Stanisław Lem is dead.
[ tags: science-fiction, sf, stanislaw-lem ]
March 2006 Archives
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 ]
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…
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…
[ tags: television, tv, writing, buffy, jane-espenson, pop-culture ]
Today Lena mentioned to me that we might need to take a MiniDisc recorder to Hong Kong with us to do interviews, record soundscapes and stuff. Frak that — I installed the Linux-based pozdilla system on my old 3G iPod in about two clicks, and now I can record 16-bit 44.1kHz sound in stereo through my Dock. Presto. No really: nowadays, there isn’t any of the command-line, config-file dicking around that you’d expect with something as exotic as setting up Linux on an iPod. Note that this currently only works for old, non-click-wheel iPods, and apparently the iPod nano’s hardware prevents recording, but it’s so cool. And of course, it’s not cool that Apple arbitrarily limited the iPod’s firmware when so many other mp3 players can do this out of the box, but I’m so impressed that such these kinds of workarounds are now so transparent…
Do you ever hack away at a project endlessly, letting it absorb all your mental and emotional energy, and yet fail to grasp the key that will let you unlock its heart? Sometimes you just have to give up. Which is what I’m doing.
I’ve been trying to write an article about Cronulla, racialisation and the different ethico-political conceptions of the world that such situations demonstrate, but unfortunately I don’t have an adequate ethico-political conception of the world of “my own” to offer. (I’ll possibly have something in a year, when I’m further into my thesis.) Neither do I have anything much more than a descriptive account of how nationalism is currently working in this country, when what I really need is an idea of what’s going on, which I take to be somewhat different. So I’m tossing in the towel.
I’ll disclose a little of where I was heading, though: when apprehending traumatic events, it’s useful go back to Walter Benjamin’s sense of the historical materialist’s mission that he outlines in the old “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, and see it as not some programme for an abstract “intellectual”, but as something everyday that people do. Of course (and I rarely see this discussed), Benjamin’s language can get somewhat uh, problematic:
The historical materialist leaves it to other to be drained by the whore called ‘Once upon a time’ in historicism’s bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history. [Benjamin 1992: 254]
Oooookay. I used to think one could simply set aside the dodgy trappings in which these kinds of allusive aphorisms are wrapped, but while there’s something undoubtedly very valuable in Benjamin’s conception of time and the event, it’s nontheless informed by a kind of masculinist and heroic fantasy of the subject that needs inverting.
[ tags: historical-materialism, marxism, walter-benjamin ]
For me, at least, the editorialisation of pop culture has evaporated, almost without trace. This is interesting, given that throughout the 1990s I regarded magazines like The Face as a constant touchstone — a fairly mainstream but nonetheless interesting barometer of where things were at. And yes, even stuff like Wired. (Am I the only one who finds the critique of its techno-capitalist triumphalism a bit, uh, obvious? It was such an easy target. But then again, I’m the kinda communist that’s read Fast Company since the Dot Com days, and has always been disdainful of Adbusters.) Hell, I worked for a major national music magazine, in the day. I collected pop culture magazines: an entire bookshelf in my loungeroom is stacked with blocks of their matching spines. Now those institutions are either gone, or largely irrelevant. I don’t read new magazines that deal with popular culture. I now get my zeitgeist from various ephemeral networks, like blogs, or forums, or actually swapping cultural material with people in physical space when we happen to be working in the same office on the same day. I don’t even really watch TV anymore — it’s all torrented. All very symptomatic of networked culture, blah blah.
But here’s the rub: I don’t have the energy to keep this up all the time — ferreting out of these little nuggets of culture out of an endless web. (And if you think it’s going to be solved with online reputation systems, you’ve got to be joking.) And you know, I really miss The Face. Those things no longer seem to count in any collective sense of “readership” or “audience”, but I miss their voice. Am I a reactionary nostalgist? It’s not so much its mediating function, or its centralisation, but its consistency and concentration.
[ tags: magazines, pop, pop-culture, public, public-sphere ]
[ tags: battlestar-galactica ]
Sorry Flyboy, I couldn’t keep it plaintext. I’m just too arf-arf-arf…
[ tags: battlestar-galactica ]
