A few quick links:
Chuck Tyron -- Tarantino: The Author as Cinematic Database: "But with the rise of the film blogosphere and crowdsourced fan sites, such as IMDB.com, what has changed is that audiences are now collectively unpacking cult and/or auteur-based films in such exhaustive detail that every scene in a Tarantino movie is now subject to the wider database and collective knowledge of a massive film audience."
Graeme McMillan @ io9 -- DC's New Bosses on Making DC the Best Again [interview]. Frankly, I am less than enthused at naming Geoff Johns their new Chief Creative Officer, as Blackest Night epitomizes everything I dislike about the current state of Big Two superhero comics.
Museum of Modern Celebrity Tweets (via Lost At E Minor): celebrity tweets, illustrated weekly.
Keith Hart, The social meaning of the power law -- an anthropologist's take on the au courant statistical pattern (e.g. think "the Long Tail" etc.) anchoring a lot of 'the new science of networks'-type arguments: "Does the recent rise to prominence of the power-law distribution, with its premise of extreme inequality, tell us something about our collective experience of society today?"
Fred Stutzman, Google Buzz as Experience Pattern: "Google’s has had to walk a very fine line with how they 'reveal' what they know about your social circle. Realistically, Google sits on behavioral social network data that is of equal value to what is created in Facebook or Myspace. Mining our web search patterns, our chat and email logs, and our travels across the web with analytics, Google knows who we connect with. The challenge Google has always faced is putting this information into play in a way that doesn’t freak everyone out."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alixtii on fanworks and transformativity, I wanted to link to a recent piece by Rebecca Tushnet: Hybrid Vigor: Mashups, Cyborgs, and Other Necessary Monsters (link goes to her blog post, which links to the PDF). She draws upon Donna Haraway's classic "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" to suggest the outlines of an answer to the question, does remix matter?:Can we assess transformativeness at all, or do we need to throw up our hands in despair? ( cyborgs are like digital artists )This is a helpful metaphor because one challenge of defending women's fanworks before the law is to protect them from charges of over-investment, incoherence, or unintelligibility from outside.
I love Haraway's essay, which has had a huge influence on me (including inspiring my own fannishness for cyborgs). And I like the rich and messy possibilities that Tushnet opens up by aligning remix culture with Haraway's cyborgs. The last sentence in particular evokes for me this bit from Haraway's essay: "The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence."
There's a fitting slippage or ambiguity in Tushnet's evocation of Haraway as to whether the figure of the cyborg describes the creator or the fanwork -- or, by extension, what Haraway might call a network of material-semiotic actors which circulate around sites of fannish production (see her The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others).
In other 'greatest hits from '80s-ish critical theory', I was thinking that Stuart Hall's concept of articulation might offer some opportunities to thinking about transformativity in the context of vidding, and specifically the juxtaposition of music and images. Here's Hall in an interview edited by Lawrence Grossberg (On Postmodernism and Articulation [PDF]):( a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time )
The political and theoretical context for Hall's use of the term 'articulation' is rather different from current discussions of remix culture and copyright law, but there are some interesting potential intersections and affinities, as with Haraway's cyborgs.
Google would like to have access to your location. The Google Toolbar will periodically use the network to keep your location up to date. Learn more
Buttons on the side invited me to Share my location (in bold) or Don't share (unbolded), with a check box to Remember for this site.
According to RWW, location is hot, but also murky and contested.
I think I'll trust myself to keep my location up to date (at least until I start regularly passing out and waking up in strange beds or foreign cities). And I'll seriously consider Lifehacker's tips for getting Google Toolbar's features without the toolbar.
But I think, even ignoring the bar-lowering mentioned above, it's going to be another awesome season.
‘You're all crazy. Every one of you. You just sit here, in your cosy little house, with your cold sodas and your Facebook pages, like it all matters. Like it's even real. But it's not! It's all going to burn and you're going to be nothing but bleached skulls. Don't you get it? You're dead! All of you are dead!'
(Riley in ‘Strange Things Happen')
Morris later elaborates:
An example of this and one of my favourite Facebook put-downs is the outburst quoted above from Riley, the undercover girl from the future in the second season of the Fox network TV series, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Cracking under the strain of impersonating an alienated, pre-Judgment Day American teenager, Riley wheels on her bemused foster family in the kitchen one day and, with four viciously delivered metonyms (‘just sit here', ‘cosy little house', ‘cold sodas', ‘Facebook pages'), pours scorn all over their lives. In this moment, Facebook is absorbed into the store of belittling stereotypes of mindless suburban complacency that print media, film and, superbly, television (the suburban medium par excellence), have been producing—and donating to critical culture—for more than fifty years.
Of course, Morris subsequently notes that:
Linking to this film [T2] in particular, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles TV series makes John Connor's adolescence a study in psychic conflict between longing for an ordinary suburban life and knowing that (as Riley puts it) ‘it's all going to burn'. What sets John apart as a leader here is not his awareness of the fire to come; in a fuzzy way, there is common knowledge around him of the unsustainability of our world. Rather, this version of John Connor stands out from his helpers (with the partial exception of Cameron, his studious Terminator guard) because he knows why people care, none the less, about cold sodas and cosy houses, ‘like it all matters'. I doubt that John Connor could risk having a Facebook page, but I'm fairly sure that he'd want one.
...okay, I think it's awesome, and you would too if you imprinted on Morris' classic The pirate's fiancée: feminism, reading, postmodernism. Because it's very cool when your intellectual crushes share your taste in television!
Now, since she's Australian, I can only hope that she's also a fan of Sea Patrol. I wonder if she's watching the audition episodes of the new season of the Australian version of So You Think You Can Dance?
What teens care about is the ability to control information as it flows and to have the information necessary to adjust to a situation when information flows too far or in unexpected ways. When teens argue that they produce content that is "public by default, private when necessary," they aren't arguing that privacy is disappearing. Instead, they are highlighting that both privacy AND publicity have value. Privacy is important in certain situations - to not offend, to share something intimate, or to exclude certain people. Yet, publicity can also be super useful. It's about being present in social situations, about chance encounters, about obtaining social status.
I keep my pseudonymous journal mostly public with the occasional private entry, and searchable by Google et al. I'm not looking for a lot of traffic -- I like the sense of writing for a small audience, since it means I can be pretty informal and assume that people reading generally acquire some context of where I'm coming from, so I don't need to spell everything out or get bogged down in qualifications.
I also like to keep enough of an open house that I occasionally meet new people, and sometimes get a comment back from someone who's post I've linked to. But not so open that I use my real name or disclose potentially identifying details about myself in public posts -- I use Facebook differently than LiveJournal/Dreamwidth.
So, yeah -- for teens, and fandom, and all kinds of groups, full participation requires a foundation of granular options for both privacy and publicity.
And the thing is – the continual thing about the damn book cover, the Feministing logo, the “unseriousness” of that one Guardian article, the need of some commenters here to devalue the fact that Feministing DOES cover issues related to class, disability, race, trans experience: to me, that’s just exactly what Valenti’s blog post was talking about. It’s the need to compensate for someone being more widely known than you are by telling yourself that you are More Serious, more of a Real Feminist, whatever. It’s the need to create a feminist elite, and to tell yourself that whoever is the easiest to like or to know about must be non-elite. It’s some indie hipster record-collector shit, but politicized, and it’s fucking stupid.
Um, right, that's exactly what this is about -- indie hipster record-collector shit, in the guise of an accessible vs. elitist faux debate.
I've been reading Tiger Beatdown for almost a year now, because it's smart and sharp and funny, but I think Doyle's on the wrong side of this one, to the extent that accepting the "Jessica Valenti vs. Nina Power / accessible vs. elitist" framework in the first place is the wrong side.
For me, Power herself comes off best of them all in her own blog post -- her blog infinite thought makes her seem pretty cool in general, even if she is big on Badiou (my lack of thoughts on Badiou) -- and reviews of her book like this one (which, surprise!, doesn't mention Valenti at all) make me think that her book's well worth reading. (See also this interview Power did with taz).
I finally decided to check out The Good Wife after reaching the tipping point of positive mentions from people whose tastes I respect. So far, my main thoughts are that a) surely this is the new big femslash fandom, right? and b) the lead actors do a fine job, but cable tv dramas have spoiled me and raised the bar a couple of notches higher than what Julianna Margulies et al. are delivering. Still, it's a solid show, and intriguing enough to keep me watching.
But it did make me miss Damages, which I'd given up on a third of the way into the second season. So I've picked up where I'd left off for my fix of Glenn Close as Patty Hewes, discovering in the process that the third season begins tomorrow. Needless to say, this means I haven't had time to watch the Caprica pilot yet, nor have I seen any reaction posts on my flist so far. This calls for a poll:
Poll #2151 Serious drama is srs bzns
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 9
I am watching
View Answers
The Good Wife
5 (55.6%)
Damages and I can't wait for the new season
2 (22.2%)
Damages? No, I burnt out on that show
1 (11.1%)
Damages? Never seen it.
2 (22.2%)
Caprica, and you'll love it!
0 (0.0%)
Caprica, tentatively
0 (0.0%)
Caprica? Hell no, not after the last half season (or more) of BSG
3 (33.3%)
Spartacus: Blood and Sand and Lucy Lawless
0 (0.0%)
Something better that I'll mention in the comments
4 (44.4%)
Aliens Made Them Stop Doing It: Vulcan couples counselors, Wraith as anti-yenta, time travellers show them glimpses of their bleak, bitter future together
Mary Shoe fic: authorial inserts of their own lovingly-described footwear adorning TV characters
xpreg: genetic testing reveals that the baby will grow up to be a mutant
Big Sang: exchanges for epic-length songfic
RCS: following the U.S. Supreme Court's logic, Real Corporation Slash takes off
What's your prediction?
Feel It (So You Think You Can Dance) -- I have been dreaming, dreaming about my fantasy SYTYCD vid, and this is even better than I ever could have imagined. Really fantastic editing.
Etheric Messages (Fringe) -- a spooky and fascinating take on Olivia Dunham.
Afraid of Americans (Watchmen) -- an inspired song choice that the vid completely delivers on
Three quick picks before I dive back in:
Past in Present (Chak De! India) -- this is about as 'more joy' as it gets
Treat Me Like a Villain (Dark Angel) -- I want to find out who made this and go watch all of their other vids; deft & effective
No Fate (FlashForward) -- now this is the show that I wanted FlashForward to be
Bonus fic rec: Five Aliens Aeryn Sun Never Wants to See Again by
cofax7 -- just awesome, and also: Aeryn!( Chuck 3x01 - 3x03 - spoilers )
Separately, a couple of posts worth linking to:
solitary_summer on Torchwood, slash, fetishization, and RTD
smirnoffmule: On Slashing While Straight and Writing While Queer
Lastly a SHINee music video for More Joy Day eve:
Erik Davis sounding very Erik Davis (Aya Avatar: Drink the Jungle Juice):
With its floating Roger Deanscapes and hallucinogenic flora, the manifest world of Avatar instead spoke another truth: that the jungle pantheism that now pervades the psychoactive counterculture has gone thoroughly mainstream. Of course, noble savage narratives of ecological balance and shamanic wisdom have been haunting the Rousseau-mapped outback of the western mind for centuries.
k-punk sounding very k-punk ("They Killed Their Mother": Avatar as Ideological Symptom):
What is foreclosed in the opposition between a predatory technologised capitalism and a primitive organicism, evidently, is the possibility of a modern, technologised anti-capitalism. It is in presenting this pseudo-opposition that Avatar functions as an ideological symptom.
Bob Rehak sounding very Bob Rehak (Watching Avatar):
Cameron’s nifty trick, though, has always been to frame his visual and practical effects in ways that lend them a crucial layer of believability. I’m not talking about photorealism, that unreachable horizon (unreachable precisely because it’s a moving target, a fantasized attribute we hallucinate within the imaginary body of cinema: as Lacan would put it, in you more than you).
Maybe that's the true genius of the movie -- it's a magic mirror which reflects back what so many different people bring to it, an enchanted well that so many different people can drink from.
Suddenly professional wrestling is relevant to media fandom!
For those of you planning to tune in, I will be happy to field any and all of your wrestling questions.
Poll #1999 The Jersey Shore poll
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 6
Are you watching?
View Answers
Yes, and I'm horrified
0 (0.0%)
Yes, and I'm proud to see my people represent
0 (0.0%)
Actually I'm J-WOWW
0 (0.0%)
Not yet, but I've been meaning to check it out
0 (0.0%)
No, and I'm already sick of hearing about it
2 (33.3%)
Dude, your taste is appalling and I fear for your brain cells
2 (33.3%)
No, seriously, if you start posting about this show I'll defriend you
0 (0.0%)
Is this one of those bizarre American things?
1 (16.7%)
Just don't start referring to yourself as 'The Predicament', okay?
2 (33.3%)
Let's go dancing at Karma this weekend!
0 (0.0%)
So here's what I have been watching and enjoying over the past twelve months, in no particular order except when it is:
( Sarah Connor, You're Beautiful, Sea Patrol, Thick of It, Torchwood/Doctor Who, The City, wrestling, Venture Bros. )
Honorable mention:
LOST (actually a pretty strong season this year, and I seriously can't wait until the final season)
Better Off Ted (loved the first season, but the recent episodes have been funny but mostly disappointing)
Battlestar Galactica (sadly not on my favorites list -- and Ron Moore, you know why)
SYTYCD (the Australia series should probably be listed above, except that my memories of it have faded under the onslaught of more recently aired and decidedly subpar U.S. and Canada versions)
Wow, that's a lot more than I thought I'd watched this year. Now I don't feel so bad about falling behind on the serious drama side.
This is a critically important moment!
No, I'm not joking. Yes, there's a long, hard road still ahead.
That’s why I’m challenging you today—by offering to double your gift—to be
as generous as possible.
In a tough economy, deciding where to give is more difficult than ever.
Here's a year-end, tax-deductible opportunity to
support an effective organization with a proven track record.
Please help us to continue saving lives.
Your participation at this point in history is very important, and I'd like to send you some
free gifts to show our appreciation.
Please send in your gift today!
Thank you!
We owe the deepest debt of gratitude
Thank you very much,
Thank you so much for all that you do.
But that's not what this is about -- I wanted to extend my praise and sympathies to the undersung legion of beta readers who make this season so merry and bright and typo-free. You have my deepest admiration, after having spent much of the last two days copy-editing stuff I didn't write and fighting the resulting urge to stab myself. Hyphenation is not a dark art! Parallel sentence structure really is your friend! Random capitalization doesn't make your tired jargon look more impressive!
So when I dive into this year's crop of Yuletide stories, dear betas, I'll be thinking of you, the watchful guardians of readability.
