Frameshift

Links roundup linked

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 16:34:55 GMT

Fresh from Symposium Blog: Fans, geeks, wrestlers, and Sherlock Holmes: links roundup.

Also new: Karen Hellekson, co-editor of OTW's Transformative Works & Cultures online journal, on Breaking the primacy of print.

Has anyone been watching the new season of SYTYCD Canada? Apparently there are four episodes out already. After the fiasco of the most recent U.S. season, and the cancellation of the Australia version, I'm just not sure I'm ready to plunge into yet another cycle so soon.

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You cow!

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 21:28:25 GMT

Being a sucker for a good soap opera-style whodunnit, I started watching EastEnders around Christmas. Unfortunately I'm about 2 weeks behind, so I have several episodes to catch up on before I can get to today's big reveal of who killed Archie Mitchell. Unless they've amped up the clues, though, it seems like a complete toss up, since half the characters had the means, motive, and opportunity. Either way, I'm really enjoying Barbara Windsor as Peggy Mitchell.

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.

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Fantastic fantastic, elastic elastic

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 18:01:23 GMT

I probably shouldn't be posting when I'm several days overdue on replies to comments from last week, but I need to clear my head.

I'm a casual and irregular viewer of <em>Chuck</em>, but I was really thrown by the season premiere episodes.

So Sarah asks Chuck to run away with her, and he says no? Because he wants to be a spy? Wow. I thought the lesson from the first two seasons is that the spy business is deadly and dehumanizing, it means keeping secrets and hiding your identity from your loved ones, the bosses treat agents and assets as disposable, if Chuck gets on their bad side they'll just lock him up in an undisclosed location and throw away the key, and his connection to the spy world perpetually puts his friends and family in danger. Why on earth would he choose that over Sarah? I just don't buy the idea that it's to make a difference and protect the people he cares about -- it felt more like a selfish, childish glee at the prospect of running around playing secret agent, especially now that he knows kung fu (sometimes). And why wouldn't what Sarah wants -- not to mention her greater knowledge of what the life of a spy really entails -- factor into his choice?

I don't know, that kind of ruined the character for me, and I'm left feeling that Sarah is better off without him.

Also, was it just me, or did Yvonne Strahovski look completely non-plussed in the scene where Sarah & obligatorily hot female guest star were shot lasciviously in their bra & panties? After a certain point, that stuff stops being "ironic" or whatever it was supposed to be in the first place.

And I don't know if this was ever a plot point or canon fact earlier, but Chuck's decision to be a spy felt even more grating in the context of Casey recounting his past assassination attempts on a foreign leader. Maybe I'm naive, but -- didn't there used to be at least a superficial consensus that assassinating foreign leaders is a bad thing that the U.S. shouldn't do?

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:

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Slinkmap?

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:42:47 GMT

Cat and Girl has a new comic on social media anxiety. I can also relate to this Gulliveresque one from last month. Bonus comic: more in keeping with the holiday spirit is Ape Lad's Laugh-Out-Loud Cats.

The Learned Fangirl asks: Is Social Media the new Pink Collar Ghetto of Tech? I'm so far removed from the tech industry that I couldn't begin to answer that; my guess is that there's something there, but perhaps that's not quite the right way to frame the question.

Eric Goldman writes up a recent Cyber Civil Rights symposium inspired by "law professor Danielle Citron’s two recent articles on online harassment of women: "Law's Expressive Value in Combating Cyber Gender Harassment" (Michigan Law Review) and "Cyber Civil Rights" (Boston University Law Review)." No easy answers to important questions, but some interesting thinking.

Terri Senft posted excerpts from two new thoughtful essays she's writing: From Personal Property to Speaking Subjects: Teens and the Right to Credit in an Attention Economy and Position paper: The Case of Online Micro-celebrity Gangsta Flirtation.

Lisa Nakamura in FlowTV on True Blood's Vampire Politics:

Given the program’s preoccupation with the South as a site of struggle over various types of social integrations, race is the program’s repressed thing, the thing that if we tune closely enough into we, we can faintly hear in the background. And it is repressed for a reason—race has had its day as a concern, the credit sequences depict it as part of an antique and literally crumbling or melting past. Race struggles were never sexy in the way that vampires are in this program; vampires are self-fashioning sexy subjects in ways unavailable to and indeed impossible for people of color.... [D]espite our supposedly post-racial state, True Blood lets human-vampire sex stand in for the racial affect that is promised in the credits, but cannot occur in the program itself.

An interview with Julian Breece, creator of Buppies, a new online soap opera on BET's website which looks promising so far. Breece also made a short film, The Young and Evil, which sounds intriguing.

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None dare call it linkspam

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 18:01:06 GMT

Okay, consider this a belated attempt to reverse the decline of my journal into an infrequently-updated tumblog. I'm not sure why I've become so reticent lately; I feel like I'm barely managing to leave a comment or two a week in other people's journals, though I compose dozens in my head.

In no particular order:

Gabriella Coleman on piracy as politics: "For those of us who believe in greater access and different ways of imagining structures and strategies of re-compensation, piracy on its own is not certainly enough and I understand fully and even to some degree, share the skepticism many feel toward such language. But I am not quite ready to declare a politics of piracy as always politically bankrupt or necessarily backward." An interesting supplement to Alexis Lothian's "Den of Thieves" argument viz. fandom, vidding, and piracy through the lens of Lim's "Us".

MightyGodKing on current Marvel/DC superhero comics: "[I]t’s worth reflecting upon how few Big Two books are good as opposed to merely being competent. For DC there’s Detective Comics, Batman and Robin, and Secret Six. For Marvel there’s Incredible Hercules, Invincible Iron Man, the “cosmic” books, and whatever comic fills the Iron Fist slot for any given month. That is it at present. (Daredevil’s new direction is uneven, Captain America is in a boring lull period, and Amazing Spider-Man is inconsistent on a week-to-week basis.) Eight books between the Big Two that are genuinely good comics and not just placefillers.... [he ETAs:] I forgot Fantastic Four, which belongs in the “good” category. Also: Ghost Rider. But that’s it." I agree -- the only comics I truly look forward to reading each month are all on his list (the three DC titles, plus Invincible Iron Man and Fantastic Four).

danah boyd on her experience giving a talk at Web 2.0 Expo: "I immediately knew that I had lost the audience. Rather than getting into flow and becoming an entertainer, I retreated into myself. I basically decided to read the entire speech instead of deliver it. I counted for the time when I could get off stage. I was reading aloud while thinking all sorts of terrible thoughts about myself and my failures. I wasn't even interested in my talk. All I wanted was to get it over with." This is basically my public speaking nightmare, except even worse thanks to the Twitter backchannel plus magnified by 100 due to venue, audience size, and sexism. I do several presentations a year, and I've gotten pretty comfortable doing them, but I still remember viscerally the handful of truly wretched experiences. My most surreal one was this spring, when I missed my flight due to a snowstorm and did my talk over the phone with no ability to gauge the audience's response as I was speaking. It was actually worse than the disembodied experience of doing a presentation on a teleconference, because at least with the latter the audience is equally dispersed and invisible to each other.

Skinny Jeans and Fruity Loops: The Networked Publics of Global Youth Culture -- a post about a recent talk by ethnomusicologist Wayne Marshall: "What can we learn about contemporary culture from watching dayglo-clad teenagers dancing geekily in front of their computers in such disparate sites as Brooklyn, Buenos Aires, Johannesburg, and Mexico City? How has the embrace of "new media" by so-called "digital natives" facilitated the formation of transnational, digital publics? More important, what are the local effects of such practices, and why do they seem to generate such hostile responses and anxiety about the future?" I haven't had a chance to listen to the audio yet, but he uses Jerking as one of his case studies! Count me in. Also, Marshall has a great blog.

I posted a vid for Bikini Kill's "Rebel Girl" the other day which I facetiously described as Maoist kitsch. But I was fascinated by the images in the clips, and set about tracking down the source. Turns out they're from The Red Detachment of Women, a Chinese ballet that was one of the eight model works during the Cultural Revolution. The full filmed version is available online here, or (in fifteen 6:46 minute chunks) starting here on YouTube. I've seen about a third of it so far, and it really is pretty stunning.

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Bullet points

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 18:47:06 GMT

I've been creeping through Babylon 5, of which I'd only seen the first couple of seasons when it originally aired, and last night watched 4x06, "Into the Fire." And, wow, the last fifteen or twenty minutes made me cringe with embarrassment for everyone involved. Please tell me this is not an unusual reaction? And -- while there's still plenty I love about the show (Peter Jurasik, you're so fantastic!) -- my resolve to make it through the remaining episodes is seriously weakened. Should I go on?

Returning to professional wrestling is making me realize how much of media fandom's interpretive lenses I've absorbed in the last few years. I can't say that I'm a slasher, but watching the Randy Orton-John Cena feud has finally made me "get" the dynamics of enemy!slash. They despise each other! They're obsessed with each other! They can't quit each other! Their matches involve handcuffs, and bondage-via-ring-ropes, and being locked in a steel cage together! Cena has a certain dorky Boy Scout air about him, kind of like Clark Kent on Smallville, and Orton -- well, he's closer in psychopathology to a Batman villain than Lex Luthor, but he does have a shaved head!

A few random links:

Notes on Going Under: A DEVO Primer (Rhizome) -- a fascinating look at the band, including their video art, and the surrounding cultural milieu in the '70s and early '80s.

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #9 (The Hooded Utilitarian), via the DEVO article -- a look at an issue of the 1940s comic: gorilla bondage! the reversal of evolution! William Moulton Marston's fetishistic feminism! And pages and pages of gorgeous art.

Terminology page at POPSEOUL! -- the most interesting ones are those that don't have a direct English equivalent:

Ajumma: a married woman characterized by short permed hair and aggressive attitude

Ajusshi: generally a married or older man characterized by poor sense of fashion and a huge ego

Nae-soong: inconsistency between a girl’s true personality (i.e. extroverted), and external (i.e. introverted, shy and innocent) personality. In other words, trying to hide your true intentions self by acting sweet and innocent.

Oppa-dongsaeng: used to describe a relationship between an older male and younger female. Also commonly used by celebrities to cover up their romantic relationship

selca: term that refers to “self-camera” or taking pictures of yourself

Ul-jjang: a term created by netizens to describe a person with the best face (ul-gul: face and jjang: best)

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Quick links: glass microbiology, YouTube videos as art,

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:59:45 GMT

Via Anne Galloway ("Visualisation, materialisation and affect"): Artist Luke Jerram's Glass Microbiology -- beautiful and mysterious sculptures of viruses (Avian flu, smallpox, HIV, etc.).

The question of pseudo-colouring in biomedicine and its use for science communicative purposes, is a vast and complex subject. If some images are coloured for scientific purposes, and others altered simply for aesthetic reasons, how can a viewer tell the difference? How many people believe viruses are brightly coloured? Are there any colour conventions and what kind of ‘presence’ do pseudocoloured images have that ‘naturally’ coloured specimens don’t?

Alex Juhasz: Everything on YouTube is Video Art... Nah, responding to Virginia Heffernan's NYT column Uploading the Avant-Garde ("In serving these niche audiences with their microgenres, YouTube has solidified its slot as a home for the vernacular avant-garde."). Says Juhasz:

In my paper, I decide that while all the people-made stuff (a sub-set distinguished from the corporate made product that dominates the site) COULD be considered art in the sense that it has been carefully crafted and then consciously distributed with the intention of the public communication of self expression, I don’t want to consider the clearly unconsidered work on YouTube to be “Art.” In its self-aware isolation (I made this in my room, or my backyard with my wrestling buddies), it doesn’t consciously connect to other bodies or theories of video, or to other artists; it doesn’t show enough care. I suppose there could be a “scene” of butt-catchers, as Heffernan suggests, but towards what project, with what beliefs? You need a shared vocabulary, agenda, history, and set of goals to make an “art scene.”

I often don't agree with Juhasz on YouTube, but it's always interesting to try to figure out how and why.

Finally, Sady from Tiger Beatdown: Beyond Good and Evil, Straight to Annoying: A Few Thoughts on Michael Moore --

...I used to wake up to Air America every morning, thanks to the dude I lived with, and what I heard was a lot of screaming about “sheeple,” a lot of self-righteousness, a lot of talking points. And not a lot of deep thought. And Moore, to me, is like the “sheeple” screaming turned up to eleven. He is so angry! And he is so angry in such a catchy, slogan-y way! He wants you to join him so we can all be angry together! Isn’t that fun? We are such good people. We are people. Not sheeple. God forbid. Hey, let’s throw the word “evil” around! Because we all know that’s not a tactic people commonly use to rile up a base and/or oversimplify issues in a really dangerous way. It’s just fun to say when you don’t like someone and want to scare people away from agreeing with them. Evil evil evil. Woo!

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Links: on TV bashing, networking sites as social drugs, otaku postmodernism

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:27:56 GMT

Melissa Gregg linked to her post from last year that I hadn't seen, a critical response to Clay Shirky's Gin, Television, and Social Surplus talk that several people on my friendslist linked to. An excerpt:

Relating the leisure pursuits of a small minority of educated and highly networked early adopters to the prospect of far broader social empowerment seems to imply that being able to make a lolcat is a step towards taking control back from the structural constraints of everyday life.... The notion of ‘cognitive surplus’ in leisure time actually risks taking capitalism’s productivity and efficiency imperatives to new extremes, part of the pernicious influence of the Getting Things Done industry as it enters the private sphere. But the complicity of Web 2.0 celebrities with capitalist logic is worth a book rather than a blogpost.

Also via her blog, The Digital Given – 10 Web 2.0 Theses by Ippolita, Geert Lovink & Ned Rossiter:

Networking sites are social drugs for those in need of the Human that is located elsewhere in time or space. It is the pseudo Other that we are connecting to. Not the radical Other or some real Other. We systematically explore weakness and vagueness and are pressed to further enhance the exhibition of the Self. ‘I might know you (but I don’t). Do you mind knowing me?’. The pleasure principle of entertainment thus diffuses social antagonisms – how does conflict manifest within the comfort zones of social networks and their tapestries of auto-customisation? The business-minded ‘trust doctrine’ has all but eliminated the open, dirty internet forums. Most Web 2.0 are echo chambers of the same old opinions and cultural patterns. As we can all witness, they are not exactly hotbeds of alternative sub-culture. What’s new are their ’social’ qualities: the network is the message. What is created here is a sense or approximation of the social. Social networks register a ‘refusal of work’. But our net-time, after all, is another kind of labour. Herein lies the perversity of social networks: however radical they may be, they will always be data-mined. They are designed to be exploited. Refusal of work becomes just another form of making a buck that you never see.

Néojaponisme excerpts a passage from Azuma Hiroki's Otaku: Japan's Database Animals which "deconstructs this self-association with postmodernism in Japan, arguing that the idea of a 'postmodern Japan' has more to do with 1980s’ narcissism than proper theoretical conclusions":

Phrased another way, the prosperity of the 1980s enabled Japanese society to forget superficially the existence of its complex towards the United States, which we have examined. “Now the United States has been defeated! We no longer have to speak about the penetration of Americanization in Japan but rather must consider the advancement of Japanism in America!” The rise of postmodernism as an intellectual fad was supported by a climate that produced such claims. This same set of factors in turn aided the spread of otaku culture. The image of Japan that obsesses otaku is in fact no more than a U.S.-produced imitation, yet the atmosphere described above was the very thing that conveniently allowed people to forget about these origins.

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Links for the wary, the weary, and the unwitting. And for Trekkers.

Thu, 14 May 2009 17:19:48 GMT

A challenging analysis via INCITE!: The Denver Chapter of INCITE! and Denver On Fire Respond to Verdict in Angie Zapata Case

"The State creates hate crime laws as a response to calls for protection. However, by putting this protection in the hands of the State, hate crime laws reinforce the legal system and prison system which in turn legitimizes violence carried out by the State. Hate crime laws prosecute individual acts of violence, thus sanctioning the violence that society, institutions, and the State perpetrate against trans people. Additionally, hate crime laws legitimize the legal system as the best response to violence against trans people. This completely ignores community-based responses which are significantly more accountable and respectful. Finally, hate crime law sets up the State as protector, intending to deflect our attention from the violence it perpetrates, deploys, and sanctions. The government, its agents, and their institutions perpetuate systemic violence and set themselves up as the only avenue in which justice can be allocated; they will never be charged with hate crimes."

The Wall Street Journal interviews Gil Kerlikowske, Obama's newly confirmed head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy: White House Czar Calls for End to 'War on Drugs' (or at least that rhetoric -- still, this could get interesting)

The Angry Black Woman on Nina Simone and her version of "Pirate Jenny"

Niall Harrison on Star Trek and Dollhouse (via coffeeandink ): 2-for-1 on Unpopular Fannish Opinions

You know what the new Star Trek movie most reminds me of? Umberto Eco's essay on Casablanca. Seriously, check this out:

Thus Casablanca is not just one film. It is many films, an anthology. Made haphazardly, it probably made itself, if not actually against the will of its authors and actors, then at least beyond their control. And this is the reason it works, in spite of aesthetic theories and theories of film making. For in it there unfolds with almost telluric force the power of Narrative in its natural state, without Art intervening to discipline it. And so we can accept it when characters change mood, morality, and psychology from one moment to the next, when conspirators cough to interrupt the conversation if a spy is approaching, when whores weep at the sound of "La Marseillaise." When all the archetypes burst in shamelessly, we reach Homeric depths. Two cliches make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us. For we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion. Just as the height of pain may encounter sensual pleasure, and the height of perversion border on mystical energy, so too the height of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the sublime. Something has spoken in place of the director. If nothing else, it is a phenomenon worthy of awe.

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Now look here, you --

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 23:43:28 GMT

Mathilde + Christine: Rondins de bois & petits chiens (via Changethethought) -- scrapbooking aesthetics as fine art?

Seen on ESPVisuals: CD Richardson's Cryptozoological Artand John Isaacs' Meat Art -- the flesh fantastic

NYC's Club Animals offer Free Bouncy Rides on the subway and a Human Petting Zoo (via Wooster Collective) -- flipping the geek hierarchy?

Via Lost At E Minor: Character Hunter, "a fun little blog that documents the ubiquitous cartoon characters found on Japanese product packages, advertisements, street signs, and vending machines."

Most excellent of all -- the video for Dizzee Rascal & Armand Van Helden's ridiculously awesome new single "Bonkers":

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Images du jour, moving and still, through the magic of links

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 17:08:02 GMT

Wang Du: Photographs (an installation of 50,000 photographs taken in China in 2007) from a 2007 exhibit at Paris' Galerie Laurent Godin (via VVORK)

Anthony Almeida's Victory Kiss at Times Square (November 4, 2008) - Barack and Michelle Obama (via James Danziger's The Year in Pictures).

Jacques Rival: A giant inflatable mouse floats on the Rhône river, during an artistic happening by French architect Jacques Rival to inform people of the risks of floods -- photo, with more at Getty (Guardian, via we make money not art)

Three shows currently up in New York

Kalup Linzy: If It Don't Fit at the Studio Museum in Harlem -- "From his original take on the soap opera and sketch comedy genres to his music videos and filmic shorts, this compilation tracks the artist’s clever and complex approach to questions or race, gender, class, sexuality and national identity." Kalup Linzy's website and YouTube channel: watch All My Churen (2003). (via Lost at E Minor)

Surveillance from the Doll House at Mireille Mosler on East 67th: "Whether dressed to play a part or a plaything to address, the dummies, dolls, puppets, and personalities of Surveillance from the Doll House represent a mysterious combination of vitality and immobility." Work by four female artists ~~who aren't Joss Whedon~~ including Cindy Sherman and Laurie Simmons. (via we make money not art)

Generational: Younger Than Jesus [145 artists under the age of 33 from around the world], now up at The New Museum in NYC -- exhibit blog (seriously, I have no excuse to miss a show at a museum I can see from my apartment, right?). Artists with work in the show include:

LaToya Ruby Frazier (portfolio on the artist's website, with statement) on her The Notion of Family: Family Work 2002-2009: "The collaboration between my family and myself blurs the line between self-portraiture and social document. Utilizing photography and video to navigate dynamics of the roles we play complicates the usual classifications of functional and dysfunctional families." See also this Daylight Magazine post.

Teaser/promo for Desniansky Raion (video) by Cyprien Galliard, which includes "beautifully choreographed footage of two huge gangs of Russian “underground fight clubs” squaring off and charging, then beating the crap out of one another, in a St. Petersburg housing complex.... It’s an amazing video, a harrowing record of ancient rituals’ being revived in new ways in unexpected places, and a picture of our new cities of ruin." (quoted from Jerry Saltz' NY Mag review of the show)

Cao Fei's photography series of Chinese cosplayers: Cosplayers, Cos-Cosplay, Un-Cosplayers. See also the virtual tour for this Second Life project by Cao Fei (aka China Tracy on SL & YouTube), RMB City: "RMB City will be the condensed incarnation of contemporary Chinese cities with most of their characteristics; a series of new Chinese fantasy realms that are highly self-contradictory, inter-permeative, laden with irony and suspicion, and extremely entertaining and pan-political."

Ryan Trecartin on YouTube: "giddy, gender-bending videos, quick-cut combinations of gay culture and sci-fi that would give David Bowie a headache" (quoted from Ben Davis' artnet review). Watch his 2004 A Family Finds Entertainment (Dennis Cooper in Artforum: "A wonder of Trecartin's videos is that his approach seems as intuitive and driven by a mad scientist-style tunnel vision as it is rigorous and sophisticated, grounded in his expert editing and inordinate gift for constructing complex avant-garde narratives.") and 2007 I-Be AREA (from a NYT review: "...For queer artists of Mr. Trecartin's generation, cross-dressing, cross-identifying and cross-thinking are part of a state of being, not statements of political position. Like the work of John Waters and Jack Smith, his art is about just saying no to life as we think we have seen it and saying yes to zanier, virtual-utopian possibilities.")

Finally, three embedded videos below the cut, also linked for your convenience: music video auteur Chris Cunningham's new Gucci perfume ad (via PSFK), the viddish I´m thru with love - Diana Krall and Hollywood divas (via Danziger) and YouTube vlogger kevjumba's Asians Just Aren't Cool Enough? on the Dragonball movie casting:

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