Wow, nothing like trying to find an old LJ post to make me realize how lousy I am at subject lines and tagging.

Aaron Schutz of the community organizing website EducationAction posted "Self-Delusion and the Lie of Lifestyle Politics" on OpenLeft. It's one of those essays whose basic arguments I already generally agreed with, but the person writing comes across as so self-righteous and obnoxious that I want to distance myself from what he's saying.

Rebecca Tushnet blogged the IP/Gender conference on "Female Fan Culture and Intellectual Property" last week: keynote, panel one, panel two, panel three. I like the conclusion from her keynote address: "Asserting their creative independence and their creative embeddedness at the same time — their basis in and distinctions from the commercial economy — fanworks offer a working model of hybridity in creative production, one the law would do well to recognize." Tushnet's articulation of a hybrid vision traversing the creative, the commercial, and the communal feels like a much more salient and productive version of Matt Hills' emphasis on the contradiction between fans as consumers and the "anti-commercial ideologies" of fandom in his book Fan Cultures (see here for my tl;dr post/critique of Hills' argument).

Speaking of Hills, I finally caught up on the new season of The Hills. I'd been feeling guilty for wanting to watch it before I'd started on the second season of In Treatment, so I'd let a few weeks pass before I caved (sorry, Gabriel Byrne!). The weird thing about watching a reality show filmed in advance is that celebrity gossip becomes plot spoilers. Having Heidi and Spencer go to couples therapy after she catches him with another woman is a shark-jumping moment all by itself. But any suspense over the fate of their relationship evaporates with the news that they got married this past weekend. Also, their visit to the therapist just reinforces my guilt for not watching In Treatment instead.

[cross-posted to LJ & DW]