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.
- Crossposts:http://cryptoxin.livejournal.com/105665.html
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.
( 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:
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.
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.
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:
( examples )
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!
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.
( the radical case against hate crime laws )
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
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
coffeeandink ): 2-for-1 on Unpopular Fannish OpinionsYou 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.
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":
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
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, Cyprien Galliard, Cao Fei, Ryan Trecartin )
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:( videos behind the cut )
