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October 31, 2003

my ass on a bad day

You're encouraging robots! Take your Max300 and shove it. Paranoia sounds like my ass on a bad day. --kermix

Posted by me at 3:11 PM

the ear is the first step

Hey, you know as well as I do, the ear is just the first step -- kermix

Posted by me at 3:09 PM

October 29, 2003

Weenie


I have no idea what to go as for Halloween. Any ideas? And sorry, Strong Sad already went as David Byrne, so that's out.

Posted by me at 9:48 PM | Comments (2)

Airplanes, boxcutters... Quakers?


Over at Rock on a Spring, Brooke is worried that alternative colleges are being portrayed as accomplices to terrorist acts. Well, Rutgers and CUNY have also taken some shit. But yeah, the point still stands.

Posted by me at 9:26 PM | Comments (0)

October 28, 2003

The unavoidability of spam has

The unavoidability of spam has made approaching it as avant-garde literature the only way to cope. -- Christine

Posted by me at 8:25 PM

October 27, 2003

Now it's time for a little braggadacio / While I swing my arms like Ralph Macchio


You want to listen to MC Frontalot if you haven't already, because he sounds like MC 900 Foot Jesus and Dr. Octagon channeling old-school Fresh Prince tracks. Socially he's covering the same subjects -- computing, gaming, and other nerd-core pastimes -- as Barcelona. Like Negativland, he has the politics of sampling on the brain. He samples Simpsons quotes and They Might Be Giants's "Shoehorn with Teeth." This is good, good stuff, and I suggest you begin with "Which MC Was That?"

Posted by me at 3:41 PM | Comments (1)

October 25, 2003

but hoarser; it comes / No Credit Checks / No Interest Chargeas the effects of delirium.

Normally I don't read spam, but this one with a headline suggesting it could "make the government return your tax money" caught my eye and made me wonder what flavor of rhetoric I would find within, what appeal to the secret anti-government sentiments of my fellow Americans it would employ. Instead I found it contained the kind of actual nonsense which spammers seem to be employing to foil filters lately. The semipoetic garble is sort of haunting, as if some other, deeper voice is trying to break through the noisy static in my inbox:

To: rr@protest.net
Subject: Make th´´ Government r´´t´´rn yo´´r t´´x-money kvxzeq


Qualifying for a free cash grant is easy!
as fifteen to twenty. May I be excused for saying that I was
$10,000 to over $500,000 Available NOW!
Never RepayAgain there is a sound as of a human voice, but hoarser; it
comes
No Credit Checks
No Interest Chargeas the effects of delirium.

See if you meet the requirements here

Posted by me at 10:23 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Wushu? Who knew?


My dear old friend Janice Yeung has made the US Wushu Team! She will be representing us at the 7th World Wushu Championships in November. Congratulations, Janice! This is awesome! And I find it highly noteable from a personal historical standpoint: Most of our friends were considered unathletic in high school (with the exception of EriQ and Catherine, who played soccer) and were generally ignored by coaches as a result. We did play some badminton, but the badminton opportunities were generally limited, and there was not much energy put into helping badminton players develop. It flies in the face of the traditional assumptions of high school gym teachers for cerebral folks like Janice to make it on this level, and to some extent it shows up what a sick model for physical development your traditional rah-rah, glory-in-your-athletic-youth high school PE department is. Yay! Go geeks! P.S. I think it is worth noting this combination wushu/b-boy competition...

Posted by me at 2:36 PM | Comments (0)

October 23, 2003

Here's something I hadn't thought of


"Because art is notoriously difficult to talk about ([Clifford] Geertz, [Local Knowledge,] 1983), much art talk is really craft talk." From a Firstmonday article on children learning photography. What do you think? Discuss.

Posted by me at 11:09 AM | Comments (4)

This is exactly what should happen.


Welcome back, Goldie. The poli-artblog is great.

Posted by me at 12:23 AM | Comments (0)

October 22, 2003

OK, Frank, I took my thirty minutes for serendipity


and looked up something I already knew a little about: the Tigerlillies' production of Edward Gorey works. OMG, match made in heaven. I wish like hell I could see it, but as far as I can tell it's only playing in LA, and when they come to NYC November 1st they will be doing other things. (Now TELL me NYC is more cultured than LA. Liar, liar, liar.) I would love to see the work the following is excerpted from, in particular:
Not everything worked: a surreal poem called The Eggplant Frog (girl becomes infatuated with frogs, girl despises aubergines, girl thinks she sees God in aubergines, or perhaps in frogs) left Stout and drummer Adrian Hughes bemused.

Droooool.

Posted by me at 11:11 PM | Comments (0)

Talking Title Nine in the Ashram Blues

or, Don't Stand On Your Head If You're Menstruating.

So I was all set to write a nice long loving piece about how wonderful it is to be a somewhat more mature person in a performance dance class, because it is. I have jazz dance twice a week this semester. Like my African dance class, it is reminding me how much I love to dance for its own sake, without the complicating factor of having to negotiate the meaning of dancing with a member of the opposite sex who may or may not be trying to cruise me.

Jazz dance class is providing additional insight, however, in that it is something I tried a few times before as a much younger person. We had it in a mandatory PE section on and off through elementary and junior high school, and then, because I loved the school's resident dance teacher so much, I took a few voluntary courses in high school which parlayed into a slightly better understanding of what she expected us to do in the school musicals.

I enjoyed working with Cynthia Crass (ahem: Cynthia Crass! IMDB doesn't list that she was in the British touring company of the Rocky Horror Show, but her cachet went up just that much when she told me that) and with Claire O'Berry, and certainly never had any negative experiences with them, but I enjoy jazz dance so much more now that I have a little more perspective on the world. When I was a kid I never thought of myself as a dancer. For reasons of the peculiarities of late-70s feminism which I won't go into now, I identified as a tomboy; the girls who liked to dance wore frilly pink things and were very very girly, and I didn't like them very much. For another, there was an insanely competitive ballet scene in my hometown (not due, apparently, to the teachers, but rather to the bourgeois matrons living vicariously through their little swans and butterflies). I went back and wrote about it this last January for the hometown paper (dammit, that link are broken!), and had stage mothers actually push their children into my path as I went around interviewing the kids.

There are certain things I missed by not dancing when I was younger; I have less flexibility right now than I would like, I spot badly enough to make my pirouettes look drunk, and my balance even when I'm standing still is pretty poor (well, at least when I'm asked to stand on one toe). I feel like I'm making up for lost time when I stand up straight, an experience I am now coming to enjoy simply for the feel of my back and muscles coming together to make it happen. But I think if I had danced when I was younger, I would never have enjoyed these things. Probably I would have taken them for granted.

Plus, they would most likely have been lost in the ambient social pressure to compete which seems to pervade the ranks of young dancers who want to go pro and which we all felt at my school. I probably would have felt anxious for not picking things up right away and slack for not practicing outside of class, and the anxiety probably would have made me hate dancing and identify as a poor dancer. It's nice to be in a place where most of us are struggling. Most of us seem to have a little experience in dance, but not enough for any one person to stand out. None of us is expected to do anything more than push our stretches a little further. That and the all-female makeup of the class makes it feel quite acceptable to fuck up and fall down giggling. I'd like to maybe look a little more graceful in the routines our teacher (who also teaches at Alvin Ailey) puts together, but I'm not sweating it.

So yeah, I was going to write all that, and then I had yoga class today and came away fuming. Something about the yoga teacher has always rubbed me the wrong way (could it be the stupid little shorts he always wears which have elastic around the legs and look for all the world like bloomers? or his Mr. Rogers-like supercalm voice? or just that I hate having male teachers for physical exercise?)... and then today in the second to last pose in the class, he tells everyone to grab two blankets and take their mat to the wall, adding almost under his breath that anyone having their period should get a bolster and a block instead. He said it so quickly that I almost thought I'd heard him wrong.

Think of the awkwardness of this moment: If you're menstruating, you have two options. The first is to grab the different equipment and signal to the not-all-female class that you're uncontrollably hemorrhaging in your shorts, something that years and years of blue-water-on-slim-maxi-with-wings-for-thongs, they'll-never-know-you're-going-through-this-TERRIBLY-EMBARASSING-STIGMA-WE-CAN'T-NAME advertisements have said you ABSOLUTELY MUST NOT SIGNAL or risk social ostracism. (If I was any more comfortable with being a woman, I might not be inclined to liken this to a gentle request to pin a bright yellow Star of David to the crotch of my yoga pants.) Or, you disobey the teacher and do what everyone else is doing, risking consequences which you guess might actually have a medical basis.

It turned out the pose in question more or less involved standing on your head, something I am very eager to do with my newfound abdominal strength. It looked like a great stretch. Those of us on the rag were told to do a much less strenuous horizontal stretch in which we basically lay prone on a big pillow.

OK, Mr. Bloomers, so what the hell was that all about? No time to ask right away, Mr. Bloomers is busy saying "There there, isn't that better?" as he replaces the big pillow, now under my head during the last pose, with a few thinner blankets so I could do the pose right. (I shit you not. He said "There there, isn't that better?" Verbatim.)

So naturally I cornered him after class. "What's the reason," I asked -- "is it something medical, or something having to do with the physics of menstrual blood?" He delicately told me that there were a few reasons behind it. First, he said, something about blood clots. OK, I said; a medical reason.

But then he tempered that claim with something about "the natural downward flow" which shouldn't be stopped, and then went on to begin some platitude about how we like to think of that time of month as a "time to take it easy." At that point the next class's teacher, who is a woman, stopped by, and he weaseled out of finishing his statement. She told me that Mr. Iyengar, who founded this particular flavor of yoga, decided on these strictures with the help of his daughter, who also practices yoga. And, the teacher guessed, it probably went back to the scriptures yoga is based on.

And here I was just telling my doubtful Pentecostal friend just the other day that she need not mind her church's dictums against yoga, because plenty of practitioners do it without the spiritual baggage attached. So much for that.

People, in case you haven't gotten it yet (no, you'll never live that tampon comment down, Evan), I'm rather posessive about what I do with my menstrual blood. It's best not to give me advice on how to manage it. And so, Mr. Bloomers, keep your hokey borrowed spirituality off of my headstand, and I won't make the political statement of bleeding on your whiteboy ashram.

Posted by me at 5:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Happy Birthday, Tricia


Just a reminder: just because militias mostly aren't making the NY Times headlines these days doesn't mean that some angry Americans don't still believe in them and perceive, through a right-wing lens, that their government has betrayed them. As Tom Tomorrow and others have pointed out, if this guy was Muslim, this would have made the NY Times front page.

Posted by me at 10:15 AM | Comments (0)

October 21, 2003

Think antibiotic thoughts


Everybody focus your benevolent energies on Estrellita. She is very, very, very sick. In addition to a nasty head cold of some sort she has been lethargic since she came home with me, and now the hip she has been favoring the whole time has a nasty swelling to it. Thank god for Petfinder insurance, but I can't stand to see her so unhappy. Think good thoughts about the pussycat.

Posted by me at 12:20 AM | Comments (3)

October 19, 2003

Anatomy of Homework

11:50 pm I know more now about why I hate writing for display to the whole class. I wouldn't have worried about it when I was in high school, when I was convinced I was God's gift to writing and the rest of my peers sucked (which, when I was in a class without any of my friends in it, they invariably did). Now I'm facing a tougher, smarter crowd, so I want to tuck tail between my legs and just trot my essay directly into the hands of the teacher. For the most part I don't worry about what the teacher thinks, with the exception of times when I get complexes about how much I admire the teacher for their greatness. Mostly I see teachers as all-forgiving. Like therapists. They know I'm working hard and trying my best to develop my understanding of things, and their job is to give me constructive criticism, not to savage me. My fellow students have no such mandate.

12:48 It is the presence of roommates which leads me to stand in the kitchen asking myself "Donut? Or sandwich?" If I was living alone, there would be no question; there would be no donuts. How did the donuts get here, anyway? I think it was an accident of conversation that they even came up. I don't think any of us really wanted them. But we got a dozen.

It was a good sandwich, though. Fake chicken, feta, cheddar and tomato on toasted "Southwestern Flatbread." The "flatbread" is a global citizen, sold in the same kind of package as the "Tandoori Naan" and made by someone with a Greek name. Still it's pretty good, and I don't even like jalapenos. I had blueberry pomegranate juice to go with. I think perhaps I am getting a little too fucking fancy.

12:50 An hour later I have still not managed to get around the holes in my understanding of why the development of modern concepts of simultaneity are mutually exclusive with medieval notions of time based on divine causality, have more or less erased and rewritten the same paragraph five times, and am not any closer to answering the question of the sociopolitical roles of novels and newspapers in modern societies.

2:53 Got distracted by things I wanted to buy on the internet, and their associated cartoons.

People around me at school are talking about hitting a wall. I feel it too. The excellent work zen that kept me away from people and immersed in my books for the first half of the semester has flickered out. I read and read and yet I can't get things to stay in my head. I have also lost the ability to go to bed around midnight which I so carefully cultivated while I was working, and it gets later and later and I find that I just can't bring myself to sleep. The things I originally intended to be doing are lost in a screenful of other browser windows and I have convinced myself I will not finish them tonight even though I devoted a good chunk of the evening to them and don't want to spend more time on them tomorrow.

* * *

Oh, fuck it all, I might as well just blog. What else of note has happened lately... For the second time in my life I had a professor tell me to put away my laptop during a lecture the other day. It was a man who was apparently central to founding the Communications, Computing, and Technology Department. He said the laptop was distracting. I told him I was taking notes. (I was. I also had iChat open, because those of us with Rendezvous wanted to talk about using video games to teach, and we felt pretty sure the lecture was going to be tedious and irrelevant.) He told me to get out a notebook. I didn't have a notebook. I don't carry them; I have my laptop so I can put my notes someplace where they will be indexable easily, and I won't have a billion notebooks to schlep around the next time I move.

He gave up, and returned to a lecture that was so completely irrelevant, disorganized, and marked by technical failures that the guy next to me started calculating how much money we'd wasted on it.

Most of the other folks closed their laptops. I left mine open despite the fact there was now nobody to talk with and nothing to take notes on; the quintessence of a wasted classroom. I played a very keen game of Scrabble with Christine online, and lost. I feel sorry for the professor. It's his department, after all; I imagine the irony was not lost on him, and that kind of thing just doesn't look good when it happens in a large public forum.

For the record, the first person to tell me to get rid of a laptop during a lecture was Michael "I only like pictures of turn-of-the-century technology" Lesy, who pronounced "The machine MUST GO," with associated dramatic gesture.

Posted by me at 3:47 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

You would be excited in the hot battle of Mashimaro


Have you checked out Mashimaro lately? There's not much that's new from everyone's favorite flatulence-obsessed Korean kleptorabbit if you've seen the origin series and the robot episode already, but there are some little widgets which are kind of cute, among other things, like the usual ridiculous translations.

Posted by me at 1:42 AM | Comments (0)

October 17, 2003

I just changed someone else's website!


I mean, I've done it before, but when it's not Wikipedia or some wiki belonging to friends it feels a little weirder and more giddy. I was just visiting the website for Foo Camp and noticed a typo. Uh, and of course, FooCamp is already way over so there was no need for me to do it anyway. But this bodes ill. Basically, wikis are a giant magnet for proofing-happy folks like myself. Watch out! They're coming! At you! With their red pens! Denying you your natural voice!

Posted by me at 6:50 PM | Comments (1)

October 15, 2003

Kim Jong Il

Oh, I know. Kim Jong Il can't carry a tune. -- Mack

Posted by me at 12:35 AM

October 14, 2003

Cmon, people, am I the only one in this little blogoclique who speaks Spanish?


Um, unless I'm mistaken, Evan's getting married.

Posted by me at 9:30 PM | Comments (2)

October 13, 2003

Security 'Sploits Make Me Sigh


I just read this interview with a squatter-type who's been demonstrating security holes in large sites, and I felt like I was seeing him from across a great divide. My idealism has been shaken so badly by the last three years that I can't imagine mustering the kind of faith this kid has anymore. It's only been three years. Man.

Posted by me at 12:46 PM | Comments (0)

October 11, 2003

Little Star

This is my new cat.

The picture doesn't really do her justice. I have never seen a cat with such fantastic markings. Someone in her family must have been silver tabby, and it shows up in these ghostly cyphers down her side.

I adopted her at the ASPCA in New York City. The woman who was putting her in her cage told me she had brought her in herself -- people know she works down there, and so sometimes strays show up on her doorstep. She named her Estrellita. Unless another name hits me with gale force, I think I'll keep it. I considered "Cielo" earlier today. The woman says that Este followed her around like a puppy, and so far that's been more or less the case. At the moment she's deeply, deeply sacked out, legs twitching, eyes half open and the whole deal. It was a stressful day, and she got spayed two days ago, too.

Jamie and Charlie also adopted kittens, Maggie and Moishe. (Catholic Charlie is adamant that his kitten be raised orthodox Jewish. Who knows why. Suffice to say that the matter of the bris has been somewhat complicated by the matter of the neutering -- does a eunuch get a bris? do cats have foreskins anyway?! questions best left unasked.)

Getting a cat has been a profoundly difficult process for me... I've written a little about it which I may or may not finish up eventually. Mostly it has to do with not having been there when my childhood cat and best friend Hazel was put to sleep, guilt about not taking Ralphie back now that I can, and of course abiding issues about loving and being happy.

Posted by me at 7:49 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

October 10, 2003

Quick (Qualitative, Not Quantitative) Poll


Should I get an "I'm Blogging This" T-Shirt? Or will that be like having a "Button Your Fly" shirt, eventually?

No, no, wait. Hamstray there already has one. That shirt has jumped the fucking shark.

Dude, every time I check out Strumstair's site there's more that jumps out at me. He's actually living in Pasadena now, and recently presented at the San Gabriel Valley Linux Users' Group, which met at Caltech. And he hikes Echo Mountain, where we used to go for Girl Scout trips. Where was he when I was twelve, I ask you. Wonder where in town he lives.

Posted by me at 10:48 PM | Comments (1)

Operation Moral Compass


"In an effort to stop a dramatic recent slide in popularity within public opinion poles, President George W. Bush has adapted a strategy in which a five-year-old girl named Sara Jo Bailey is handcuffed to his left hand." From Rock On A Spring. Brooke is doing a great job over there; I honestly thought this piece had come from the Onion, until I got to the end and realized it hadn't followed their relatively tired formula.

Posted by me at 10:17 PM | Comments (6)

October 5, 2003

Ask yourself: With what satanic force are his eyes glowing?!


This man is going to be governor of California?! (Scroll down to the Arinamin V movies.) Spread this meme! Could be useful right now. Fundies generally won't vote for a man with satanic fire in his eyes, I figure, and California has its share.

Posted by me at 8:19 PM | Comments (1)

Hello Ideant!


I'm adding a link under Affinity Group to Ideant, aka Ulises Mejias, who is in my History of Communications class. He is one of the better writers there, seems to grok the professor's anti-globalist bent, and is a person who seems to have neet interests. Here's a quote:
"The moratorium on ijtihad is simply unsustainable. Furthermore, ijtihad should not only be the domain of (male)(orthodox) Muslim jurists. Similar to the open source software movement, what is needed is an open ijtihad movement to create a multitude of sites for reinterpreting Islam according to the realities of Muslim "minorities" which collectively form the majority: the progressives, the peace-loving, the moderates, the women, the poor..."

Hello, Ideant!

Posted by me at 11:54 AM | Comments (0)

What's Going On, Here?


I don't generally want to link to things that have already been on Memepool, since I presume a lot of you read it already, but when Rat Fink meets Engrish-speaking samurai on a pulp novel cover, it's really not something you pass up. It's an unrivalled experiment in style, nostalgia, and cultural crossover...

Does anyone else wonder if some Japanese folks have gotten around to exploiting American amusement at their legendary enthusiastic misuse of English? Or that, um, other Americans are trying to cash in on the popularity of Engrish and faking it? How did other folks here feel about Banzai? Mostly I thought it was stupid, but it had its moments... it's one of those tricky things where genre experiments border on racism. I don't imagine anyone writing the show actually believed all Asians or Asian-Americans talk or act like the Asian-TV-stereotypes on the show, but apparently some of its viewers did... and of course there's always issues of representation (were there Asian folks involved in making the show?)

Perhaps further investigation of our enjoyment of Engrish and Japanese pop culture is in order. I personally maintain that I enjoy seeing my language mangled anywhere and don't hold it against whoever does it; I also like to make fun of my own miserable Spanish. And Japanese TV is just *better* than American TV. Admit it. What is it about Japanese demographics that allow the long-term production of something like Iron Chef which would probably last less than a season as an original show (as opposed to an imported syndicated cable show) here? What's wrong with *us*?

Posted by me at 11:54 AM | Comments (0)

October 4, 2003

Full Waffle Jacket Watch


OK, so this is actually last week's post or so, but HOLY CRAP! Chase posted something! Once Upon A Time in Mexico must really be bad, to drag our almost-three-years-lapsed blogger out of exile. We love you, Chase! Come back to the table! Your dinner's gettin' cold.

Posted by me at 4:16 PM | Comments (0)

October 3, 2003

main class

Instructor 1: "I'm going to be the Main, and now she's going to pass me that disk." (Instructor 2 throws Instructor 1 a disk, which he accidentally drops.) Oldest guy in the class: "That's what my program did."

Posted by me at 7:27 PM

October 2, 2003

Basic Update

Oh, lordy, there's a lot of simple stuff to update about. Better do it now so nobody gets too far behind.

I am out of the fleabag house in Sunnyside. I am now paying 266% more rent for a fifth-story walkup in Washington Heights (translation for Californians: I am thirty minutes by train from the center of town, on the fifth floor of a building where other people live just a wall away, and there is no elevator) in which every single floor is linoleum and the bathroom sink is sandwiched so tightly between two walls I can't lean into the mirror while brushing my hair for fear of breaking my elbows.

But god, does it ever feel great. I'm not kidding. There's lots of sun, and my turtle and plants are happy. Despite the cheap fixtures everything is at least new, and there's nobody else's hundred years of crappitude cluttering up the place. My roommates, Charlie and Jamie, are fantastic. (My grandma wrote, "I hear you are living with two gentlemen. I do hope they are indeed gentlemen!" For my own sake, I planned very carefully: one of them is gay, and the other has a girlfriend. Hall booty, after all, is still bad booty.) They both possess excellent senses of humor and wide-open minds. The big problem, which I'd been hoping to avoid, is that they're much too distracting for grad-school-era roomies. Of course, it's much, much better than living with awful people.

We have rescued two orphan couches which have names. They are Pee Couch and Shrimp Couch. Someday I plan to post pictures. You will still have to use your imagination about the names. They are good couches despite. We plan to get cats to go on them. Er, go *on* them, not *go* on them.

Now about work: I'm still part-time at the ad agency, although it is a very small part. The bulk of my time and the more minor segment of my income are taken and given by a research assistantship at school. Nothing major to report there yet.

Now about boyfriends: Pshaw. No time!

Now about dancing: I made it into the Columbia advanced swing class and performance team! I am also doing jazz two days a week, and one day of yoga. I hurt like a bitch. Most excellent! More on the CU Swing team at some point, there are some verrry peculiar gender dynamics to being in a male-led group with three leads and seven follows. With what now? Three leads and seven follows. That's right.

And one more thing: I have it on authority that Columbia will be installing a new Dance Dance Revolution machine in Lerner Hall sometime between late October and the end of November. Please god don't let it be another broken one-pad machine with DDR 2 installed. Eeeeewww!

* * *

Approximation of the end of a conversation I had with a professor (the head of CNMTL) at Teachers College the other day:

Me: You know Neil Stephenson, right? I mean, you're familiar with his books? (Cryptonomicon is on a shelf in his office.)

Frank: I've read all of Stephenson's books.

Me: You know the Primer?

Frank: I think it's the best model of how a teaching system should be, adapting to your responses as a learner.

Me: It's kind of an idee fixe for me.

Frank: We haven't produced anything on the level of the Primer yet, but it's definitely a goal.

Me: (mentally) Yes! I can't believe I'm actually having this conversation! I'm definitely not leaving without a doctorate now.

It's nice to be understood.

* * *

Man, some weeeird stuff has been going down on the subway lately. Makes me wish the subway blog were still functional. Three recent events:

A pair of mariachis in black jeans, cowboy hats, and white rhinestone-studded shirts make their way into my uptown 1 car and begin to play their guitars. One of them has a truly beautiful, professional-sounding voice.

Someone says "Stop it!"

For a moment it seems unrelated; there are a hundred Tourette events and other out-of-context comments in this big freaky city. Then again, "Stop it! Stop with your Spanish!"

The woman is behind other people, who begin to move away from her even though the car is still in motion. I see for the first time that she is black, with a face contorted in anger. She doesn't stop. "Speak English! This is America!"

One of the mariachis stops playing and moves to the center of the car. His partner calls after him, telling him not to worry about her. She still doesn't shut up. A pool of empty space has collected around her. "They just come here to take our jobs! I saw it on the news!"

Another black woman reaches past one of her two handsome and composed children to hand the fleeing mariachi some coins. "They're just trying to make some money," she says. Down by the door, a man with long, long hair and a Frank Zappa moustache calls out, "This country belongs to the American Indian!" I say something poorly composed about maquiladoras and the state of the Mexican economy.

The angry woman gets off at the next stop, still yelling. The mariachis move to the next car.

A few days later:

Same train, later at night. A gaggle of teenagers pushes through the doors from the next car noisily, comes only as far as the first pole, and its members seem to almost consciously strike poses -- rumps sprung, stances set, hanging off lovers and almost playing with the pole. They match -- clothes no colors but red and white and blue denim. Their Spanish sounds scripted to grab a certain attention. They tumble and box with each other for a few minutes, then move on to the next car.

A few stops later they come back through. Similar routine.

When the train zooms away from me at my station, I see them between two cars, crowding and freaking, singing to me about sex while they can see me and then to the black rushing air of the tunnel.

Today:

I sit down on the bench to wait for my train. The bummed-up man three seats from me says, "Excuse me, I'm going to the bathroom here. Or I was trying to."

How in god's name do you respond to that?

* * *

Speaking of things I don't want to respond to, I still get mail from a writer for Glamour who periodically calls out for people to participate in her stories. This probably stomps on some sort of copyright issue, but here's this week's pitch; I thought you'd enjoy the further dive into stupidity. (I keep wanting to try to get Wade involved in one of her stories, because he's so intractable and would probably cause a ruckus, but I think we tried once and it didn't work. Maybe his hair isn't "floppy" enough. Oh, lord, all that suggests to me is more Ashton Kutchers. People, that haircut doesn't work for everyone, especially those with thick necks... but I digress.)

Hi, girls.

This one's for NY-area people. Sorry! But thanks
again, and let me know if you want off my quotable
list.

For the makeover package in Glamor, we are looking for
women who think their husband/boyfriends need a
makeover. Whether they think their guy's hair is a
little too messy or his wardrobe's kind of scruffy,
Glamour wants to help. We need men who in the
tri-state area, and they should have "floppy hair,"
which I think means shaggy hair or longer hair that
can be cut. But underneath the messy clothes and hair,
the guys are hot!

Please email, by Friday, a photograph of the guy along
with his name, age, and location, phone number (work
and home) and email, as well as the name, age,
relationship and contact information for the woman who
submitted him.

Thank you!

Posted by me at 1:45 AM | Comments (17) | TrackBack

October 1, 2003

Telvision Is Not The Message

Originally posted a little while ago, but I am not totally sure when.

"To be on TV is to become very quickly a cool kid. Friends call to say they've seen you. People recognize you in stores."

"a roomful of journalists covering a New Hampshire primary debate between [Gore] and Bill Bradley on closed-circuit TV booed and hissed the vice president 'like a gang of fifteen-year-old Heathers cutting down some hapless nerd.'"

"the mass-media cult of celebrity has unmistakeably pagan and Dionysian aspects that make it more volatile and unpredictable than political raisonneurs can easily imagine. It elevates its temporary wise men and warrior kings alike for the sheer cthonic joy of tearing them down."

From "The Media Is The Message," Harper's, 10/03

"McLuhan's unique contribution was the argument that in each of these communications epochs, different media act as extensions of the human senses with consequences for both cognition and social organization. For example, "oral societies" live primarily in an "ear culture," while writing, and to a greater extent print, makes the sense of sight dominant. Following McLuhan's sensory classification, the electronic revolution returns us to the world of primitive orality, to village-like encounters, but now on a global scale: hence, "the global village.""  From Parchment, Printing, Hypermedia, by Deibert (reference is to Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, War and Peace in the Global Village (New York: Bantam Books, 1968))

I met Mack Elder because he was the only kid at the Young Writers' Workshop who recognized an allusion I made to the "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" animation that circled the Web in 2001. I was trying to find kids to help me build the workshop's website. I wanted to appeal to the kids who were well hooked-in to the web, almost as much out of my sense of subcultural tribalism as a need for technical skills. When I made the reference, I knew that kids fitting my own obscure personal definition of cool would respond. I hadn't figured on there being only one kid at the workshop who'd get it.

Those of us who spend a lot of time on the web forget, I think, how non-universal our pop cultural references are. One of the more vertiginous experiences for me this past year was to have Mack suddenly firing quotes at me from my own website in the midst of his usual stream of references to the Simpsons, Monty Python, Star Wars, Star Trek, Red Dwarf, Iron Chef, They Might Be Giants, "Weird Al" Yankovic, Talking Heads, Wesley Willis, Cowboy Bebop, Bloom County, Army of Darkness, Blade Runner, Homestar Runner, Penny Arcade, Diesel Sweeties, Megatokyo, Oolong the Rabbit, the Kikkoman fansite flash anime, Yatta! and any number of "classic" movies and shows which I have failed to assimilate, as a refugee from mainstream media. The kid was giving quotes from my Quote Wall the same weight as he would the line "He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy!" The Quote Wall consists of inside jokes made by my friends, which aren't necessarily even presented in context, so what meaning he can have given them escapes me. When he whines "Miss Hoover? I glued my head to my shoulder," his meaning is a bit more clear.

(Mack, I know you're reading this, and I hope you won't think I'm mad or offended. Just please, honey sweetie tootsie sugar lumpkin, don't do that anymore. I love you, but I'm just another kid posting her journal online, not a cultural touchstone.)

I think for the moment Mack and I and others of our generation can be forgiven. Most of us were born at a time when there were only three major television networks, with Neilsen ratings that probably hovered over 25% apiece on a given night. For the moment we can be excused for reflexively presuming that the people around us are at least aware of the media we consume, if they didn't actually watch Cheers themselves last night. We forward articles and share links, also, so even as references begin to fragment, we are fostering communities of shared references.

But postmodern theory says we are destined to lose our shared reference points, if I understand it correctly. And so (painful segue) I'm waiting for media criticism to catch up. The three Harper's quotes are from an article which decries political journalists for being caught up in the cult of celebrity. The middle one I chose mostly because I thought it was cool that John Hughes's Heathers warranted a reference without explanation, and because I love seeing important people as the insecure teenagers that they are.

The other two gave me pause. Of course I agree with the author -- and the various writers, such as James Fallows, who have said this before, and whom he cites -- that it's ruinous to have the press, the "Fourth Estate" on which citizens ostensibly rely to make informed decisions about governing themselves, subsumed by entertainment outlets and universally aligned with the upper class.

But the author's assertions rest on a model of celebrity which could well be eroding. Sure, media monopoly is making it unlikely that mass media will completely disappear. But the Internet is creating its own mini-cults of celebrity, as among the bloggers (Kottke, Megnut, Zeldman, et al) and various artists (the creators of Homestar Runner, Diesel Sweeties, etc). These celebrities could be geographically known as widely as J-Lo, unlike, for example, garage bands pre-internet, which might have had large followings but would likely have found them constrained to a small region.

(This is where I think Mack went wrong. I have no such delusions about my celebrity. I don't think anyone much is reading the DSWJ aside from my mom, a few high school friends, and a loving and devoted audience of once and future boyfriends. *throws them roses* I luvva juus boyce!)

The Net is also amplifiying stars from other media ignored by the American media juggernaut; would anyone deny that Hayao Miyazaki's Oscar for Spirited Away depended on the propagation of anime by Net-crawling geeks? And it's fostering networks of mutual respect and linkage among pundits of various stripes (check to see who Tom Tomorrow has linked to in the past week for an example), who, along with Matt Drudge types, may well undermine the top-heavy star journalist system the author of the Harper's article describes as people seek relevant news and fail to find it in their well-manicured hands.

I find myself wondering daily how things will change when kids who have had access to the Internet from a very early age grow up. Will they turn off the TV entirely, finding it not interactive enough? Will there be so many entertainment options available that their senses of what is attractive, who is famous, what is important, will balkanize to the point where they are no longer monolithic enough to have any sway? And what will happen to political opinion then?

(no, I'm not hopeful, either. but the world needs its science fiction writers, right? just call me mr. bradbury.)

The media critique I've been raised on -- the one that finds the objectification of women in beer ads, early addiction of kids to advertising through Sesame Street -- is a mass media critique. I'm only now thinking about the ways in which it's an inadequate rubric for interpreting what is going to happen to us in this next generation.

I may be too early on in my studies to judge, but I'm getting a sense that the older generation isn't distinguishing between the TV/radio era and the age of the Net. Deibert (in Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia) lumps all three of them together under "hypermedia," which focuses on the commonality of their ability to bridge time and space but doesn't address their differences in directionality (one-to-many versus many-to-many AND one-to-many AND one-to-one).

(I have some quotes from the book Data Smog to back this observation up, too; I've been having a hard time organizing my online time with my home connection still down, but I will try to work those in too. Of course, Data Smog is kind of hysterical and more general than academic, but it's worth mentioning.)

His citation of McLuhan above further demonstrates this generalization. TV and radio are a return to a primitive orality, sure, but it is worth noting how the Internet has revitalized print. Teenagers who would otherwise be using the telephone talk to their friends via IM, and they make up a huge segment of the blogging community. Primitive, yes -- OMG, u bett %-P -- but orality, no. It remains to be seen whether video web content will eventually start to edge out print, and I think it is worth investigating whether some people only make use of websites with no print, but the Net belongs to those who can read and write.

Maybe I need to pay more attention to what my former Indymedia peers are writing; maybe they already know this failing in the older critique of media and are filling in the blanks with new lessons learned on the Net. But then, I think I left Indymedia because they aren't breaking free of the old critique in a number of ways. They are (as I understood it) trying to provide a forum for everyone to develop their own news speaking truth to power, in response to the dictatorial nature of mass media.

But the Net and the availability of consumer video and audio production tools are already doing that. (Well, ok; the Net has only really overtaken Indymedia in the publishing capacities it offers in Indymedia's lifetime, seeing as blogging software wasn't widely available when it began.)

IMCers are pooling resources to do grassroots political media, which is something that a lot of small production companies, local radio stations, and nonprofits were already doing; they're now more or less competitors for a dwindling pool of resources. (I mean in the States. I can't really comment on what goes on internationally, because I never saw it firsthand.) And I was never impressed with their ability to put social structures in place which might have compensated for the fact that technology on its own doesn't create change. As I've said before, it was a lot of overwork, a lot of voluntocracy, and a lot of crypto-trustafarianism.

Realizing this gap between reality and the old media critique has implications for what I think I want to study. I've been sort of insistent on learning how to use mass media against itself. I like Michael Moore and Adbusters. I don't even own up to all the evil things I really want to do, for fear my lefty friends will never speak to me again: until recently I wanted to use the kind of research on cognition and psychology that make Sesame Street and advertising successful to... what, pass along critical thinking skills and a willingness to question the authoritativeness of mass media? Now I'm not totally sure those will be useful things to do anymore, in part because I'm unsure about the future of mass media, and of course because it's shady -- and probably ineffective -- to force people to theoretically unquestioningly accept a dictate that they should question things.

I don't think the shift in media has any effect on my desire to work on media literacy, though, aside from expanding its meaning to perhaps thinking critically about government propaganda, social subjectivism, capitalism, institutions, etc.

Anyway. I hope this semester will demonstrate to me ways in which the old media critique holds, but not ignore the ways in which it doesn't suffice.

* * *

My History of Communication class is the first one I've ever been in which genuinely makes use of online tools. We have threaded discussions, readings online, and small cookie-cutter personal profile pages. The professor, who I greatly admire, actually reads what we post and uses our responses as cues for discussion in class. Looking back it strikes me as a little weird that this is my first class like this; I mean, the Web isn't exactly an innovation at this point. But I guess I did start college in 1995, so it's not altogether surprising. Hand-coding HTML was still considered a challenging technical skill by many at that point.

Anyway, I'm uncomfortable with it. I mean, I like the discussions, I like being able to share links with classmates online; I find I am more comfortable reading book-length material on screen than I once was. But this particular professor is basically asking us to do response papers each week online. This poses some problems I would not have forseen:

* * *

Wow. This is all coming together now that I'm writing for myself rather than for an assignment. There's constructivism at work, for you. I'm just not synthesizing much at all when all I'm doing is responding to other people's ideas of what I ought to be learning, and stuffing things into my head wholesale. I think it's a damn good thing I wrote myself up a mission statement before starting school, or I'd likely be lost in someone else's view of the world by now.

one last thing: it is soooooo nice to have a moment where I am not keeping one eye on the clock and the other on the page number, and trying to make the former slow down and the other move faster.

Posted by me at 3:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack