Between comic books and professional wrestling*, I seem to be revisiting some of my main mid-to-late '90s-era fandoms. Oh, and I also embarked in a desultory rewatch of the first two seasons of Babylon 5 on Hulu, which I haven't seen since they originally aired. At this rate, any day now I'll end up searching for downloads of Xena: Warrior Princess and Marmalade Boy.

Is there such a thing as a fannish midlife crisis?

* And falling behind on professional wrestling in less than a week! Next time, I won't plunge back into wrestling the week before one of the WWE's big four pay-per-view events. It's only Tuesday, and I've barely seen an hour of the 5 hours of wrestling that have already aired this week. :(

There are two -- Count 'em! Two! -- new episodes of the geeky comedy Better Off Ted airing tonight. This is a very good thing.

The 4th season premiere of America's Best Dance Crew is up on MTV's website. It's looking like this could be a very strong season. Also, they have a voguing crew this year!

Over at MightyGodKing, two overlapping-but-different lists of the top 21 most influential comics writers here and here. As someone dipping my toes back into comics after a long hiatus, I'm pretty ambivalent about the turn to decompressed storytelling. Then again, a couple months ago, I went back and picked up one of those black & white Essential collections of 20+ issues of The Avengers from Steve Engelhart's run, which I remembered fondly from my childhood (at least from the back issues that I avidly scavenged). I was sad to discover that it really didn't hold up very well. So -- aside from the classics -- I can't really lapse into nostalgia for the good old days of Silver Age-style narrative. That doesn't mean I have to like Brian Michael Bendis, though....

Anybody remember back when Madonna was the darling of the cultural studies set? I'm getting flashbacks from all the trendy fawning over Lady Gaga (see: FlowTV [cached version], Tiger Beatdown, Flavorpill) barely a year after I first encountered her through her appearances on So You Think You Can Dance and The Hills. (Yes, she appeared on The Hills, and please don't use that as a springboard to pontificate on how 'Lady Gaga' subverts realness/celebrity/performance/whatever.) I'll be over here, rolling my eyes and counting my grey hairs.

What does the following describe?

"[A] proven haven for malicious actors and content and... particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries."

First thing that comes to your mind -- no wrong answers!

ETA: And the results are in!

From a Racialicious post on a recent MoMA screening of DJ Spooky's Rebirth of a Nation, billed as a remix of DW Griffith's 1915 Birth of a Nation. One main theme in the critique is that the original source was insufficiently remixed; the result was, in effect, more a re-presenting of the film that reproduced its racism.

The whole post, and further discussion in comments, is worth reading.

'And as for the “macho = homoerotic” thing, both in film and in general, well, let’s just chalk that up to the fact that at this moment in the history of our nation straight men have ceded everything but snarky T-shirts, Xbox 360, leet speek and the classic geek pear shape to the men of alternate sexualities. A good-looking man in text-free clothing, speaking about something other than the iPhone? Gay.'

  -- John Scalzi rescues a lost LJ post from the distant mists of 2007, presumably before the advent of the [NSFW] Guys with iPhones.

I'm going to tentatively claim this one (and the Slate piece purporting to explain "How macho movies get misread as homoerotic" that he's riffing off of) as further support for my theory that we're entering into a post-homoerotic landscape. It's one thing for straight men to protest that they don't see the supposed homoeroticism in, say, Point Blank or 300, or -- as the author of the Slate article does -- take pains to reject or refute a homoerotic subtext. Those are the familiar old-school moves, based on a classic contagion model of the homoerotic. And what are the traditional ways of dealing with contagion? Quarantine and isolation. Separate the healthy and the sick; minimize exposure risk; regard potential symptoms with a high index of suspicion; develop sensitive diagnostics and, ideally, vaccinations. Because everyone's potentially susceptible.

And that's why the Slate author comes across as either old-fashioned or juvenile. Dude, chill out! When you protest, in defense of straight men taking pleasure in narcissistic identification with the "hot, sweaty men" of 300, "Shouldn't a guy be able to do such a thing without being called gay?" -- you're fighting last century's battles (and over a film set in 480 B.C., no less). I certainly wouldn't say that nobody cares anymore, but let's face it, vast swaths of culture and society have moved on. Retro, unironic avowals of heterosexuality? Not hip, not hot. Sure, "no homo" still has currency, but also inevitably oscillates between "straightforward" ritual disclaimer and ironic performativity. (Conversely, people quite earnestly and sincerely profess that when they say, "That's so gay!" they really, really don't mean that kind of gay because they're totally cool with that stuff and homophobia is, like, so lame.)

These days, no self-respecting straight man would protest the homoerotic too much -- at least, not with a straight face. Over the last decade or so -- marked at its outset by the launch of Viagra, and culminating in the ascendancy of Judd Apatow -- straight men all over the country have embraced the possibilities of a masculine heterosexual insecurity all but completely decoupled from the 20th century spectre of contagious gayness and sexual orientation misattribution.

So nowadays, the fight has shifted to cultural status. These men have learned to relax and love the gay, but that doesn't necessarily mean they support same-sex marriage or gays in the military. When Scalzi cites "the present heterosexual male abdication of anything more culturally, emotionally and intellectually resonant than 'Dick in a Box'", do we mourn, celebrate, shrug, or roll our eyes? If the global economic meltdown is accelerating the Death of Macho, will sexual orientation as well as gender determine the respective winners and losers of this world-historical process? But hey, that's politics -- in the meantime, we can all go laugh together at Brüno, right?

Do you find yourself getting caught up in following an internet kerfuffle about something you know nothing about that you randomly stumbled across? To the point of forming opinions and mentally taking sides, even though the core issue remains impenetrable to you?

Apparently it all started when someone named Alex declared in Why I will never be clean again..., "With a heavy heart, and with very little jouissance.... 'I hate Badiou.'"

Now all I know about Badiou is that he's a trendy French philosopher, the latest in a long line of trendy French philosophers. Where 'trendy' means intellectually fashionable, though for all I know, he may also be a style icon, but that seems unlikely. I don't know anything about his ideas or writing; I looked him up some time ago when I first heard his name, and frankly it all seemed too dull to pay attention to. I am pretty sure that his first name is Alain, but I can't guarantee that since nobody involved in the current blog contretemps refers to him as anything but Badiou.

So Alex hates Badiou, and people react and respond, and apparently someone somewhere dismisses Alex' critique as fanboyism gone awry, according to k-punk in Fans, vampires, trolls, Masters:


Ah, but wait! Anodyne Lite intervenes in Sexuation and fandom: there are no girls on the internet:
And thus did the fanboy/fangirl debate arrive at the cutting edge of philosophy, which (fittingly?) is apparently going by the name of speculative realism these days.

I will give Alex the last word here, if only because his renunciation of Badiou could only be better if it had been published as an op-ed in The Onion:


Hey Alex -- if this is your idea of the future of philosophy, I think 4chan got there first.

Ever since my dream that I was trapped on The Hills, I've mostly been avoiding Twitter, not posting and only checking it once a day. Last night I had a dream in which I was getting ready to go to work in the morning, and as I was about to leave my apartment I discovered that all of the locks on my door had been removed, including the chain and the deadbolt.

My first thought in the dream was that someone had taken them off in middle of the night while I was sleeping. But then I realized (again, in the dream) that the locks could have only been removed from inside of the apartment, and nobody could have gotten in while I was asleep, so I must have somehow done it myself. Upon waking, my first thought was that this, too, is a Twitter anxiety dream.

It seems like Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame has also been going through some social media anxiety viz. Twitter:
( warning: offensive to fangirls of all sizes and those who love them: )
Um, wow, Trent. But the rest of his forum post is worth reading. He's been a huge pioneer and advocate for online music distribution and social media, so when he pulls back from Twitter, it takes on more weight than your typical flounce.

I can't help but read this in the context of recent events on the feminist group blog Shakesville, which Sady from Tiger Beatdown posted about here; see also this post from The Apostate). Personally I've never really been a fan of Shakesville, and don't read it regularly; when I do follow links to it, I've tended to find the in-jokes and invocations of community increasingly off-putting. That definitely biases me towards wondering how much of their recent problems are a direct consequence of both the personalities involved and their particular way of claiming and promoting themselves as a community.

( also I really hate that teaspoon thing, but moving right along )

And maybe there's something here about the difference between building social networks vs. online communities. But I don't think that Reznor's pitch (echoed by Techcrunch) for verified identities or the demarcation by Shakesville's Melissa McEwan of "safe space" necessarily get to the root of the dynamics in play here.

From an NYT blog post excerpting a new Harvard Business School study of Twitter as a social network:


Is that bolded part really true? The 'previous research' cited is a working paper that I can't find online, so it's not clear whether they're comparing Twitter to MySpace or Facebook, or to media sites like YouTube and Flickr.

Henry Wolfe is watching The Young and the Restless, just like me! Where the actor who plays Shawn's father on Psych just made a cameo as a priest. But he also talks about this -- which is a big part of why I got sucked into The Hills:Though these days even many of the vertical shows -- especially the most densely serialized -- unfold across the horizontal axis, with DVD commentaries and deleted/bonus scenes and interviews and online ARGs and character blogs.

After posting last night about maybe getting a fannish Twitter account, I found three new articles about Twitter posted at the media studies site FlowTV. So I'm cryptoxin on Twitter: now what?

The best of the FlowTV pieces -- and the one which speaks most immediately to my interests -- is People I Want to Know: Twitter, Celebrity and Social Connection by Liz Ellcessor, and Leigh Edwards' Twitter: Democratizing the Media Corporate Branding is also relevant (though I think there's supposed to be an 'or' in the title before 'Corporate Branding' and a question mark at the end). Still, it feels like they're only scraping the surface -- understandably, for short pieces on an emerging phenomenon.

Louisa Stein's It's Contagious: Twitter and the Palimpsest of Authorship juxtaposes Twitter with lim 's vid Us, but I honestly couldn't figure out what her argument was -- something about "the prismatic processes of individual and collective authoring." Which sounds good, but the piece itself didn't make a lot of sense to me, and reads more like shorthand notes from a talk or an overgrown abstract for a longer and more thoroughly argued essay. Or am I just being dense?

Off to 'follow' Lauren Conrad and Lil C....

Twisty Faster asks, What has recognizing your male privilege done for you lately?: "But on the other hand, it’s pretty danged heartwarming when a dude finally concedes that male privilege exists. Whenever this happens, an asshole gets his wings."

At Racialicious, Latoya Peterson begins a series on cultural appropriation with an introductory post by asking How do we view global hip hop culture? She presents some Korean music videos as examples (including my favorite song by Drunken Tiger, "Do You Know Hip Hop?", which first got me interested in Korean hip hop after hearing it at a friend's house several years ago). The videos make clear that the questions of appropriation go beyond musical borrowing, extending to style and cultural signifiers; the music video for "Nobody" presents the Wonder Girls as a '60s girl group, right down to hairstyles reminiscent of The Shirelles.

Ultra-personalized art by My Gene Image (a subsidiary of Eton Bioscience Inc.): "You collect your oral cell sample non-invasively and send the sample to us. We then extract DNA from it, make probes to find your desired gene, and display its sequence elegantly in an artwork or a crystal." (via PicoCool)

Is Dollhouse really getting renewed? So much for my Whedonschadenfreude....

Today's philosophical conundrum: at first glance I assumed that the Fan Secrets tumblelog was a parody of fandom_secrets. At second glance I wasn't sure. Now I'm wondering whether it's even possible to effectively parody fandom_secrets or whether it's always been a self-parody.

Today's fan fiction craving: I caught up with recent episodes of The Young and the Restless last night, which has been teetering on the brink of the Rich and the Vapid lately. But! They've just launched a new storyline modeled after Rebecca, complete with a Mrs. Danvers figure, a prominently-displayed pencil drawing and life-size marble sculpture of the dead wife, plus a sinister son faking blindness and, in the role of the new Mrs. de Winter, a pregnant woman with a history of miscarriages and mental breakdowns haunted by the sound of a baby crying in the night. And let me tell you, so far it's awesome! So I'm wondering if anybody has recs for any gothic-style Rebecca-themed stories in any fandom -- or for that matter, Gaslight plots to make a character believe they're going insane? Bonus points if they're not complete AUs but rather grounded in canon.

Today's short film: Philip Bloom's Alone in Tokyo (via Jean Snow)

My Dreamwidth Pledge to You (list in formation)

I will not tell people on LJ that my Dreamwidth user name is 'swinefluevog'.

I will not start a 'Ten things I assume you know about me post' with "I am a genetically engineered super ape (distantly related to Monsieur Mallah) who escaped from the Soviet space program at a tender age and led a fugitive existence in an Eastern European traveling circus until fleeing to America after the fall of the Berlin Wall."

I will not cross-post with comments disabled on LJ, only to edit the LJ post's 'comment on DW' link to Rickroll my hapless readers or redirect them to a random stranger's post.

I will not use however many Dreamwidth invite codes I receive to breed a mutant zombie robot army of sockpuppet journals to do my bidding, because they'll only achieve sentience and band together to turn on their creator in the end, and that would be very sad (for me).

ETA: I will not suggest that people read me on Dreamwidth instead of LJ, despite the identical cross-posted content, if they prefer to follow the darker, edgier "reimagined" version of my journal.

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]