For those of you who don’t know, A Very Potter Musical is an original two-act play (including some very catchy musical numbers) that was written and performed last year by a group of college students at The University of Michigan. When it was uploaded to YouTube, it became a big hit and earned close to two million views. And when you watch it, it’s easy to understand why it became so popular.

Now, as a disclaimer I have to admit that I am not actually a huge Harry Potter fan. I read the books and have enjoyed the films, but I was never one of those people that stood in line on the first day. I don’t own any of the Harry Potter merchandise. But A Very Potter Musical is absolutely brilliant. The way the characters are portrayed is hilarious, both as a parody and in its own right. The acting is surprisingly good for college students and while the sound quality in the videos occasionally makes it difficult to understand, thankfully someone went to the effort of establishing a version with subtitles. This makes it easier to appreciate the dialogue, which is well-written and very funny. Particularly memorable are the homoerotic undertones in the (b?)romance between Voldemorte & Quirrel, played by Joe Walker and Brian Rosenthal respectively; the hilarious Cedric Diggery, played by Tyler Brunsman; and the inspired portrayal of Draco Malfoy, played by Lauren Lopez, a talented young woman who I would totally like to take out to dinner sometime.

A Very Potter Musical received such acclaim, that Starkid Productions decided to create a sequel, which was finally made available to the digital public last night. Now I have to admit that after one viewing of the sequel I think I prefer the original. In my opinion, the musical numbers in the original were better and I found their portrayal of Deloris Umbridge annoying in the bad way. This is no insult to Joe Walker, who practically stole the show in the first production, but as a villain Umbridge is nowhere near as enjoyable as Voldemorte. That said, whereas when I saw AVPM I had no preconceptions, for the sequel I had exceedingly high expectations so I’m not surprised that they were not surpassed.

I did enjoy virtually every scene with Draco, to whom they wisely gave a greater role in the sequel. As usual, the relationships between Harry (Darren Criss, who also wrote much of the music), Ron (Joey Richter), and Hermoine (Bonnie Gruesen) was the glue that held the show together. The costuming was even better than the original, to an impressive degree, and the dance numbers were well-choreographed. Several of the new characters were quite good; I particularly enjoyed the introduction of Lucius Malfoy and seeing where Draco got his mannerisms. There were still many laugh-out-loud moments and clever references to the first production and the Harry Potter series. And considering how confusing the plot became by the finale, they did a surprisingly good job of tying up all the loose ends. Given that the first production went through most of the real substance of the Harry Potter story, the sequel did well to incorporate a prequel-like aspect using time travel. (Not a spoiler because it happens in the first scene.)

I will say that there were several things I wish they had done slightly differently: Deloris Umbridge received too much screentime, particularly given that they could have done more with Lucius Malfoy, who I still feel had unfulfilled potential; I found their running gag of Lupin being a drunk to be a little bit odd — I think they could have done more with both his character and Sirius Black (again, no insult to the actors); and I was disappointed with a couple of characters’ endings. Still, overall it was quite enjoyable, particularly given that it’s an amateur production put on at no charge. While it was hard not to be a little bit disappointed with some aspects of the production, the sequel was definitely a worthy successor to the original.

If you haven’t watched either A Very Potter Musical or A Very Potter Sequel, I highly recommend you check them out.

Which versus That
If you could put it in parenthetical, it’s “which.” If you couldn’t, it’s “that.”
The bicycle, which I couldn’t find…
The bicycle (which I couldn’t find)… (Works.)

The bicycle that I like was lost.
The bicycle (that I like) was lost. (Wrong, doesn’t work.)

Court is singular.
When the only basis for the federal court’s subject matter jurisdiction over a matter is diversity of citizenship, it must apply state substantive rules. (Correct).
When the only basis for the federal court’s subject matter jurisdiction over a matter is diversity of citizenship, they must apply state substantive rules. (Incorrect)

Their versus His or her
In writing research and other academic works, it is important to consider the reader and try to grab and maintain their interest. (Incorrect)
In writing research and other academic works, it is important to consider the reader and try to grab and maintain his or her interest. (Correct)
In writing research and other academic works, it is important to consider the readers and try to grab and maintain their interest. (Correct)

Affect versus Effect
Affect = Verb
Effect = Noun

The drug did not affect me.
The drug had no effect on me.

Note: Affect can be a noun, as used in psychology.
Note: Effect can be a verb, such as “effect change.”

However, since I spent an hour today responding to Reverend Chuck Freeman’s blog post entitled “A Consumer is a Subject, A Citizen is a Verb,” I thought I would upload my response here. Basically, Reverend Freeman argues that Americans today are in danger of becoming Subjects, not Citizens, because we have become “buying machines.” He says, “The American corporate media culture challenges our freedom in a much more sophisticated and seductive fashion. We are saturated with images and rhetoric by which we willingly morph our identity… A Consumer is a Subject, a pawn to be manipulated. A Citizen is a Verb with dignity and purpose.”

The following is my response:

Chuck,

While I agree with much of the spirit of your message, I wouldn’t be a good democratic “Citizen” if I didn’t express my opinion as to what I perceive as a weakness in your exposition, or at least a contradiction want to clarify. I have two points I would like to make and I’d be interested in hearing your response.

First, at one point you say, “we have reverted back to being Subject.” Later, you tell the reader, “You are now a Consumer. You have deformed into a buying machine.” But at the end, you conclude by asking, “Will you be a Consumer or a Citizen?” So my question is, do we have a choice or not? Are you trying to say that the American people have become Consumers, not Citizens, due to the effects of advertising and the importance our society places on economic wealth as the sole determination of value or are you merely alleging that it is easy to become a Consumer in that environment and we should resist the temptation?

I don’t think you are arguing the former, because if you are asking us to become Citizens, not Consumers, then clearly you believe such a choice is possible. So while it might be easy to slide into complacent consumerism, it’s not necessarily inevitable. If this is true, than I think you might overstate your case at the beginning of the composition for the sake of grabbing the audience’s attention. It might be more accurate to say, “An increasing number of Americans have become Consumers rather than Citizens” than to assert to the reader that they, individually, have made that transition.

My second point, which is less focused on the manner in which you present your idea and more on the content, is that I disagree on your equating Subject status with Consumer status.

The whole point of being a Subject was that you did not have a choice. You were compelled by the social and political hierarchy into doing something. You were not an actor in society because you lacked the power to change your status. A Citizen, as you say, is an active role.

However, I disagree that recent trends have forced us to become “Subjects” once more. Yes, Americans today are subjected to an increasing amount of advertising, bias in the media, and constant efforts to direct our personal behavior (at least to the extent it effects our voting and buying decisions). Yet by equating Subject and Consumer, you ignore (or at least, downplay) the liberty that we have to make choices that fly in the face of that manipulation. I might see an advertisement on TV, but no one is forcing me to buy a product at the point of a gun. Likewise, I can watch Glenn Beck or Keith Olbermann but my voting behavior may be influenced, not determined, by those pundits. In essence, despite constant efforts to control our behavior, we still have the ability to choose, which is the hallmark of the Citizen status.

It is impossible to sever the link between Citizen and Consumer, because the central characteristic of both is the same: the ability to choose. Merely because other people are trying to direct our behavior does not mean we are Subjects, because we still have the liberty to act according to our preferences.

In fact, if anything, I think we have the opposite problem today. Far from becoming Subjects again, without the ability to choose, we instead have become over-saturated by the abundance of choice. Which cereal should I eat for breakfast? What car should I drive? Where should I live? Who should I vote for? Americans have so many options that we become exhausted by constantly making decisions. With so much choice, the temptation is to become lazy. It is so difficult to remain informed about everything. Much easier to surrender to popular opinion, or advertisements, and just follow the group. This, in my opinion, is the real risk in society today.

The important distinction is not between Citizen and Consumer, but rather through being a passive Citizen-Consumer and an active one.

An active Citizen-Consumer is still under the pressures that are inevitable in a free society, but attempts to find out the truth. A passive Citizen-Consumer responds to that pressure by blindly complying with it. However, equating passive Citizen-Consumers with Subjects ignores the central issue. What is at stake is not the liberty to choose, which distinguishes Citizens from Subjects. What is at stake is our willingness to actively seek the truth in the face of an exhausting amount of personal liberty.

Rather than expressing my own opinions on this candidate, I just want to post a link to an article a good friend of mine wrote shortly after Palin’s nomination. I think it’s an extremely fair and thoughtful evaluation of her credentials.

]]> http://www.emelianova.com/ben/2008/10/03/dont-forget-to-register-vote/feed/ http://www.emelianova.com/ben/2008/09/07/enfj/ http://www.emelianova.com/ben/2008/09/07/enfj/#comments Mon, 08 Sep 2008 00:18:25 +0000 Ben http://www.emelianova.com/ben/2008/09/07/enfj/ For reasons I won’t go into, I have had a chance to do some significant self-reflection in the last few weeks. My final academic year as an undergraduate started a few weeks ago, and I’ve had a few developments in my personal life which have caused me to look inward and think about the kind of person I am and the type of person I aspire to become.

While I normally shy away from these sorts of “MySpace” self-identity quizzes – both because I think they’re largely a waste of time and because I question the motivation behind anyone who feels the need to constantly post surveys about themselves on the Internet – I have recently felt the urge to go ahead and list some qualities about myself that I think have become a rather permanent and an important component of my identity. While this list is hardly a commitment to these traits, nor is it a complete description, these are some things about myself that I feel are important to my identity. The subject refers to the acronym that describes my personality type according to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. I personally feel that it is an extremely good description of me, although all personality tests have their limits.

Things I am:
· A leader whose management style relies heavily on getting feedback from multiple parties before making a decision.
· Eager-to-please, desiring to make as many people happy as possible.
· A social perfectionist that hates to be criticized or embarrassed, particularly publicly.
· Flirtatious, a flatterer.
· Someone with an active and playful sense of humor.
· Creative and expressive.
· Someone who tries to be positive even while being critical.
· Analytical, capable of understanding the way systems and people connect to one another. Frequently uses analogies to make points. “A big picture person.”
· Prefers having a small number of close friends to a large number of distant ones. Often not comfortable with people at a first meeting.
· Someone who thrives on interaction with others.
· Self-aware.
· Strong moral center.

Things I am not:
· Neat and tidy.
· Extraordinarily handsome or extraordinarily ugly.
· Detail-oriented.
· Athletic.
· Driven to make plans for the distant future.
· Good at remembering names and faces.
· Spatially oriented – good with directions.
· Someone with an proficient memory.

There was once a great Ant Hill of Higher Education. Every day thousands of ants would ride their caterpillars from all over the countryside to learn how to be productive members of the colony. One day the Queen of the Hill heard a loud noise.

Opening her window, she saw a crowd of angry stud-ants below. “Why aren’t all of you in class?” she asked.

The crowd yelled back, “We are tired of being forced to buy parking passes for our caterpillars! We pay enough as it is!”

Worried, the Queen replied, “But if you do not pay to park your caterpillars, how can I afford to maintain the parking lots you use?”

But the ants were unconvinced, and so the Queen let all the ants park their caterpillars for free. Several months went by and the roads around the hill and parking spaces began to deteriorate. Once again an angry crowd formed outside the Queen’s window.

“We demand better roads and parking!” they cried.

“Oh dear,” said the Queen, “I simply cannot afford to pay for all the upkeep now that we don’t have parking passes anymore.”

“We don’t care about the details,” the crowd replied, “just fix the potholes and repaint the lines so that our caterpillars don’t trip or bump into each other.”

So the Queen pondered about the problem and finally decided to increase the tuition for all the ants in order to pay for the parking improvements. “At last,” she thought, “I have finally made all the stud-ants happy.” But to her surprise, only weeks later a new crowd had formed.

“What is it this time?” she said in exasperation.

“My Queen, we are the stud-ants that do not have caterpillars. Every day we walk to the Ant Hill, and we don’t think it’s fair that we should have to pay for the parking and the roads,” the stud-ants explained.

“That sounds fair,” said the Queen, “but how can I pay for the parking upkeep without the tuition increase?”

The stud-ants thought and thought, when finally the smallest ant in the group had an idea.

“Why not create a special parking pass and charge the stud-ants money to purchase it? That way stud-ants with caterpillars will pay for the parking lots that they are wearing down and stud-ants without them aren’t charged money for a service they aren’t using!” he declared.

The Queen thought this was a fine idea and quickly went about implementing it. Finally, she collapsed on her throne, exhausted from all the fuss about parking. It was only then she realized that she had ended up exactly where she had started.

The moral of the story: “Stud-ants will always be upset about parking.”

The protagonist was probably one of the most unsympathetic, dislikable characters that has ever been set up to be a hero. At the beginning of the film, he’s whiny, indecisive, and spineless. In the beginning of the film he’s angry, self-righteous, and bitter. By the end of the film he’s just self-righteous (X3). At the beginning he tells the audience that he “used to be a loser like you.” Look bud, I came here to watch a movie, not get insulted! The abuse doesn’t stop there. The final line of the movie is delivered by our hero speaking directly to his audience, “This is me taking back control of my life. What the fuck have you done lately?”

Apparently the only two lifestyle choices are working a normal job as a spineless nobody and being an assassin with a bad attitude.

The script was terrible. Just awful. Even fine actors like Morgan Freeman were unable to deliver some of these lines. I was literally squirming in my seat throughout the film after being subjected to some of the must unnatural dialog ever uttered in a theater (yes I am including the audience in that measure.) The language alternated from being extremely lofty, “we are an elite fraternity of assassins operating for 1,000 years to maintain order in a chaotic world” to a lot of childish cursing, often within the same sentence.

The plot is predictable (I totally called the “surprise” twist) and to call it implausible is a massive understatement. I have three words for you “Loom of Fate.” All the likable characters died and the the unlikeable characters weren’t unpleasant enough for the audience to be happy when bad things happened to them, just bad enough to wish they had less screen time.

Oh, and I would like to confirm the underlying misogyny of the film. Every single female character was portrayed very negatively with the exception Angelina Jolie’s character, and she was basically portrayed as a sex symbol.

Which brings me to my final point - this movie was in almost every way a male adolescent fantasy. Youth finds out he has super violence powers. Beats up all the mean people who made his life miserable before. Gets trained by hot sex symbol babe who is older and inexplicably attracted to him. In the end he has “taken control of his life” through a lot of violence and swearing. If I were thirteen, I would probably think this movie was the coolest thing since I discovered HBO shows softcorn pornography at night. However since I am not thirteen, I am forced to call it what it is: an awful film that should not be viewed by anyone outside its target audience.

*Edit.* I wanted to add that this movie is based on a comic book which, from the synopsis I read on Wikipedia, looks like it has a much darker and less juvenile premise than the film that carries its name. Too bad.