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“Garvey makes comparisons between the process of making [19th Century] scrapbooks and personal websites, but there is an even more striking comparison to weblogs.”
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“The Korsakow-System is an easy-to-use computer programm for the creation of interactive database narratives. Korsakow-projects are films with a twist.”
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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
April 2005 Archives
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 ]
Just finished the most satisfying spatial annotation / online photo-documentary mapping project with a bunch of Afghan refugee teenagers in Sydney’s West. This is in the last few minutes, so I still have to badge the site with legal mandatories and funding body acknowledgements before it goes live, but I just have to quote you some choice bits:
George Street Shops: This is near Westfield. You put the car in the carpark, it’s very peaceful. (We are listening to Indian music while we write this, and George St is boring, so we get talking. Homayoun doesn’t like high-pitched music with Urdu in it, because he doesn’t understand Urdu. Indian movies are not just about love, they teach us about family, about how you live forever with your husband. The Bollywood star Shurkhan is hot, he gets good action in the movies, and he is the best.)
And how’s this for the (sub)urban annotation of desire:
Horwood Place: Two guys got out of the car, carrying fruit. X said to the young one, “oooooooh you are so handsome and cool, can you join with us?”. He was soooo excited that X chose him, but X said “sorry baby, I’ve already got a boyfriend. “Can we join in?” they said. Marian said yes, and explained that it was going on a website by ICE. “Of course we want to be in the picture.” They laughed.
(Alas, even when the site goes live, the mapping engine we’re using won’t give us permalinks.) This is a project that I’ve been itching to do for about ten years (ha ha, back then it was a CD-ROM), exploring how young migrant people relate to space in Australia. I was originally envisaging working with people who’d been in the country longer, so as to explore deeper familiarities with certain places, but when the opportunity to use this model knocks, you don’t turn it down. Also, the kids ran out of time during the photographic excursion, so they actually didn’t get to document their more intimiate/social spaces, and show off more of their digs. And it’s not spatial annotation in the locative sense, which I’d love to do in the future. But still, what we managed to achieve was a kind of familiarisation/defamiliarisation, the churning of the derive, which is just as cool.
The young people are just nuts. They listen with one ear while they chat up some anonymous, diasporic Afghan honey online.
[ tags: spatial-annotation, refugees, migration, urbanism, mapping, maps, derive, psychogeography ]
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Hack to enable variable alpha transparency in Internet Explorer.
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This is the software I’m using for the refugee neighbourhood mapping/annotation project next week.
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Multiple page entries r us.
The ocean really is there if you look through the torrential downpour. Cool!
A few days ago, Deborah and I had an extended email convo about religion, fundamentalism, social typologies of (dis)agreement, capitalism and the antichrist. In one of the gaps of just a few minutes between mails, she drew this picture of me, complete with my Sportsgirl bear outfit and thought bubble:
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“Although Buffy may not be a Lacanian… her bearing towards the un-dead does have some similarity to the calling of the Lacanian analyst.”
I’m in Byron Bay because Lena’s at the OzECulture conference, which seems too boring to sneak into, and I’m just tagging along for the holiday. But there is a Creative Commons session tomorrow, and some people from the QUT Creative Industries precinct there, so who knows…
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The dramatic combination of “nature” and artificial light has always excited me. After a brief wander, I’ve been too tired to do anything except lie in bed as the sun goes down, with a halogen spotlight bathing me in electric light and the dark ocean clouds in the distance beyond the balcony. It reminds me of the most exciting commercial photography I’ve ever had to work with as a new media art director: a swimsuit catalogue in which the models, splashing in the surf at dusk, were captured with a short range flash as the sun set in the background, firmly breaking the old “don’t take photos with the sun behind the subject” rule. The sense of depth, the yawning gulf created by this gimmick, amazed me. And hey, gimmicks are great, and often profound. (I took the gimmick further by painstakingly making all the foreground elements caught in the flash — including individual drops of fucking surf — actually flicker in the light of one’s cursor. If that sounds tacky, it was — as tacky as a Tazo, or x-ray glasses, or Sea Monkeys, or anything else that’s throwaway and yet somehow worth celebrating.) Wow, now it’s pouring rain.
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Two years ago I conducted a workshop about the juridical aspects of the War on Terror, and I used Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones as a framing device for our discussion. Nobody seems to appreciate it much, but that film’s plot was actually quite a daring left-liberal analysis of the War on Terror, largely making up for the over-the-top racism of the last film. Back in 1977, when Princess Leia tells Obi-Wan that “years ago, you served my father in the Clone Wars”, everybody assumed that the clones were the easily designated foe in this conflict, and that the Jedi were fighting an external threat.
The genius of Attack of the Clones was to utterly invert this logic, and to reveal that the Jedi and the clones were on the same side, and not even the “right” side of this war, which narrativises the transformation of the Republic into the Empire. We realise that the Jedi led the fucking Stormtroopers into battle in a war for which all sides had been manufactured, thus cementing the primacy of the military-industrial complex. In perhaps the most important scene, emergency powers are granted to the Chancellor by the Senate. “Begun, this Clone War has,” intones Master Yoda gravely, right after he has led a battalion of Clone Troopers to impressively vanquish the Enemy in their first engagement. Cue the Imperial March.
With Episode III just around the corner, I must say that I’m looking forward to how this critique will play out. Even though Lucas has forgotten how to make movies, I’m just itching for the moment Chancellor Palpatine declares himself Emperor with the words, “DEATH TO THE ENEMIES OF DEMOCRACY!”. I kid you not.
[ tags: photography, star-wars, war-on-terror, militarism, democracy ]
Okay, giving up on the BlogTalk paper, due to post-viral fatigue. Also got a grant application due tomorrow — dunno if I can manage that, either, which is heartbreaking, cos it’s for a digital storytelling program I want to run later this year. I got very excited about it after going to Rina Benmayor’s digital storytelling seminar the other week. Damn. (Comment of the day went to Jon Marshall — “silence is completely different from the unsaid” [in a discussion about, uh, you know, triumphalist teleological narratives of individuation].) And Jean, I know you’re still waiting on my reflections on my own technocultural/training interventions (as potential research fieldwork), but gah, I don’t even know my own name these days…
Meanwhile, I’m wetting my pants over being blogrolled by someone as cool as Nikki from Imperfectcry. She and others in her kick-arse Filipina-blogger crowd, like Anneke, Cali, Cams and Erren, are way cool, and if I may be more (colonially?) reflective, they brilliantly avoid what pundits somehow usually conceive of as the “dominant” blogging typologies — they elaborate glamorous, hyper-articulated spaces of non-Anglo g(i/r)rlhood, showcasing finely tuned chops that sidestep the discourses of “mastery”, especially when the skills are shit-hot. I salute thee!
I am going to lie down now.
[ tags: filipina, blogging, affect, digital-storytelling, rina-benmayor, exhaustion ]
