antipopper

• Test: Gleaning, Exchanging and Vernacular Media
  “Garvey makes comparisons between the process of making [19th Century] scrapbooks and personal websites, but there is an even more striking comparison to weblogs.”
  (tags: blogging scrapbooks vernacular media research gleaning decertau)
• [korsakow syndrom]
  “The Korsakow-System is an easy-to-use computer programm for the creation of interactive database narratives. Korsakow-projects are films with a twist.”
  (tags: film video interactivity newmedia)
• Publics and Counterpublics
  Like manna from heaven: “According to Warner, the idea of a public is one of the central fictions of modern life… he applies the idea of a public to the junction of two intellectual traditions: public-sphere theory and queer theory.” Get me to a library
  (tags: michael-warner zone public-sphere queer-theory public politics research)

Watch the Serenity trailer. There’s a great Han Solo / Indiana Jones bit by Mal towards the end.

[ tags: firefly, joss-whedon, pop-culture, serenity ]

Above: my best shot of Destiny’s Child from last night. (More at Flickr.) What can I say? The craziness can’t really be described. The hysteria was insane, and you know, it was totally warranted.

On Beyoncé: I’ve always found her a bit annoying, on an affective level. But in the flesh and relatively up close (yay for Caro’s dancefloor tickets!), Beyoncé was unfeasibly, almost terrifyingly beautiful, like a mythological creature. The most interesting thing about this is not that I’m being “superficial” here by concentrating on her beauty, but that she’s recently learned how to really work it in a way that I think was largely absent during their last tour, and even in the Dangerously In Love material, which when it debuted seemed to be going through the motions, at least for me. This is why I preferred the Child as an ensemble, and eschewed Beyoncé-worship.

But now, Beyoncé theatrically emanates an incredible luminosity, as if she were a substance about to sublimate past her skin. Sure, the moves are quite transparent, but that doesn’t matter — you don’t feel cheated at all. When she looks you straight in the eye and sings “I love you” during “Dangerously in Love 2″, one’s jaw can’t help but drop. At which point she can slowly stalk the stage in silence, looking at everyone gaping. I haven’t seen anything like it.

Meanwhile, Caro’s take on all of this is “fuck, Beyoncé has the best boobs in the whole world!”…

Other fragmentary points:

• You don’t really want to try queue-jumping several thousand thirteen-year-old girls. But we did it anyway, and lived!

• “What do you think the gender balance of this place is right now?” I ask. “Like a humanities class,” says Miguel. Funny.

• Miguel and Michael sang along to every word.

• It’s good to have my prejudices confirmed yet again: Michelle sucks. Vindication! Except from Shane, who insists on defending the indefensible. Michelle = the Problem Child.

• Flipside of the prejudice confirmation: Kelly rocks! Again! Vindication! Embarrassingly, I launched into a loud “I told you so…” rant, right then and there.

• Kelly said that she’d been all over the world and hadn’t yet found a good man. At this point, Michael put up his hand and started jumping up and down, yelling, “pick me! pick me!”. We pretended not to know him.

• Skewing the setlist towards the ballads was dumb, as always, but they even cut “Bootylicious” short. Huh?

• I’ll never get tired of multiple costume changes. And during the one for “Soldier”, there was a fucking excellent set-piece involving all the male dancers in Black Panther uniforms. I think Hon almost wet himself.

Oh yeah, a realisation: Destiny’s Child’s tongue-twisting, ultra-verbose melodic phrasing (especially when housed in such sleekly abstract R’n'B warheads) really is one of the most distinctive innovations in recent popular music. It reminds me vaguely of the way the Manics’ lyrics always scanned so strangely when sung, but without any of the grade-school pretense.

[ tags: destinys-child, beyonce, rnb, music, pop-culture, review ]

To commemorate a stupidly unproductive day, a stupid t-shirt just for you folksonomic, social software types. Now on sale at the Antipopper Store. Hold on, this just seems a little too vacuous. How about this one:

That’s better. Still stupid, though.

[ tags: flickr, george-bush, tshirt ]

Destiny’s Child tomorrow! The last time I saw the Child in 2002, I was mighty sore from our encounter with the cops at May Day, with my ill-advised State of Emergency intervention, in which we engaged with the permanent state of emergency by supposedly creating our own, Benjaminian-style — becoming “emergency workers of the world” by wearing orange overalls. In practice, it was a matter of the cops saying “oooh, look at those troublemakers in the ridiculous orange overalls — let’s kick their heads in!”; I didn’t learn my lesson until later that year at the WTO convergence, when I think Hon gingerly said to me, “um, I’m sick of getting beaten up — I think we should take these overalls off now”.

Oh, here’s what I wrote about that show a couple of years ago:

We went and saw them a year ago. Kelly totally rocked! And so many twelve year old girls in the same room — crazy! Then we stood outside the side entrance of the Entertainment Centre for half an hour afterwards, waiting for them to get into their limos. Beyonce gave her handbag to a fan! We screamed a lot! How many exclamation marks can I use?! The Child of Destiny. The crisis of teleology. There must be a link, right?? The bastard child, faithless to origins, launching into a line of flight. Throw your hands up at me.

Yes, I am that embarrassing.

[ tags: destinys-child, pop, teleology, walter-benjamin, wto, may-day, kelly-rowland, police, overalls, beyonce, handbag ]

Hey, parramappa — that psychogeographical refugee photography-mapping project I wrote about earlier — is now online. Not bad for three days work by a bunch of the most distracted kids you’ve ever seen! Don’t dis the name, it wasn’t my idea. :)

I’ll only chime in on the whole “Adobe buys Macromedia” kerfuffle to note that this could be really bad news for the Mac platform. Macromedia has spectacularly mishandled their Mac products for the last few years (to the point where Mac Flash developers are reluctantly switching to Windows). And Adobe’s relationship with Apple doesn’t seem particularly good — why else has Apple been investing so much in the Final Cut Pro Studio, and Core Image? With Macromedia and Adobe together now, I think it’s almost guaranteed that the situation will worsen. On the upside, Mac users will no doubt move to more elegant, leaner products that actually work on their platform, but this might also lead to their re-ghettoization.

UPDATE: Actually, this could also be a good thing on a purely budgetary front for people and organisations who are currently doing things like buying two suites of professional creative software for web development — Macromedia Studio MX and and Adobe Creative Suite. Given the amount of overlap between the two suites, the products within the new Adobe that have the least share of their market, like Freehand, Fireworks and GoLive, are bound to be discontinued, which might then lead to a mega web development suite that encompasses Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator and Flash. This might be cheaper for, uh, me. :)

I’m in the local library, down the road from what used to be my home, but is now an office of sorts for me. I work in four locations now, none of them really central enough to be a base. I’ll be doing design work or writing a paper while simultaneously transferring ancient films by militant metalworkers to DVD, or passing notes to a client in Jerusalem while supervising a new media drop-in centre, i.e. my weird version of “youth work”. This also means I usually lug little forests of Continental philosophy around with me to each location.

(The latter has its advantages; yesterday I showed one of my brilliant Storybox kids a copy of Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster, upon which we had a short discussion about how we continue to write when certain things defy representation. Although I must say that I obviously learn an infinite amount more about such stuff from these out-of-control teenagers than Maurice Fucking Blanchot.)

Okay, what I’m really doing is talking up the fact that I’m stuck in the library because I forgot my fucking keys. All right? :)

After last week’s brief psychogeographical exertions, I’ve predictably turned into a blithering mess again. A quick job for the UN (!) on the weekend, and some compulsory vegetating as I catch up with every overseas TV show I’m following, including Doctor Who, which is getting much, much better, I’m happy to say. The second episode is where the true reinvention of the series takes place: I mean, any science fiction show that features Britney’s “Toxic” {swoon} as “ancient classical music” is a winner in my books. Now, back in the saddle. I’m taking it easy, honest…

Oh yeah, sorry I didn’t make it to anybody’s various conferences last week, either. I’m sure you were all fabulous.

[ tags: doctor-who, tv, britney, toxic ]