Kingdom of Evermore after listening to this clearly certifiable alien whose name was Clemens for a couple of days, rightly channelled what they heard and saw on the Kingdom's radio and television stations and as one and asked, hosanna, haysanna, sanna, sanna, why such an arrogant and ignorant stranger was ever allowed to enter the divine Kingdom of Evermore and sully its divine conformist ways in the first place and prayed that divine punishment be meted out to the deviant offender as recompense for what she had done. Hallelujah.

In the end, of course, Evermorons had nothing to worry about. Two days after the stranger's arrival the divine, beneficent, and paternalistic oligarchic doctrinal kings of the Kingdom did what they had to do: they took the madwoman into custody and burnt her at the stake, both figuratively and literally since that is the only way to snuff out and arrogant and ignorant soul of those who have the gall and audacity to ask critical questions about their holy and sacred best of all possible worlds. As for the punishment of the stranger, the subjects of the Kingdom felt no guilt and had no pangs of conscience whatsover after the divine judgement of the holy auto-da-fe. They found comfort in the soothing mantras of their divine leaders as relayed on their divine wirelss and television sets which proclaimed that as a holy and divine race they had every right do what they did to heretics like the stranger. And after all, as they all noted as one after hearing what their leaders had to say on the Kingdom's radio and television outlet outlets, there was a sign warning the stranger before she entered the Kingdom which read: "Check your demonic critical mind at the local law enforcement office door when you arrive lest you feel the hammer of the law come down upon your eggely weggely little noggins. And all the Doctrinal Kings' horses and all the Doctrinal Kings' men would never put eggely weggely back together again.

And so it goes...and so it goes...and so it goes...and so it goes...and where it's going some of us know...

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: An Open Letter to YouTube's Two College Students

 

I found your different reaction to this somewhat funky Grand Funk Railroad rocker "We're an American Band", which you liked, compared to the more traditional bluesy Grand Funk song "Inside Looking Out", which you were lukewarm about, interesting, fascinating, and quite revealing. It was almost as though you were talking about a different band in these two "reaction" videos made, no doubt, for money and profit. Commodify everything seems to be the mantra of the brave new digital age.

I have a lot of problems with your "approach' to popular music, one grounded, I think, ultimately in fetishisation and one which recapitulates traditional ahistorical fetishisations. I suspect I have particular problems with your reactions given, first that you are clearly bright, if a bit too pissed sometimes, and secondly because you claim to be college students though I really don't see what relevance that phrase has to do with any of your musical "criticism" on YouTube. Valid criticism, it seems to me, must do several things and, by and large, yours only kind of and fitfully does this. First, it must be grounded in empirical exegesis, in an analysis of text as it is and its contexts. Second, it can, if it must, be interpretive. One can interpret a book, film, television show, or a piece of music either more or less historically, socially, culturally, and reflexively. Finally, it can, if it wants to be, homiletic, it can preach about the merits or demerits of the music and the musicians who make a song. My problem with your approach is that the last, the homiletical level, seems to determine the hermeneutic and empirical levels, a kind of anti-science approach.

Exegetically, of course, one has to admit that, in this instance, GFR is, instrumentally, more than competent as were most rock bands of the era. Pop performers were and are a different beast. Secondly, interpretively one has to delineate the genre of music you are listening to, which you kind of did, if somewhat ahistorically. Speaking of history, one has to, of course, put music in historical context. If you want to, for example, compare GFR to Rush the only way you can do this validly (scholarly and intellectually speaking) is to compare this GFR song from the early 70s to a song from Rush's first album, which is late 70s, if memory serves. Comparing 70s GFR to 80s and 90s Rush is a problem that should be obvious to college students (or perhaps not) not only musically but in terms of technology, though ultimately that doesn't matter since one either likes (jouissance) a ditty and a band or not. By the way, you also have to compare this GFR song to others to get a sense of the bad and the genres they mine.

What one values and likes, of course, as empirical evidence makes clear, is, ultimately, in the socialised eyes of the beholder. If forced to choose this GFR song or a Zeppelin song, I would, at present go for the GFR "Inside Looking Out", with the understanding that I (subjective) find the blues way too repetitive and prefer the repetitiveness of pop to the formulaic simplicty of the blues. I find the blues in general, akin, in other words, to one of those Hollywood film ultra fantasy based bullshite blockbusters that dominate the corporate and propagandistic film world today today even though I appreciate what ZZ Top and Stevie Ray Vaughn (fellow Texans) did when they transformed and broadened the blues. Personally, I prefer, and I still do, the baroqueness of psychedelia and prog far to the blues of Led Zep, though I do like a few songs of theirs, those that are, not surprisingly, more proggy and folky (bog bless Sandy Denny). I find both of these musical forms much more interesting than the much less complex blues. But then I was more a Beatles guy, who were less bluesy than their contemporaries such as the Stones and the Animals and later proggy and folky Tull compared to their early bluesy stuff. A little bit of reflexivity is always worth thinking about when one is peddling one's critical wares.

It is clear to me that much of what passes for "criticism", a term I use loosely since your prefered form of criticism is inherently problematic and  way to ahistorical, theoretically simplistic, and methodologically problematic. It is essentially just about feelings and nothing more than feelings. Why, of course, one should give a fuck about what Lester Bangs or Robert Cristgau says about music--I never did--is a question worth asking and pondering given that such "criticism" is little more than ain't I cool pr bullshite. Film criticism of the era--I am thinking of Pauline Kael--is a similar form of "criticism", a "criticism" that is ultimately homiletical, that is ultimately of the I like it so it must be good because I am so fucking cool type of "criticism", a type of "criticism", of course, founded on mass fetishisation or the I am a god impulse so common among humans particularly in the Western world. I have always liked what I like and I have never given a fuck about what other or don't like because ultimately beauty is, as I recognised years ago, ultimately in the eye of the beholder and I have never given in to that corrosion of conformity, peer pressure. Hopefully, I am also reflexive enough to think about why I like what I like and the economic, political, cultural, geographic, and demographic forces that have helped construct why I like what I like.

The Books of My Life: Joss Whedon (Lavery)

Age, birth cohort, and culture matter. I know because I have lived through them ever since I was born. I was born in that primaeval era before Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977), that epoch before the triumph of the Hollywood mega science fiction, fantasy, comic book adolescent and arrested development superhero film that has become all the cultural and commodity aestheticism rage in the best of all possible media saturated worlds that we in the core nation world now live in. As a result of experiencing things like the assassination of John F. Kenndy, the invasion of the Beatles, the first James Bond film, the seemingly, at the time, endless Vietnam War,  and a time bound block of Saturday morning kiddie television programmes, my cultural life is different, from that of latter cohorts as is the social and cultural capital I have accrued and which is related to these cultural influences over the course of my life, because they have different if somewhat related historical experiences than me.

The media, particularly radio and television, were, of course, important in that bygone era of the early and middle 1960s just as they are today, though not to the same extent. At that time television, which was still somewhat in its infancy and was, at least for that metaphorical fifteen minutes, all the rage. My family, like most other families of the era I knew, had one television in the house. A few of my friends and acquaintances even had one of those newfangled technological marvels in their homes, the colour television. I still vaguely recall the day that I discovered colour TV thanks to a nearby neighbour whose family had one in their home. We kids, as I recall, stared in wonder at the colour pictures emanating from the television screen thinking all the while about how wonderful our world full of technological gadgets as it was, was. Interestingly, I can't recall when our house got its first colour television though I am almost certain that it was in the late sixties since my Dad worked for a division of the Dutch corporation Philips. As with other families at the time our television was a large and incredibly heavy box like thing that sat in the centre of the aptly named TV room of our house so all could see it from the couch that sat along one side of the TV room or from the floor, which was my preferred spatial mode of television watching. It was almost like going to temple or sitting in church.

Saturday morning, in particular, was an almost magical day in my house when it came to TV watching, something which was limited on other days by parental decree and by the realities of my daily schedule. Saturday, unlike other days, including Sunday, the day when the dreaded religious oriented programme dominated the morning schedules of television stations in Dallas, Texas, was a day in which one could escape, if briefly, from the mundanity and banality of "normal" everyday life with its endless cycle of get up, eat breakfast, go to school, eat school lunch, come home from school, eat dinner, play a bit, go to bed, and get up the next morning ready to do it all over again, again. While the parents slept well into Saturday morning, an escape for them from the "normal" routines of the work week, I escaped into Saturday morning cartoons like Mighty Mouse (1955-1967), Tom and Jerry (1965-1972), Underdog (1964-1973) along with the seemingly endless reruns of Little Rascals and the Three Stooges comedies. I watched them all with little sense of intellectual engagement. Instead I watched them because of the sense that I had that there really was nothing better to do on a Saturday morning, a feeling I suspect was common among many young people at the time. TV was, in other words, simply there.

Mighty Mouse, Tom and Jerry, Underdog, Spanky and the gang, and the Three Stooges weren't at the top of my list of favourite Saturday morning viewing fare. I preferred Looney Tunes in its various incarnations such as the Bugs Bunny Show (1960-2000), the Road Runner Show (1966-1973), and the Porky Pig Show (1967-1967). Why Looney Tunes? I suspect I was attracted and engaged by their parody and absurdity though I wouldn't have described it that way at the time. Given this, it should be easy to understand why I liked Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969-1974) and Doctor Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) and why I never got into later animated TV shows like Scooby-Doo, Where are You! (1969-1970), a show which I was already too old for by the time it debuted and which I found rather eh. I don't think that even cannabis, could I have gotten hold of some at the time, would have helped me enjoy this formulaic mystery oriented television programme that now has become legendary for later generations thanks to its perceived campy organish music and its perceived  stoner vibe. Shaggy in that show, of course, is an updated Maynard G. Krebs for the stoner age.

I also, of course, watched a bit of evening television now and again throughout my teen years, a bit being the operative phrase here since everyday life and my parents limiting the amount of prime time television I could watch came into play particularly on weekdays. I recall watching a bit of Batman (1966-1968), which had its fifteen minutes of fame on American television in the mid-sixties, less because I was a fan of comic book superheros and more because I became a fan of Julie Newmar, who played Catwoman in the show. I watched the Dick van Dyke Show (1961-1966) in reruns and liked it immensely, finding it unexpectedly literate and sometimes brilliant. I watched and liked It Takes a Thief (1968-1970). I was briefly taken in by those hippieish characters who were a bit older than me of the The Mod Squad (1968-1973), young people who looked like I wanted to look back then but couldn't since my parents and my school had a hair length "dress" code for males. I quickly outgrew that show, however, when I managed to see through its rather transparent consensus ideology message which attempted to make us viewers identify with angsty do goodish counterculturalists now working for the good and virtuous man, and for truth, justice, apple pie, Chevrolet, and the American way.

Television, while it was a part of my teenage years, never became the be all and end all of my teenage life. I "played", when ill health didn't intervene, with friends and acquaintances from the neighbourhood. I hiked along Five Mile Creek to the north of my neighbourhood and wandered through the woods near my house off of Blue Ridge Boulevard to the south east of my home. I was what might today a fan of some things, most of them unrelated to television. I read books, something that was becoming a central part of my life at the time. I worshipped the Dallas Cowboys every Sunday. After all, I lived in a state where football was and is the state religion football. The Cowboys made me suffer. I still remember the heartbreak I suffered when the Cowboys lost to Green Bay in the Ice Bowl. Eventually, my fanish devotion to the Cowboys, a fannish devotion that was coded as normal in the Dallas of my time cooled. Cowboy worship eventually proved evanescent though I do have to admit that I sometimes, if inattentively, still pay attention to how the Cowboys are doing and what was once heartbreak has turned to oh well. 

Even the Dallas Cowboys had to take a back seat to my real fanboy devotion of the era, however, the Beatles. I had been an avid fan of the Beatles since 1963 when my mum let me, after much pleading on my part, to buy me the newest Beatles album, the first Beatles album, Please Please Me (1963). Me and my friends spent hours listening to the Beatles, talking about the Beatles, who I loved though not to the point of blinding fanboy hero worship, trying to figure out what Beatles were trying to say to us, and talking about something we thought the Beatles were trying to talk to us about, the ever present war in Vietnam, which I grew to oppose and protest against. By the late 1960s the Beatles led me to other though not necessarily harder stuff particularly of progressive and pyschedelic variety. I fell in love with rock bands like King Crimson, whose In the Court of the Crimson King (1969) I heard for the first time on a contercultural FM station out of Arlington, Texas, The Moody Blues, and songs like "I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night", "Incence and Peppermints", and "Pictures of Matchstick Men". Compared to progressive and psychedilic music television mediocrities like Gilligan's Island (1964-1967), The Brady Bunch (1969-1974), and even Star Trek (1966-1969), which tried, at least, to be intelligent and literate in that Wagon Train (1957-1965) sort of way, never stood a chance though, I must admit that, it was sometimes pleasant to see the beautiful people of Hollywood on display on the small screen.

One could also, of course, see the beautiful people of Hollywood on the big screen. Throughout the 1960s I became more and more interested in another communications medium that is chock full of Hollywoodish beautiful people, film. My father introduced me to the films of Alfred Hitchcock in 1964 and I was both fascinated by them and came to adore them. From that devotion an interest in film scholarship developed. Robin Wood's book on Hitchcock was the first book of film criticism I ever read. Hitchcock's films were not the only ones that fascinated and intrigued me. One morning while I was home from school because of asthma I got when I was twelve, an asthma that has affected almost every aspect of my subsequent life in many and sundry ways, I saw the 1956 adaptation of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four starring Edmond O'Brien. It, to use the slang of the time, blew my mind. By the time I started college after a two year hiatus in 1975 I was already a cinephile. By then I sought out the films of Ingmar Bergman, Alain Resnais, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Francois Truffaut, Anthony Mann, Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen, and others, so adolescent retreads of Hollywood film serials that enthralled the gaze of teenagers, physical and mental, and who they introduced to the addictive glories of empty spectacle, were simply not appealing to me or of interest to me in any way. Hence my whoop-de-doo about Star Wars.

Comic books, which are all the rage in some quarters today and which have deeply impacted how Hollywood makes films in the post movie brats era, with their powerful men and often scantily clad women, their caricatures of All American good and All Anti-American evil, caricatures we youth were supposed to recognise, chose to be like and not like, and model ourselves after and not after, thanks to our socialisation, did not appeal to me either in my youth or today, though I must admit I did find Superman: Red Son (2003) interesting when I hit my forties. I knew of the existence of comics, of course. Some of my friends bought them along with Rat Finks, sour balls, and candy bars at the local drug store. I recall once buying a comic book issue of the Man from U.N.C.L.E.,  a TV show I did not watch and had no interest in watching at the time, for twelve cents thanks to peer pressure. Little did I realise at the time that tie-ins like that one between one form of American popular culture and another, would become as omnipresent and as saturated across media platforms, fast food restaurants, and breakfast cereal as they are today. I also recall buying the Three Musketeers Classic Illustrated comic book classic but quickly decided it was better to buy and read the real thing. Even baseball cards were more appealing to me than comic books. After all, baseball was the biggest sport in the US at the time and I did adore Sandy Koufax and see him as a role model in my life.

I remained more interested in music and film than in American television well into the late nineties. There were, however, exceptions to this rule. I was aware of what television could do thanks to Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969-1974), Upstairs Downstairs (1971-1975), Fawlty Towers (1975-1979), Brideshead Revisited (1981), The Jewel in the Crown (1984), Inspector Morse (1987-2000), Prime Suspect (1991-2006), Cracker (1993-1996), and a host of British television adaptations of classic novels, particularly those of the Brontes and Jane Austen, television shows that US television simply could not come close to in terms of quality. There were American TV shows I did regularly watch if somewhat fitfully throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and which I liked. I really liked, for instance, the very cinematic, dramatic, and comic The Wonder Years (1988-1993). Most of the stuff I saw on American television, however, including the talky Hill Street Blues (1981-1987) with its extensive cast, the screwball Moonlighting (1985-1989), which wore out its welcome within a year, and the weird for weirds sake Twin Peaks (1990-1991), which ran out of steam within a few months, simply weren't intellectually appealing or even stimulating to someone who had seen and who enjoyed the films of Luis Bunuel and Dusan Makavejev. It wasn't until the X-Files (1993-2018) that I began to really take notice of American television. X-Files was somewhat revelatory for me, though it too soon lost its way (by the fifth season, I would argue) thanks, in part, to the structure of American commercial television with its penchant for flogging dead horses for financial benefit rather than artistic glory. It was not until Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) that I really began to sit up and take notice of what American television and television in general might do and sometimes did do artistically, that turned me into a more avid TV watcher.

Buffy's creator, Joss Whedon, is the subject of David Lavery's book Joss Whedon, A Creative Portrait: From Buffy the Vampire Slayer to the Avengers (London: Tauris, 2014). Lavery's book foregrounded for me how one's birth cohort matters, for while Whedon was influenced by some of the same things I was, --films and television programmes--he was impacted by them in different ways than I was and he was also impacted by things that I wasn't, such as comic books. Additionally, both of us, because of our different birth cohorts, were impacted by the different historical contexts that we lived through. My cohort, for example, was not influenced by comic book films in the same way that Whedon's was and Whedon's cohort was not as impacted by the assasination of John F. Kennedy in the ways mine was. I still have very vivid memories of arriving home from school on 22 November 1963 and seeing my grandparents and parents sitting in front of a black and white television watching news coverage of the assasination of JFK on that day.

Lavery, who is often referred to as the father of Buffy and Whedon Studies by those engaged in Buffy and Whedon Studies--the mother being fellow academic Rhonda Wilcox--has written a book that is not your typical biography of a Hollywood celebrity. It is biographical. Lavery tells us a tale of a man who came from a family of writers. His grandfather and father wrote for television while his mother was a bohemiany activist, lover of the arts, and writer, who I, for some reason, always picture as somewhat like the grandmother in Bergman's Fanny och Alexander (1982). Lavery follows Whedon from his school days in the US and England, where Whedon attended the elite Winchester public school, and elite Wesleyan University in Connecticut, through to his early days as a writer of Hollywood television shows like Roseanne (1998-2015), script doctor for films like Speed (1994), writer and creator of the film version of his now more famous television show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), Hollywood cult success as creator, writer, and director, of the television shows Buffy, Angel (1999-2004), Firefly (2002-2003), and Dollhouse (2009-2020), and finally to writer and director of a Hollywood mega blockbuster success (modern Hollywood speaks commodity aestheticism), Marvel Comics's The Avengers/Avengers Assemble (2012).

While Lavery's book fills in much of the traditional biographical details of Whedon's life up to around 2014 (before the release of his second Avengers film Avengers: The Age of Ultron in 2015), the book centres more on what Howard Gruber's theory of creativity and creative artistry and the creative life can tell us about creative personalities and auteurs like Joss Whedon. Gruber, a psychologist who specialised in the study of human creativity before his death, argued that creative people develop emotional ties to certain elements, certain phenomena, or certain problems and that their creativity becomes tied to certain forms of knowledge, certain strategies of purpose, and to specific emotions over time. Creative individuals like Whedon, Lavery drawing on Gruber contends, draw and drew on a network of enterprises, exhibit a sense of purpose or a will that perseveres over time and gives direction to their lives, and who strive to create images of great scope. Lavery thus traces the influence several things in Whedon's life. These influences included, argues Lavery, comic books like Marvel Comic's Spider-Man. Whedon's father wrote for PBS's Electric Company (1971-1977), which did a Spider-Man segment, and he brought home the Spider-Man comic books the writers had access to when writing these segments. Joss apparently devoured these comics and would later write Marvel comics and direct Marvel Comics films like The Avengers/Avengers Assemble. Another influence on Whedon was the bard, Willam Shakespeare. Joss, according to Lavery, studied Shakespeare extensively at Winchester and loved his plays and the sonnets, a love reflected in Whedon's low budget independent 2012 adaptation of the bards Much Ado About Nothing and in his extensive references to Shakespeare in Buffy. Still another influence on Whedon was film. Joss studied film at Wesleyan under noted film scholar Jeanine Basinger, who, unusually among film studies scholars these days has actually seen a lot of films, something essential if one is going to study cinema, and noted cultural scholar Richard Slotkin. Whedon was not only a student of fiims, however,  as Lavery notes. He was a cinephile or a film head, something reflected, for example, in Whedon's references to the films of Sam Peckinpah in Buffy. All of these elements, according to Lavery, were chanelled by Whedon into his creative life and all of them are reflected in his television shows, films, webisodes, and comic books, all instances in which Whedon was able to create images of great scope within the confines and constraints of corporate entertainment media culture.

I liked Lavery's creative biography of Joss Whedon, who I have been interested in since watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on television now many years ago, and regard it as one of the most creative things I have ever seen or read in my almost seventy years of life thanks to its mix of comedy, drama, tragedy, parody, satire and wit, its genre blending, and its gender bending. It is thus hard if not impossible not to agree with Lavery's conclusion that Joss Whedon is one of the major contemporary creative artists and auteurs of his generation. Lavery's Joss Whedon, A Creative Portrait. However, there are a number of problems or issues I have with the book as well. Unfortunately, Lavery's book seems more the work of a fan scholar or a scholar fan than of an academic despite the fact that Lavery is an academic and does engage, if fitfully in the book, in academic analysis. One presumes, fairly I think, that Joss Whedon, A Creative Portrait, was primarily aimed or targeted, by Lavery and his publisher, at the Whedon fan demographic and this fact makes the book more fanboy and fangirl oriented than scholarly. The work of scholar fans or fan scholars is, of course, and this is where the problem comes in, invariably impacted by value, something that, like beauty, is ultimately in the socialised eyes of the beholder. And while there is nothing wrong with being a fan of someone or something it is critically important to recognise that normative approaches, which are the bedrock and at the heart of fan culture and fan analysis, an approach which generally ends up celebrating the artist, a political figure, or a religious figure of devotion, turning him or her into a kind of saint and their "products" into holy documents, is different by degree from a descriptive analysis that seeks to fully and fairly comprehend the work of a celebrated artist like Joss Whedon in its broader contexts in a fair, balanced, and dispassionate way.

Another problem I have with the book is that Lavery too lightly and too uncritically explores how Whedon benefited from something sociologists are quite familiar with, namely, the role social and cultural capital--familiar and institutional--played and play in Whedon's ability to be creative and in his ability to instantiate (make his art flesh) his creativity in economic institutions associated with the entertainment industry. Whedon's grandfather and father were, after all, television writers and apparently Joss's father was able to help him get early writing gigs in Hollywood when Joss moved to Los Angeles to live with his father after graduating from Wesleyan. Speaking of Wesleyan, Wesleyan, thanks, in particular, to Basinger,  has itself developed, a cozy networking relationship with Hollywood, and Basinger, as Lavery notes, was able to arrange a job for Whedon as a researcher at the American Film Institute, thanks to her and Wesleyan's network connections with contemporary Hollywood. Power, privilege, authority, and their associated networks, along with social and cultural capital, familial, institutional, and cultural, things like pre-existing narrative and generic forms, do matter, when it comes to channeling creativity into creative projects.

A further problem is that Lavery relies too exclusively on interviews and on DVD commentaries to tell his tale of Joss Whedon's creativity. This reliance on Whedon's telling of the tale of his own creative life is a problem because, as ethnographers learned long ago, informants are not always forthcoming when it comes to the truth or at least elements of the truth.  Manipulation of the truth, of course, has historically been a problem, particularly when studying Hollywood, a industry where propaganda, propaganda about celebrities, films, and telvision programmes, often seems Hollywood's very raison d'etre. In fact, one might compellingly argue that it was Hollywood that pioneered and perfected the modernist variant of bullshiting that has become endemic in the modern and postmodern world. Given this, it is essential that analysts be critically skeptical of informant statements and check and verify or falsify them by following subjects and ascertaining whether they really do as they say they do, such as going to church every Sunday, or check and verify or falsify information and data against other available oral or written primary source material.

Of course, the primary source material in its various forms one is cross checking against can and does have its own inherent problems. The labour intensive process of separating fact from fiction in Hollywood and beyond can often seem somewhat akin to the questionable art of divination or the punishment meted out by Zeus to Sisyphus. The release and collection of additional primary source material may clarify certain problematic contextual, exegetical, and hermeneutical issues, or it may make the attempt to discern the truth even more difficult than it already was. Has, for instance, the release of Whedon's script for Wonder Woman over the internet, a script that has garnered both lukewarm praise and harsh ideological damnation, or the release of Zak Snyder's cut of the Warner Brothers Justice League film, a film which was reassigned to Whedon who took it over and rewrote and reshot it  (Whedon version, 2017, Snyder version released 2021), which has garnered angelic praise from the fandom of Snyder, helped clarify certain exegetical or interpretive issues or made them muddier? Only time will tell. While Lavery's book does take note of some contradictory evidence surrounding Whedon, its grounding almost exclusively in interviews and commentaries done by Whedon, makes Whedon's public voice, and this may be a problem as I noted above, the voice of authority. As recent ethnographers and ethnologists have noted again and again, who is doing the narrating and why he or she is narrating the story in the way that they are, can and often does muddy the already opaque waters of scholarly and academic analysis. In the end we cannot forget that primary source materials of all stripes are embedded in a sea of fan apologetics and polemics making analysis and interpretation difficult.

A related problem with Lavery's book, along with many of the books produced by Literary, Film, and Television Studies scholars these days, is its limited use of history. Lavery doesn't fall into the same trap that many if not most crystal ball textualists, those Media Studies scholars who think that everything you need to know about a book, a film, or a television programme can be discerned by an application of nineteenth century social science, the notion that underlying economic, political, cultural, geographic, or demographic factors undergird and determine a text, fall into. Lavery's book avoids the historical ahistoricism of much crystal ball textualism by taking a somewhat chronological and hence limitedly historical approach to the Whedon texts, thanks to its limited use of extra-textual interviews and commentaries and its chronological structure. However, such an approach misses the fact that a text is not only impacted by broader contexts like those the crystal ball textualists focus on--class, ethnicity/race, and gender--but also by material cultural artifacts within those broader contexts, such as other cultural texts. Buffy, for instance, has echoes of the Canadian-American television show Friday the 13th: the Series (1987-1990) with its supernatural investigators who are kind of a Scooby gang before the Scooby gang, while Angel, the Buffy spin-off Whedon and David Greenwalt has echoes of the Canadian-American TV programme Forever Knight (1992-1996) with its vampire seeking redemption, its mythological arcs, its similar use of flashbacks, its similar feminism, its similar refined old world vamps meeting the often unrefined modern new world, and its similar mixtures of drama, tragedy, and comedy. Unfortunately, Lavery does not investigate the possible influence of these two programmes on Buffy and Angel while Forever Knight gets little more than namechecked  in the monograph on the show for the Wayne State University TV Milestones series by "leading" Angel authority Stacey Abbott's (2009). I suspect this lack of attention to historical pedigree, a lack that often finds in academic fan culture, is the product of a culture, a fan culture grounded in a celebration of a creative and charismatic individual and his or her works and the consequent tunnel vision associated with such a fan culture.

Finally, Lavery's book was written before accusations of harassment surfaced in Hollywood about Whedon beginning in 2020, in the wake of a number of allegations and revelations about a number of Hollwood figures (some of which had been known for some time as Peter Biskind's book on American iindependent film makes clear). Whedon was accused, by some who had worked with him, of authoritarian behaviour, bullying, snarkiness, anti-religious rhetoric, and mental torment, all hardly unknown in a variety of quarters in Hollywood since its beginnings in the early part of the twentieth century. Interestingly, and in retrospect, Whedon's questionable behaviour and several of his failings, including his failings on set, seem to be referenced by Whedon in several of the interviews Lavery references in his book. In one or more of these interviews Whedon maintains that he had to play the adult on set sometimes and though this doesn't excuse his behaviours it does point up the fact that a kind of general or conductor is needed on a Hollywood television set since, if you are lucky, you have eight days to make an episode. We also need to understand that sometimes things happen which can cause tensions on a Hollywood set between actor and show runners, such as, for example, an actor getting pregnant and not telling those she works with that she is pregnant until just before shooting starts. This, of course, can be a problem if the writers have already planned out a season of the show and now have to revise the show to take account of an unexpected occurence.

While not the definitive biography of Whedon, that awaits a future scholar who has access to all the relevant primary source materials, Lavery's book, I suspect, will remain one of the go to books on Whedon and on Whedon's creative life in academia for the foreseeable future. Lavery's book nicely synthesises and puts into chronological focus a wealth of interviews and commentaries relating to the creative life and work of Joss Whedon, most of it from Whedon himself, which, while not ideal from a scholarly point of view, is a step in the right direction, particularly when compared with previous biographies on Joss Whedon. It also synthesises and summarises a host of more academic oriented studies on Whedon, many of them from the journal on Whedon's work Lavery founded, Slayage, both of which are helpful to anyone starting work or continuing work on the creative output of Joss Whedon's career thus far. 

Recommended.

Postscript:
i do know that there is an essay out there in anthology land that explores and compares Forever Knight and Angel. I haven't had a chance to read it, however, though I applaud the historical and cultural comparison.