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[May. 7th, 2008|06:38 pm] |
Now this is internet drama I can really get behind: SF Chron TV critic Tim Goodman is riling up his readers for a bloody, take-no-prisoners LOST vs. Battlestar Galactica Face-Off. I'll stick to the cheap seats -- after seeing Monday's episode, the second post-strike one, I'm amazed at how good One Life to Live suddenly is -- I wouldn't exactly compare it to Friday Night Lights, but Robin Strasser's Dorian Lord actually got me a bit teary-eyed. It's smart soaps writing for grown-ups, and it's bringing out the best in some very talented actors. Soaps By Remote has some interesting posts up from their "OLTL Experiment" to see what happens when a viewer with no history with the show checks it out for two weeks. I'm looking forward to their post on last Friday's episode, which was magnitudes better than the show's been in recent weeks.
( antisemitism and racism ) |
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| For the fan who has everything? YouTube videos! |
[May. 6th, 2008|06:03 pm] |
I have no deep TV thoughts after catching up on last week's episodes of LOST, BSG, and Doctor Who. At least, I don't think my confusion as to whether Matthew-Fox-as-Jack's apparently newly shaved/waxed chest on LOST reflects a continuity error or a new plot-related mystery to unravel counts as a deep thought. I'm still enjoying all three, though none were at their finest last week and, for me, all were overshadowed dramatically by Friday's episode of One Life to Live, the first crediting returning headwriter Ron Carlivati since the WGA strike.
Nor do I have any deep fandom thoughts about dogpiling or shunning, though it's nice that other people are thinking about them.
I also have no links. Well, okay, just one, to be filed under "Prescient Warnings of the Impending Collapse of the U.S. Television Industry Or Maybe Not, I Never Know Who To Believe But This Certainly Seems To Be A Thriving Sub-genre These Days": Mark Cuban -- The Ala Carting of Video on the Net: Will It Lead to Disaster?
And now for two videos which aren't vids-from-the-fanvid-tradition, but are doing some interesting and vid-like things:
( Iron Man; The Hills ) |
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| Speed bumps and stop signs on the road to hell |
[May. 3rd, 2008|01:39 pm] |
If I ever have to insist that I'm "really actually good people, I swear" then whatever point or action or statement I was trying to argue or defend? I've failed, and I probably need to stop and rethink that one.
If there's one thing I've learned over the last few months, it's that I shouldn't expect anybody to give a damn about my good intentions when I screw up. And that clinging to my self-regard as a good person in the face of crticism, anger, and hurt is just compounding the problem. Me insisting that I'm a good person, or that I'm not insensitive or racist or sexist etc., not only doesn't make it true -- it's a pretty lousy reputation management strategy, compared to my actions. Especially when that very insistence implies that I'll only engage and address criticism after the critics explicitly acknowledge that I'm a fundamentally good person -- as if that's the core issue of paramount importance, as though the act of criticism itself is ultimately an attack on my essential good-personhood.
And providing lengthy and defensive explanations about what I thought I was doing, what I meant and intended to do, and why I thought that was reasonable? The proper time for that usually only comes if and when somebody asks. "But I didn't mean it that way!" is generally an insufficient response to "Well, that's how it looks/sounds/comes across." |
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| Do they even have weekends on Battlestar Galactica? |
[May. 2nd, 2008|03:29 pm] |
A Laugh-Out-Loud Cats comic for BSG fans.
Lots of good spring anime, including Macross Frontier, Kurenai, Soul Eater, and Kaiba. But especially Vampire Knight! It's about a high school that regular students attend during the day, and vampires secretly attend at night. But it's so much more than that! I think the opening theme song/sequence captures the flavor:
I am not sure why each episode gets subbed by a different group -- I've watched the first four episodes and seen subs by Ureshii, Mishicorp, Shoku-dan, and Your Mom. Still, it's great, no matter who's doing the subbing! |
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| And I have miles of tabs to close before I sleep |
[May. 1st, 2008|06:29 pm] |
From BusinessWeek: Do Reputation Management Services Work?
An industry of online fixers is sprouting to defend clients against damaging information on the Web. With potential customers increasingly heading online to research products and services, bad reviews or complaints that turn up in a search can mean lost business. Reputation management services promise to highlight positive pages and bury offending sites deep in search results.
I'm considering starting one of these services for fandom. I could do the equivalent of ambulance chasing just by hanging out at Fandom Wank.
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) skywardprodigal hosts PoC in SF Carnival #9: What I Heard about You, And What That Meant for Me -- terrific links and great commentary.
I Googled "geek diaspora" to see if the phrase had any currency, and came across this New York Observer report on the NY Comic Con:
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| Torrents, YouTube, and Global Televisions |
[May. 1st, 2008|02:18 pm] |
So I posted yesterday about a new telenovela called Fuego en la sangre, aka Los tres hermanos homoeroticos.
[Yes, I'm shamelessly pandering to incest-friendly slashers here in the hopes of finding someone to talk about this show with on LJ. But two of the brothers really did look like they were on the verge of making out in one scene while the third was busy being shirtless in the background. Also, a lot of the gender stuff (not to mention the character motivations) becomes much more palatable if you just decide that los bros. Reyes are all gay -- as are their female counterparts, the three Elizondo sisters.]
So for now, I'm relying on YouTube, which seems to have a much broader sampling of global television -- I watched a few episodes of a Phillipines adaptation of a Mexican telenovela on YouTube last year. Aside from video/playback quality and vulnerability to copyright holder-issued sweeps & takedowns, YouTube's value in globalizing television is limited by its poor searchability -- it's often hard to find what you're looking for, assuming you know what to look for in the first place. And of course YouTube's specialty is the clip; it wasn't really designed for watching full episodes, much less watching episodes sequentially. I think I ended up watching ten different videos -- helpfully labelled "Capítulo 1 (Parte 1)" and so on -- to get through the first two nights' worth of Fuego. So I admire curatorial efforts such as this one, which provide an orderly alternate interface for viewing Fuego on YouTube.
This is certainly a very US-centric perspective, and actually much narrower than that, but it's still kind of cool to be living in a time where over half of the television that I'm watching originates in other countries and often other languages, despite the challenges in tracking down sources. And should I even be calling it television still, when I'm watching it all on my computer? |
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| Burning up for your love -- and Revenge! |
[Apr. 30th, 2008|05:32 pm] |
Man, the new Univision telenovela Fuego en la sangre (Burning for Revenge) sounds awesome. From the press release:
The Reyes brothers, played by three of Spanish-language TV’s biggest heartthrobs Eduardo Yáñez, Jorge Salinas, and Pablo Montero, take an oath over the grave of their beloved sister to avenge her death. Their plan: to seduce then abandon the beautiful daughters of the man they hold responsible for their sister’s death, played by three of today’s hottest leading ladies, Adela Noriega, Elizabeth Álvarez, and Nora Salinas. But their plan is threatened as each brother finds himself actually falling in love with his intended victim. They find themselves trapped in a labyrinth of passion, ambition, and lies that clouds reason and leaves young hearts yearning for love…and Burning for Revenge.
The show debuted in Mexico in January and started airing in the U.S. on Monday, setting record ratings and beating all but House in the 18-34 demographic. Here's a trailer; you can start watching the series on YouTube, or just check out the Reyes brothers' skinnydipping scene (NSFW). No fansubs into English that I'm aware of, but you can read recaps courtesy of Caray, Caray!
If there were ever a telenovela ripe for English-speaking LJ fandom, this is it.
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| Rhymes with NEWB |
[Apr. 30th, 2008|03:50 pm] |
From catching up with Jason Tocci's Geek Studies blog:
How People Explain Female Geeks:
When essayists and reporters do take the time to specifically point out female involvement in geeky subcultures, it is often to make one or both of a couple assertions: - Women like geeky stuff you might have associated only with men.
- Men might get one thing from geeky pursuits, but women get another thing.
The upshot of either assertion may be an implied question: Are female geeks unusual for their gender, or unusual within their subculture?
Sexism and Misogyny in Geek Culture: In the post from yesterday, I guessed at why there are more male than female geeks, and I think we can similarly hazard some guesses as to why many male geeks are misogynistic. Basically I think this comes down to feeling rejected and threatened by women—either personally/romantically/sexually or in terms of professional and cultural identity—and trying to cut women down to feel better about themselves. Some geeks have indeed turned to coding or gaming or whatever to prove their worth as men, according greater worth to geeky knowledge than to traditional indexes of masculinity; contemplating women excelling in these fields raises questions about how masculine they really are.Others may feel resentful about rejection, which gets guys (like in one of the above-linked posts) claiming that the exclusiveness of computer culture is no worse than “stupid fashinista culture.” They are resentful over feeling personally rejected, and frame their exclusiveness and rudeness as a response to women as a stereotyped “other.” On the other hand, some are just desperate and socially inept, and may sincerely think that harassing women online might yield some kind of personal or sexual interaction. Elsewhere he links to a WIRED article: Wired's Geekster Handbook, A Field Guide to the Nerd Underground. I don't think they're using "Nerd Underground" in the same way that synecdochic recently did -- the article lists six types of nerds: The Fanboy, The Music Geek, The Gamer, The Gadget Guy, The Hacker, and The Otaku. If this is the underground, what's left for the Nerd Mainstream? The accompanying picture is worth a thousand words on how Wired's vision of geek culture is gendered and racialized. Is there even such a thing as a singular geek culture anymore, or is it really a geek diaspora?
( political links ) |
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| Links guaranteed fresh or your attention back |
[Apr. 29th, 2008|06:44 pm] |
Not that the gendered implications of this escape me, but here's a rigorous skientific analysis of the relationship between facial hair and computer language success (via /.) -- it's like a male geek picspam.
Here's WIRED on ROFLcon (see also interviews with the organizers from MIT's C3).
WIRED also reads New York Magazine's cover story on Gossip Girl and decides that Gossip Girl's Online Success Is a Preview of TV 3.0:
New episodes routinely arrived at the No. 1 most-downloaded spot on iTunes, and then there were the hundreds of thousands who were downloading free week-old episodes on the CW's site. Even executives at Nielsen threw up their hands and admitted that Gossip Girl appeared to be speaking to an audience so young and tech-savvy they hadn't really figured it out just yet.
This isn't the first show to find internet success -- Lost and The Office are big download hits, too. But this is the first show that seems to have succeeded primarily on the internet. There's something about the combination of the show's premise, the viewers' age, and the available technology that has given Gossip Girl a life of its own online. Not only do fans watch the show on their computers, but they post sightings of the actors on gossip blogs and exchange rumors (about both the show and its stars) on fan sites. You can even play Gossip Girl's Upper East Side on Second Life. It's not appointment television; it's a 24-hour conversation. We are all Gossip Girl! And the whole experience can happen sans television.
TVbytheNumbers registers its lack of imagination disagreement. But then, they're just haters who think Dawn Ostroff should be fired, and who would pay attention to people like that?
Daytime soap opera One Life to Live's returning headwriter Ron Carlivati not-so-obliquely criticizes how the show was written during the WGA strike by Gary Tomlin, and Snark Weighs In lives up to its title in dissecting the in-house wank. But who cares -- Andrea Evans is coming back as Tina!
And just when I'd sworn off Supernatural, sockkpuppett goes and makes a gorgeous, evocative new SPN vid which makes me care about the Winchesters again. Just when I thought I was out.... |
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| TV is my anti-anti-drug (pass the Provigil) |
[Apr. 29th, 2008|11:45 am] |
I've seen a few people favorably linking to Clay Shirky's Gin, Television, and Social Surplus, and I have to wonder what's up with that. Most of the piece recycles all-too-familiar arguments about television as sedative & soporific, an electronic opiate of the masses -- see Jason Mittell's The Cultural Power of an Anti-Television Metaphor: Questioning the "Plug-in Drug" and a TV-Free America [PDF].
Shirky's argument casts television as the thing which must be turned off and turned away from in order to deploy society's "cognitive surplus" -- that TV "essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat." That "[i]t's better to do something than to do nothing" -- and watching TV, here, is doing nothing, a purely passive consumption. He closes with an ostensibly fandom-friendly valorization of "producing and sharing" juxtaposed against the worthless, even wasteful act of consumption -- but his example here is a four-year old watching a DVD and "looking for the mouse." For adults, the preferred alternatives he offers to watching TV are blogging, editing Wikipedia entries about Pluto (the planet, not the Disney character), contributing to mailing lists, and perhaps making LOLcats.
And we've been here before -- theater, reading, music, movies have all been considered pernicious and wasteful influences on weak minds, especially the minds of women and youth, at different cultural eras. Contemporary opprobrium harnesses these long-standing tropes of addiction and cognitive ennui to target video games and the internet and devalued (again, often feminized or youth-oriented) cultural forms. Steven Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter is a useful corrective, though arguably (like Shirky) he posits a 'bad old days' of mindless passive consumption to contrast the complexity and mental stimulation afforded by contemporary television and video games. Even Jonathan Gray argues against the logic of TV Turnoff Week by exhorting people to watch better (as they used to say, "quality") TV fare like The Wire instead of bad old TV like The Hills.
(Yes, I'm biased here, though pace Johnson I will say that I tend to watch Th* H*lls much the same way that Barthes read Balzac, and could easily imagine a sequel to S/Z [perhaps called L/C?] tracing the multiplicity of codes which the show weaves together and viewers parse & untangle in their interpretations -- see also songsaboutbuildingsandfood's brilliant shot-by-shot analysis of last week's club scene.)
I do tend to privilege nebulous notions like quality and complexity in the television that I'm most drawn to and drawn in by, as well as in the fanworks I find most satisfying and compelling. And writing out this post makes me wary of unreflexively elevating those personal preferences and tastes to universal values and de facto justifications for the merits of TV and fan creations. Because isn't it the very logic of justification, the demand to produce explanations and alibis and exceptions and exemplars for our pleasures and passions, that we should be resisting in the first place?
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| Where have you gone, Michel Houellebecq? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you -- woo woo woo! |
[Apr. 24th, 2008|10:32 am] |
A funny thing happened on my way to leaving feedback for synecdochic's excellent "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose" (I know "excellent" isn't exactly news or insightful analysis here). I saw her post "sex-positive". what a loaded term. -- again, it's really excellent and thought-provoking.
And it reminded me of how I've always had issues with the term/concept (yes, a tedious "my issues, let me show you them" post), which I first started hearing over 15 years ago. And I feel like I should be handing out disclaimers like Halloween candy here -- but I'm still sipping my first cup of coffee, so instead I'll just ask for the benefit of the doubt.
I came to the concept of "sex-positive" at the tail end of the Reagan-Bush years in the U.S., amidst an array of clashes and debates around the politics of sex and sexuality. In my downtown New York-centric corner of the world (and feel free to read that as "provincial" and even in many ways "narcissistic"), it was a really bleak and tense time, and the so-called culture wars were for many of us very much a matter of life and death. Cultural politics were radical politics were sexual politics. In this milieu, affirming that you were "sex-positive" invoked whole movements, subcultures, lineages and affiliations that were quite specific to that era.
And those were movements, subcultures, lineages and affiliations that I very much aligned myself with, that very much informed and shaped who I was and in so many ways continue to be. Yet I couldn't get behind the whole "sex-positive" concept. I could see why people found value and meaning in it, why it felt vital and compelling and necessary to them, how it functioned polemically and philosophically and practically for so many people. So I was happy to support other people's sex-positivity, and their work in creating sex-positive spaces and socialities, art and education. But it wasn't for me.
So I guess my complaint against sex-positivity is that it can potentially create a norm around compulsory affirmation, a reflexive dismissal or hostility towards any "negative thinking" that risks invoking shame or invalidating desires or infringing on personal pleasures and expressions. And I really can see how those norms can be valuable and productive -- and even demonstrably superior and preferable to the available alternatives and defaults -- in some contexts and cultures and communities, for at least some people at least some of the time. But -- well, there are always trade-offs, right? |
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| Paragraphs largely lacking any segues or transitions |
[Apr. 23rd, 2008|11:25 am] |
Last night I dreamt about internet drama -- in my dream, everybody was calling it the Great Spork Fork. Apparently there was a widely read and influential community that posted MST-style sporks of TV episodes, which were elaborately timed so that people could make podcasts to play as DVD commentary tracks. But there was a schism in the comm, when some got sick of sporkinig the same old crappy TV shows and wanted to start MSTing imaginary TV shows that were more interesting. It all ended in recriminations and defriendings and pseuicides. Several people on my flist made great comments and posts throughout all the wank, but for some reason they'd all changed their LJ usernames as an oblique form of protest or commentary or something. Then my cat woke me up.
I love how gmail reads my LJ comment notifications and matches them with behaviorally targeted sponsored links. Today's offering: Top 10 Reasons Not to Sleep with Him.
I've gotten terrible about leaving feedback lately, but I managed to break my streak of fail for this amazing SGA-Noir art (via ileliberte). Now to start working through my backlog of fics & vids that I liked but haven't commented on.
Less than 24 hours after confessing to violetisblue that I should be banned from reccing shows (and she, quite rightly, did not make any attempt to disavow me of this belief), I inadvertently managed to interest two people on my flist in a new Japanese drama, and accidentally persuaded a coworker to check out Th* H*lls. Stop me before I rec again!
Also, if you've been following the feminist blogosphere discussions about white appropriation of the work and analysis of women of color -- [X] is doing book readings in my neighborhood tonight and tomorrow, one a mere three blocks away from my apartment. DO NOT WANT. And yet -- I'm perversely tempted to attend one and ask earnestly during the Q&A, "Amanda, why do those angry women on the internet hate you so much? Are they just jealous, or do they hate you for your freedom?" |
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| Hardcore (frenzy of the visible edition) |
[Apr. 22nd, 2008|05:45 pm] |
Scalzi posted on the Open Source Boob Project thing, and linked in passing to this appalling NYT article: At Jets Game, A Halftime Ritual of Harassment.
And it reminds me of my years as a pro wrestling fan in the mid- to late-'90s. My favorite was Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW) -- at the time, they were still independent (now they're owned by WWE), and marketed themselves as edgy and hardcore. Which meant, among other things, barbed wire matches and (real) blood on the mats.
I followed them on TV, and only once got to see them live -- at a VFW hall (if I remember) in a suburb of Boston. And it was an awesome experience -- I can't even begin to describe the amazing jolt of energy when Sandman emerged from the back of the stands, poolstick in one hand and beer in the other, as his themesong ("Enter Sandman" by Metallica, of course) started blaring over the speakers. And that incredible sense of oneness when we'd all start chanting "ECW! ECW! ECW!" (though admittedly it felt a bit proto-fascist) or "HOLY SHIT! HOLY SHIT!" at a particularly stunning move.
Nor do I have words for the awfulness any time a female performer appeared (generally in valet/manager roles -- usually, if they mixed it up inside or outside the ring, it was more "catfight" than female wrestler). Instantly the crowd would start chanting, "Show your tits! Show your tits!" and generally the women would play to the crowd to some degree, though not (fully) taking off their tops. It was really bad and mortifying, and the crowd was much more overwhelmingly male than my experience at stadium shows for the big two companies (WWE -- then WWF -- and WCW). The latter still skewed male, but had a lot of (m/f) couples & families.
And you know, I could bracket that part of the experience off and not feel personally implicated in it and still have a great time. But I can't imagine how I would've felt if I'd gone to the show with a woman -- much less if I'd been a woman at the show.
I'm getting a bit of that sense from reading everybody's comments & responses to the ferret guy. And it sucks that his post precipitated it, but I'm really *heart*ing female fandom in all its smart, angry, creative, passionate, "oh hell no" awesome glory right now. Now that's a hardcore that I can really get behind today. |
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| I'll be posthegemonic in the postpatriarchy! Err... |
[Apr. 22nd, 2008|04:14 pm] |
I should maybe stay offline this week, as this marks Day Two of clicking on links that I know will just infuriate or at least seriously exasperate me, and yet I can't help myself. Sure, there's a long and noble tradition of Someone Is Wrong On the Internet, but I worry that I'm becoming an outrageaholic one click at a time.
In other news! I have fallen in love with a new Japanese drama that will surely break my heart called Last Friends. The opening voiceover reminded me a lot of Banana Yoshimoto's novels, and the rest reminded me not a little of NANA (especially the bittersweet voiceovers-from-the-future directly addressing one of the characters, like a postcard that they'll never receive). This is maybe not coincidental, since the writer also wrote the screenplays for the two NANA movies. Oddly, four of the five main characters are played by actors from the live action version of Nodame Cantabile. Also in the wake of thinking about BSG's Razor, I am acutely sensitive to the Tragic Lesbian character, and worried that she is Marked for Death, though she's well acted and interestingly written and training to be a motocross racer.
I've started reading a really good essay by Sara Ahmed called Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism. I've only made it through the introduction, but it looks like essential reading.
Two questions for the flist:
1. If you use a bittorrent client, have you ever set it up to download stuff automatically from RSS feeds from torrent sites (e.g. like this)? How's that working out for you?
2. Does anybody have access to the academic journal Theory, Culture & Society (SAGE)? I'd love to get my hands on these two articles on posthegemony cultural studies.
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| Links to stuff I haven't read yet |
[Apr. 17th, 2008|01:58 pm] |
On TV: Botox. Face-lifts. Reconstructive Surgery. - Mary McNamara, LA Times (see also follow-up blog post), via Maureen Ryan's The Watcher (post includes her list of "a few women whose faces I love").
See also John Barrowman's Botox advice: "Just do it around the eyes. I can still smile and look expressive. If something makes you feel good then you should do it."
Gays in Primetime: A Special Investigative Report (see also part 2) - AfterElton, also via Mo Ryan.
Ta-Nehisi Coates on Bill Cosby and the Black Conservative tradition - Too Sense on Coates' article in The Atlantic 'This Is How We Lost to the White Man'; the accompanying video interview/commentary by Coates is great stuff.
In the wake of Steve Vander Ark's notorious “Jo quit. We’re taking over now.” -- James Marsters on the future of Spike in Joss Whedon's Buffy comics:
When asked if he has read Angel: After The Fall or the Buffy: Season 8 comic books, he answered, “No, but I am very afraid of these comics.”Marsters mentioned that at the Paily Center event, the subject came up and he turned to series creator (and comic book author) Joss Whedon and asked, “You haven’t put me in this comic book have you?” Marsters went on to tell the audience, “I own that character, too. If he wants to do radically different things with that character, he should come and ask me.” Lastly, the prospects for a new season of The Sarah Connor Chronicles look better than ever, according to Fox Entertainment president Kevin Reilly: "They're [SCC and Back to You] really the lead candidates at this point. We've already started staffing on 'Sarah Connor.' Although it was an unusual season, it will end up finishing by far and away the strongest new drama of the season. Other shows have not gotten the traction." |
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| Triangulating |
[Apr. 15th, 2008|11:55 am] |
kyuuketsukirui has posted a first batch of reviews for ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) lgbtfest -- description from the comm's profile: "LGBT Fest is a fest for fanfic that focuses on the experience of being lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. This fest is multi-fandom and open to stories about any characters you want to write as LGBT, whether they're canonically LGBT or not."
It's a cool idea, and I'm sure a lot of great fic will come out of it. I'll confess that when I looked at the prompts, a lot of them had a certain earnest "after school special"/"a very special episode of..." vibe to them, which just goes to show how pathetically jaded and tiresomely cynical I am. But it got me interested in what the presumed differences would be between an "lgbtfest" and a "queerfest" and a "slashfest."
I do wonder whether queerness or proto-queerness takes different forms & flavors in different kinds of slash fandoms -- SGA slash's queer feels instinctively different than bandom slash's queer, for example, and each have their own ways of triangulating the slash-lgbt-queer nexus. Which may in turn partly speak to broader differences between how RPS and FPS articulate these triangulations -- though now I'm way out of my depth (possibly that occurred several paragraphs ago, in which case you can tell me in a comment!). |
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[Apr. 14th, 2008|06:24 pm] |
I'm reflecting on these (and other) recent episodes from my life & work in the wake of events & discussions in the radical women of color & the feminist blogospheres discussed by delux_vivens here and in her own LJ, shewhohashope here, coffeeandink here, and ithiliana here (and much more -- see links in those posts). It's difficult, painful, powerful stuff.
I have a lot to work on, in terms of my own thinking and behavior and privilege and actions and responsibilities and accountability. I wish I could say that I've consistently supported women of color, listened to women of color, heard women of color -- but all too often I haven't. I wish I could say that I've consistently stepped up as an ally even when it wasn't easy or convenient or safe, when it didn't feel good, when it wouldn't make me look good, when it cost me something -- but all too often I haven't. I wish I could say that I've never traded off of my relative power and privilege -- for the sake of convenience or expedience or comfort, out of force of habit or willful ignorance, because the alternatives were too messy or uncertain, due to ego or ambition -- but all too often I have.
Yet I'm not interested in luxuriating in liberal white guilt here -- I'm taking inventory, and that also includes a lot of things and moments that I'm proud of and honor. But I need to acknowledge that this is hard for me, that I still have a lot of defenses and knee-jerk reactions that shelter me from being responsive and responsible. And that it ultimately isn't all, or even much, about me at all -- that it's useful and necessary to look inwards, but crucial to look beyond myself.
ETA: I got distracted and posted before I'd finished -- The above was inspired by The Angry Black Woman's call for a Carnival of Allies. I have vaguely mixed feelings about the concept of 'allies' that I've never been able to put my finger on -- I'm much more used to thinking in terms of communities and coalitions. For the latter, I've been rereading Bernice Johnson Reagon's excellent Coalition Politics: Turning the Century. |
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| Monday links |
[Apr. 14th, 2008|01:55 pm] |
The awesomeness of Battlestar Galactica reduces me to a blathering fool -- I'm very happy that so many people write thoughtful episode commentary and I enjoy reading them, but all I can contribute is "I love Kara Thrace my frakking show!" Plus a link to the equally awesome BioCylon User Manual (an excerpt) by cyborganize (which might also be of interest to Sarah Connor Chronicles fans). And I also liked the weekend's Doctor Who episode just fine and possibly even dandy as well.
In other news, I am knee deep in the spring anime season. Enjoying so far: Vampire Knight, Kure-nai, Itazura na Kiss, Special A (aka S.A.). Most of the shows that I was particularly looking forward to haven't been fansubbed yet; I'm also waiting on subs for a new (live action) drama, Last Friends, that sounds intriguing (and has a theme song by Utada Hikaru, which always works for me).
Speaking of Cylons and Terminators: US war robots in Iraq 'turned guns' on fleshy comrades (The Register) -- "Apparently, alert American troops managed to quell the traitorous would-be droid assassins before the inevitable orgy of mechanised slaughter began." This time.
"Why in the world won't they take my money?" - Hulu, iTunes, and the value of attention (MIT's Joshua Green in FlowTV) -- this is a much better analysis of the impetus behind Hulu that I'd tried to suggest a while back -- at least, in my paranoid reading, segregating "corporate" and commoditizable video from "user-generated content" of dubious monetizability, with remix culture-style works such as vids potentially frozen out or left in no-man's-land.
About Five Thousand Seven Hundred and Fifty Words (Samuel Delaney on s-f writing) -- a classic must-read (though the best part for me is the second half -- skip ahead if it feels too plodding in the beginning).
Day 21/22: The Footage (Cerebal Jetsam) -- an interesting post linking the viral, ARGish promotion of a Nine Inch Nails album last year to William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, with interesting implications for a critique/analysis of fandom & capitalism:
Speaking of viral promotion strategies, I just love so much that commenters have decided that the pseudonymous Marvel_B0y (who posts as a snarky/semi-disgruntled employee of Marvel Comics) is actually a viral campaign to promote Marvel's Secret Invasion event. |
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