antipopper

Stanisław Lem is dead.

[ tags: science-fiction, sf, stanislaw-lem ]

My kitten has figured out how to turn on the TV, so that he can watch cartoons in the morning.

[ tags: cats, television, tv ]

A couple of weeks ago I had lunch with an old advertising colleague, who reminded me that we worked with a certain person who thought that the “average” (i.e. mean) yearly income in Australia must have been about $80,000, or thereabouts.

[ tags: advertising, wages, vacuousness ]

A lot of things made my day today, but this picture of Maoist insurgents in Nepal topped the list:

Finally, some Maoists after my own heart!

[ tags: maoists, britney, maoism, nepal ]

I’m sitting here at my weekend day job, converting VHS tapes to DVD at a union. It’s been immensely satisfying today, with documentaries from the 1980s about:

• B.A. Santamaria and The Movement/Democratic Labour Party — the vanguard of Catholic anti-Communism in the Australian labour movement;

• the place of U.S. Catholic bishops in the nuclear disarmament movement; and

• the suspicious death of unionist Karen Silkwood, most probably at the hands of the Kerr-McGee energy corporation.

A more general observation: while the union’s content choices are obviously weighted towards “politics”, I’m nonetheless getting the impression that current affairs programs of the ’70s and ’80s were much more open about the conjunction between economics and (social) power. This is regardless of whether the content is “progressive” or “reactionary”; for example, last week I encoded an outrageous 60 Minutes segment on how Australian workers should learn from “the Japanese example” of internalised, militarised workforce discipline and respect for the boss, but which necessarily acknowledged the relationship between labour and capital. Meanwhile, today, “economics” tends to be presented simply as a fantasyland — as the impact of things like interest rates on “consumers”.

[ tags: nuclear-energy, karen-silkwood, politics, dlp, ba-santamaria, democratic-labour-party, church, catholicism, catholic-church ]

Ange has picked up on the Galactica season finale’s Berkeley In The ’60s vibe, but instead, I’m gonna be completely dodgy and gasp (with and without irony) about how hot all the non-white women were in the last two episodes! (Spoilers:) Tori, the pneumatic election-fixer! Boomer’s new post-natal “wild” look, with tousled, faintly orange hair! Dee in a sexy officer’s uniform! My mouth was hanging open.

It’s been widely remarked that Ron Moore’s Galactica has “dropped the ball” on the “representation” of “minorities”; I’m not one to really subscribe to such representationalist logic, but it’s still quite obvious that the prominence of powerful black men in the original series — e.g. Tigh and Boomer — seems to have been, uh, erased. What we have in its place is… odd. I’m not quite sure how race plays within the show’s discourse of otherness that I’ve been endlessly harping on about, but I think it’s significant that more effort than usual was expended on beautifying the cast’s non-white women in the last few episodes. I might be over-reading here, but I feel caught in a weird interpellation, an address the show seems to be making to straight, non-white men: okay, you can’t have your identificatory Viper-pilot wish-fulfillment, but how hott are the sistas in this show?

In the logic of incorporation, perhaps this is the next stage of “representation”: after seeing “ourselves” (the straight, non-white male spectators) on screen, “we” can then disappear as objects of scrutiny (just as whiteness itself disappears?), and gaze upon “our own” women? Weeeeeeird. It’s like the point I made to Hon a few weeks ago: in comparison to the 1980s, we Asian people in Australia are now more “public”, in terms of sheer numbers, and in terms of institutional visibility. Back in the ’80s, if you were to find a publicly distributed photograph of a half-naked Asian woman in Australia, it would inevitably be part of a fetishistic “white gaze”, a piece of kinky exoticist misogyny for white men with Yellow Fever. But now, we see photos of half-naked Asian women all the time on posters for dance parties that Asian people go to, and the audience is Asian men. Does this mean “we” (straight Asian men) have achieved a certain amount of phallic authority that we can now publicly objectify “our own” women under Australian multiculturalism?

[ tags: battlestar-galactica, race, sex, television, tv ]

With the various young Sudanese, Somalian and Liberian people who come in to use the multimedia access centre I supervise, conversations like this are becoming more frequent:

Me: Hey, I’m Ben. What’s your name?

Dude: Daddy Boy.

Me: Hey, Daddy Boy. Have you got another name you use for like, more official stuff, so we can send mail to your house?

Daddy Boy: No.

Me: Cool. Anyway, if you want, just write down your name and contact details on this contact list…

Daddy Boy writes “D-A-D-D-Y-B-O-Y”…

Me: Thanks.

I guess there might be something profound to say here about cultures (and subcultures) of naming, but my first thought is that it’s fucking cool we’re going to be sending physical mail that’s officially addressed to people like “DMC” and “Daddy Boy”. Take that, officious database fields! This claiming of the vernacular name is like a weird reversal of the situation where migrants, especially children, are unofficially but forcibly renamed by white authority figures, like immigration officials or teachers who can’t be bothered learning how to pronounce their names… after which the new names actually end up sticking. A good proportion of my uncles- and aunts-in-law were named this way. “Nayif? I can’t fucking say that shit. You’re called ‘Nick’ now, all right?” (In contrast, heaps of my own blood relatives were born as subaltern subjects of the British Empire, and thus “luckily” already had English names.)

The irony is that the names that guys like Daddy Boy have claimed for themselves are possibly “easier” to pronounce by whitey teachers, but as “street” names, they’re probably being institutionally suppressed in favour of the relatively “unpronounceable” names their parents gave them…

[ tags: names, naming, race ]

I’ve just discovered that I’ve won a Australian Interactive Media Industry Association Award (in the “Best Culture, Lifestyle or Arts” category) with the team from 6 Moons and SBS for the Swapping Lives website, which I designed. Hurrah — it’s my second AIMIA Award! It’s been a nice to hear how well the site’s been received — lots of people were talking about it at the First Person conference,* and SBS say they’ve received some of their best feedback evar.

It was a difficult job with conflicting requirements that kinda snowballed out of control, but which I can look back to now as being all worth it. :) To those like Tom Cho who met me at the Writing Across Cultures conference last year and wondered why I rudely kept fiddling with Flash MX 2004 on my laptop during conference sessions, now you know.

* First Person was a continual love-fest. Someone next to me would be talking about how much they liked the Swapping Lives site, and I’d say “hey, I designed that!”. At lunch I was enthusing to a Canadian delegate about how the Murmur Vancouver site had inspired much of my work in spatial storytelling, to which she exclaimed, “that was one of my projects!”.

[ tags: aimia, awards, design, self-congratulation, swapping-lives ]

It doesn’t get any better.

I just realised that I’ve been publishing two feeds all this time — this is the right one, and the other is hereby counting down to nothingness…