fire breather smoke eater

A tiny bit over a month ago, I wrote the following, about the class I’m taking this semester:

Visual Literacy, a lit department class that seems promising and is mostly online. This is kinda my jam, but I think that it won’t be overly easy and boring for me. I’ll keep you up to date.

In the interest of keeping you up to date: the text is interesting, but I may have been wrong about it not being overly easy and boring. My current project is figuring out how to raise the level of discussion on the class discussion board without sounding condescending, when the current norm is people saying things like, “A rose will always symbolize romance, and a woman will always symbolize beauty.”

Also, while on the subject of Indian food — the “Kashmiri” lunch truck, which disappeared last fall because the woman said she was opening a restaurant in North Oakland, has returned. I didn’t ask what happened to the restaurant plan; I’m a little bit afraid of her. Excited about the additional lunch option, though. It’s located next to the two remaining Thai trucks, on Bigelow Boulevard between Fifth and O’Hara, right across from Soldiers & Sailors. Go show her that you’re glad she’s back.

Also, for good measure, check out this local news story that made me laugh: “Smoke eater” has city official seeing red. Quick synopsis: Darlene Harris realizes she’s not allowed to smoke in the City-County Building. Requisitions fan to blow smoke out of her office so that she won’t get caught. Clever Public Works employee buys her “SMOKE EATER” instead, to call attention to this. Media picks up story, Darlene Harris served again. Beautiful.

in which i tie up loose ends

I bought Christmas cards today. Know what that means? That’s right — I’m officially an old person. There were only 12 in the package, though, and they were kinda pricey, so you’ll probably only end up with one if you’re family or a friend who I don’t see much who I know is into Christmas (or some approximation thereof). I might temper their message by signing them “Agnostically yours” or something.

Right now, for one reason or another, this “Dog Campaign for Real Beauty” spoof ad is making me laugh a lot. The original is here — watch it first if you haven’t seen it before. This campaign is rich with stuff to analyze — I think it’s what I’ll write my term paper about. Speaking of which, the semester is almost up, and next semester I’ll be doing the following:

• Visual Literacy, a lit department class that seems promising and is mostly online. This is kinda my jam, but I think that it won’t be overly easy and boring for me. I’ll keep you up to date.
• Independent study: my goal is to read and write on the topic of blogging in scholarship, with particular attention to the political economy of scholarly publishing. If you know of any reading that might be pertinent that you’re not sure I’ve read, do send it along as a suggestion. I appreciate it.

There are things coming up that interfere with this being finals week looming: Steelers tomorrow evening (I can watch and do homework at the same time, though, promise), holiday specials and Centipede/Parts & Labor at Gooski’s Friday night, The Ex at Garfield Artworks Saturday night. Why does this stuff not happen during the weeks when I don’t give a fig about schoolwork? Alas. I’ll make it all work. Don’t fret, reader.

in other news —

1. Google Reader is making my life way easier — I got pretty behind on my blog-reading recently because I’m especially busy with work and schoolwork and even using Sage is kind of unwieldy. Things just got much wieldier.

2. The new issue of Reconstruction is all about blogging. I haven’t read it all yet, but danah boyd’s article about defining blogging is good, and important for any of us interested in studying this stuff. There appears to be an article that deals a lot with the exact stuff I want to study next semester in my independent study course, as well. Uh oh. (I don’t think it’s precisely the same, though.)

3. Has anyone else noticed that June is getting rather out of hand in this latest development in “Rex Morgan, M.D.”? She’s bound to get served when Niki’s working mom gets home from a tough day at the meth lab. Especially if her pathetic loser drug addict boyfriend is in tow. And regardless of all the circumstances, who takes a kid into his own apartment and tells him to clean up, besides his parent/guardian? You’re overstepping your boundaries, m’lady, and I don’t feel for you if you incur someone else’s wrath for it.

holiday specials, 2006

Okay, folks. It’s time. Say what you will about the rest of the holiday, I really love animated Christmas specials. Let’s let down our critical guard for a moment and look at what we might enjoy this season. Just for you (and for me, so that I can just check back here when I want to know what’s on in a give week), I distill the Post-Gazette’s list of holiday specials down to what’s crucial:

• Tuesday, November 28: “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” ABC, 8:00. I’ve said it in this spot before and I’ll say it again: that moment when Linus gives the lecture on what Christmas is really about, Charlie Brown, is the moment of the year when I kinda almost wish I still believed heartily in all that. This is a must-watch yearly. We don’t get WTAE very well, but I’ll rig up the rabbit ears and/or go to someone else’s house and make this happen.
• Tuesday, December 5: “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town,” ABC, 8:00. A classic Rankin-Bass with some wonderful songs: “Put One Foot in Front of the Other” gets stuck in my head in a sort of awful way, but that’s okay. The Burgomeister Meisterberger’s number about banning toys and there being no more toymakers to the king is my fave, though. I don’t think this one has been on network TV the past few years — good to see they’ve brought it back.
• Friday, December 8: This is a big night; I hope there’s nothing exciting going on outside of my house because I don’t plan on leaving. CBS’s animated holiday special tour de force: “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Frosty the Snowman,” and “Frosty Returns.” It seems like a bit of overkill to put these all on one night, but I guess desperate times call for desperate measures, and it takes a lot of firepower to beat out Stossel AND “To Catch a Predator” in the ratings. “Rudolph” is the king of the holiday specials. Frosty says inane stuff like “You wouldn’t be sneezing if you weren’t cold!” and “Frosty Returns” features such mid-’90s stalwarts as John Goodman. ‘Nuff said.
• Saturday, December 9: “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” ABC, 8:00. If you don’t catch it on network TV, turn on TBS anytime between now and Christmas Eve. If “A Christmas Story” is on, you waited too long.
• Sunday, December 10: “It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie,” WBGN, 11 a.m. This was apparently made for NBC in 2002 and features cameos from Yoda and Triumph. I don’t remember if I watched it then, but it sounds decently funny, or at least campy. Apparently not a keeper, though, since in four years’ time it managed to slide from a prime time spot on NBC to a Sunday morning slot on that channel that’s, like, not really public access, but still shows “The Beverly Hillbillies” several times a night.
• Monday, December 11: “The Year Without a Santa Claus,” NBC, 9:00. Kudos to NBC for bringing this one back to network TV. Why the hell is it on at 9:00? Little kids go to bed at 9:00, guys. The Snowmiser isn’t THAT scary.
• Tuesday, December 12: “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” ABC, 8:00. Since TBS showing it daily for a month AND ABC showing it once in prime time wasn’t enough.

I’ve left off all the shows on cable because, hey, I don’t have cable. Also, as I may have noted above (below?), Garfield is notably absent from this year’s crop of specials. My righteous indignance knows no bounds with respect to this. Perhaps I will fire off an ugly email in the direction of Rob Owen.

john fahey, sonic outlaw

Perhaps surprisingly, two parts of my weekend (cultural consumptionwise) that resonated a great deal with one another were the Negativland documentary Sonic Outlaws and the John Fahey album “The Dance of Death and Other Plantation Favorites.” What, you may ask, ties together a mid-’90s film about the state of intellectual property and culture jamming and a record recorded in 1964 by an educated young white man imitating the style of older black musicians? Allow me to postulate.

A theme that the Negativland movie kept returning to was this: in a media-based culture in which cultural texts — songs, stories, etc. — are passed along via record, and in which those records (regardless of medium) are considered to be the strict property of the producer, the continuity and subtle mutationism of “folk culture” are all but disallowed. Mark Hosler and Don Joyce keep returning in the film to the idea that what they attempt to engender through their band is, strangely enough, a return to folk culture: while it may seem what they’re doing in terms of appropriating modern media texts in as postmodern a manner as possible, structurally they’re effecting a return to the same sort of cut-and-paste, retell-and-improve methodology that was until very recently in history the most prominent way to transmit culture.

Now, I’m not about to tell you that John Fahey was a product of folk culture — while I’m no Fahey expert, as best I can read it, Fahey’s playing emerged from a canon of recorded music, both that of European composers and, clearly, that of Southern “blues men.” Here comes my point: what Fahey played represented a fusion of his main influences that managed not to stray incredibly far from either (when he passed off some of his early work as being that of a “Blind Joe Death,” he fooled even some folk music experts), but at the same time combined the two to create pieces that transcended either and made something brand new and perhaps “experimental.”

John Fahey copped entire melodies but at the same time created something totally new with them — fused styles and entire musical vocabularies in the same way that the earliest jazz musicians did with European and African music. Fahey was fully aware of what he was doing, but let’s not fool ourselves: so did the jazz giants. (I remember reading, I believe in the Cage chapter of The Bride and the Bachelors, the assertion that in fact, Coltrane and Davis et al. were reading the existentialists just like the white intellectuals of their time; perhaps much of what we hear and repeat about the “natural inborn genius” of the jazz virtuoso is simply mythologizing and slightly racialist/culturalist assumption?)

Just as Fahey’s early work sought ambitiously to fuse American roots music with more “high culture”-oriented European composition, Negativland in the ’80s and ’90s concerned themselves with combining the composition of music with the overwhelmingly hypersaturated media landscape of the time. They, too, appropriated entire lines and verses and semiotic vocabularies in order to create art that both reflected their environment and made statements about the nature of making cultural texts.

An amusing point in the Negativland film comes when it’s pointed out that U2, on the Zoo TV tour, used spliced video from live satellite feeds — clearly copyrighted material — on their bajillion TV screens. This, only a few years after Island sued Negativland for copyright infringement. Similarly, while Fahey was copping lines and techniques overtly in the interest of his art, scores of British bands were becoming massively popular doing much of the same: copying the styles of American blues artists (and eventually simply copying one another copying American blues artists).

The fluidity of the mutationism is what’s key here: someone like Fahey or Negativland, working consciously within the context of “folk culture,” is open to reappropriation of their work. Someone like, say, The Rolling Stones, working as a mainstream rock band within the business culture of the music industry, will appropriate blues techniques but won’t allow for their own material to be appropriated by the next generation (see The Rolling Stones v. The Verve).

and now for something utterly despicable.

I’m at the parents’ house, and thus on a slow computer and wanting to get back to watching TV, but I can’t not talk about this thing that makes me immensely angry: read this Post-Gazette story. You know how I feel about the sort of “investigative reporting” that Marty Griffin does if you read my post a while back about Dateline’s “To Catch a Predator” series. I normally defend reporters because I realize that the corporate structure of the news business and the profit motive are what fuels sensationalism, but I’ll lay it down: Marty Griffin is the most vicious, pathological reporter in Pittsburgh and has finally driven someone who had serious problems, and who could have sought help for those problems, to kill himself. I hope he’s ashamed of himself, and I hope he’s learned a lesson and loses the bullshit “ruthless investigator” routine. If I were KDKA, I would have canned him long ago, but he definitely shouldn’t have a future in the press now.

it’s all in your head

Knowing the nature of Negativland’s craft, and never having seen them live before, I was a bit ambivalent going into the show Tuesday night. It seems like a live show would be inferior to their recordings just because the actual content is nearly all prefabricated and the “performance” lies simply in synthesis; at the same time, one can be fairly certain that these guys can pull off something good, or else they’d cancel their tour and take responsibility for someone else’s homicidal tendencies.

When they were but young, Negativland was doing things with sampling and mashing that weren’t being done by too many people. Sure, there had been an avant garde working with tape loops since not long after the invention of magnetic tape as a medium, but it was just that — a fringe that was doing cool stuff, but not in volume. With the rise of technologies that make mixing and sampling a lot more accessible and less time-consuming, mixing and mashing has become a fairly commonplace practice known to the mainstream, and it stands to question how essential Negativland is today: can Negativland remain relevant?

In order to remain relevant, they have to — and do — take on the most important contemporary issues in a manner that’s both more critical than what their counterparts are doing and more reflexive. Negativland in 1987 reflected the contemporary explosion of information culture at the time, and Negativland in 2006 reflects the culture of 2006, not 1987.

The show — essentially a two-act semi-improvisational play set in the studio of a radio station (It’s All In Your Head FM) — deals ostensibly with the existence of God, and in a more complicated manner with the arguments about it and the issues that spring forth from them. The first “act” looks more at a simple atheism-vs.-theism binary that characterized much of the cultural argument of the West in the late 20th century. Just before the intermission comes what can be interpreted as a terrorist attack, and the second act, much more morose, explores the tortuous complications of the culture wars in a (yes, I’m gonna say it) post-9/11 world.

Act one represents postmodernity in conflict with fundamentalism, and places science (our “current best guess”) as the new way of thinking that religious fundamentalism is reacting to. It concentrates mostly on Judeo-Christian fundamentalism and makes a sound argument against the existence of God. It features a lot of self-referential humor (e.g., a gospel-sounding version of “Christianity is Stupid” mixed in with a lot of other samples of songs discussing God) and what one might call the Negativland equivalent of slapstick (a radio-show feature in which a zookeeper shaves a monkey to show the physical similarity to humans and ostensibly support evolution as a theory).

Act two blows the “safety” of act one out of the water by presenting the real, much more complicated problems we’re faced with in relation to religion, science and their role in global and local politics. Negativland points out the flaws in the traditional binaries we encounter and propagate oftentimes in leftist rhetoric. It’s easy for us to look at science and rationalism in opposition to oppressive Christianity, and to look at other, more “exotic” religious traditions (obviously most notably Islam) in opposition to oppressive Christian hegemony, and not to give much thought to the fact that we’re on some level supporting two things that are diametrically opposed: rationality and oppressive religions (which happen to not be the hegemonic religion in our country).

It’s not an original point in the least, but it’s one that isn’t often discussed in activist circles because such an argument can be seen as counterproductive to the immediate goal (upending the “Christian right” and the general stranglehold that Christian discourse has on our own culture). But perhaps that’s as short-sighted a view as any: perhaps the project of upending Christian hegemony by any means possible is a very temporary one, one that can’t possibly bring about the ultimate desired end (freedom from the oppressive forces of organized religion).

The nature of the show is such that, while this is the main question being grappled with, tons of other factors overlap throughout the “broadcast” (just as happens in an information-rich, image-saturated culture). We’re presented with Freudian hypothesis, both as a vehicle for furthering the cause of science and rationality and defeating religious oppression and as a structural model for looking at the struggle between rationality and supernatural thought. We’re faced the entire time with a choice between wearing a blindfold and surrendering to the idea of this presentation as an imagined radio show or watching the band members/players play a radio team on stage. We’re thinking about media monopolization, we’re accosted by cultural artifacts (especially the records being played) as vehicles in ideological arguments about the nature of being.

It’s a lot to cram into the two-and-a-half hours (or so) of the show, but part of the reward is that so much is presented that the audience is forced to filter the information they’re given and choose what to contemplate. It also clearly mimics the fast-paced and jumbled communication environment we’re faced with today and both parodies mass media communication and challenges us to respond to it.

something to read

If you’re interested in internet communication and social networking sites and the such, do check out danah boyd’s short essay on the creepy newsfeed thing that Facebook enacted last week that had the youngers around me abuzz. It’s well put-together and a good example of a critical look at the weird issues inherent in online social networking with neither cheerleading nor a kill-’em-all attitude toward the sites. Nicely done.

Also, thanks to people for coming out last night — that thang ended up all sold out. I hope you enjoyed.

Serious Game.

Last night I wrote a post, then in another tab in my browser went to a page that, unbeknownst to me, had a Quicktime item embedded in it, which of course crashed my browser and caused me to lose my post.

My best effort to recreate the mood of last night would go something like: Hi folks. I’ve been busy and haven’t posted much lately. I’m nursing wounds from a seeminly inexplicable bike wreck, and reading a good bit and preparing a training session on using blogs in academic research, to co-present to colleagues at work. It’s funny that a lot of what my co-presenter and I are stressing in said presentation is a lot of the same philosophy that I was so publicly and vocally pushing circa three or four years ago in the context of Indymedia. I feel like so much has changed in my life since then, but it makes me feel good to realize that, despite what some people might think, I haven’t gone back on the important stuff that I was saying back then — the context has just changed a bit, and perhaps I’ve tempered certain aspects of my game.

Speaking of my game, I’ve decided that I’m going to try (at least for now) to come up with one somewhat serious post about stuff that I’m interested in studying per week. I think that’s a good goal and gives me a structure to work within, and we’ll see if I decide to change that once school starts. The rest of the random talking will continue as scheduled.

kvetching about stealth marketing.

I kind of hate being known as someone who’s preoccupied with hating Myspace, which I’m not, I just don’t really like it for a number of reasons, and have enumerated them at points in the past. Whatever. So, with that out of the way, I point you to an interesting NY Times article about stealth(-ish) marketing on Myspace: Digital Kids: Myspace blurs line between friends and flacks. (You need a login on the Times website to read it, but it’s free, so if you don’t have one already, just suck it up and get one. You only need to pay if you want an upgraded subscription, to read columnists and do recent crosswords and stuff.)

In the defense of Myspace, social networking sites aren’t the only place that stealth marketing is going on; if you’re attached to a college campus at all, you see it all around you. “Real-life” (is there a better term for this) guerrilla marketing is, I’d say, even more unsettling than internet stealth marketing, because there’s more of a natural tendency to be suspicious of who’s on the other side of an interent-mediated communication (since there’s no face-to-face, nor even any voice-to-voice, through the computer).

When companies hire cool kids to provide word-of-mouth advertising, it creates a situation in which word-of-mouth — which you might consider the last “genuine” form of interaction — can’t be trusted anymore; you never know whether the person you’re talking to, who you might even know well, is speaking from experience or from a script that s/he may or may not actually believe. In essence, in stealth marketing, the message being communicated is being sent by the advertiser to the receiver through the medium of a person who the receiver is expected to respect. How do you feel about being a medium, cool kids?