Publicly Sponsored Hate Speech

May 1, 2013 By 3 Comments

I hadn’t intended to write another post about the virulent hatred of fat, fatness, and fat people that is currently shaping our culture. My previous post on the topic led to some interesting and intense conversation, but there are many other topics to discuss and many other dangerous political trends to analyze. Besides, this is a communications blog.

But when I came across this astonishing campaign image on the subway recently, I realized that it deserves its own post.

"Cut the Junk" NYC Campaign

“Cut the Junk” NYC Campaign

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Filed Under: Art, Culture, Health, Marketing, Media, New York, Politics, Science

Perfect Strangers, Alone Together

February 27, 2013 By Leave a Comment

This past Valentine’s Day, a once viral video from 2006 re-made the rounds online: Ben Coonley’s Valentine for Perfect Strangers.

I never get tired of Coonley’s video, described as “a romantic e-card from Otto, a feral cat seeking love from a stranger on the Internet. Otto edits himself into clips from the 1980’s sitcom Perfect Strangers and asks strangers on YouTube to return the favor.”

Watching it again this year, I thought about its potential overlap with Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2012). Ostensibly, Turkle and Coonley are working in the same soil: intimacy and the internet. The website for Turkle’s book features the following language: “Facebook. Twitter. SecondLife. ‘Smart’ phones. Robotic pets. Robotic lovers. Thirty years ago we asked what we would use computers for. Now the question is what don’t we use them for. Now, through technology, we create, navigate, and perform our emotional lives.” “Technology has become the architect of our intimacies,” she goes on to warn.

But as I recalled watching the video for the first time — years ago with the friend who introduced me to it — I thought not of the pathetic ironies of 21st century digitally-mediated longing but of actual relationships: the shared laughter with my friend, and then my subsequent inclusion of the video in a screening program I’d put together in Puerto Rico. In a steamy gallery space with bad acoustics, dozens of young people sat crowded on the floor and watched Coonley’s video and other short works about love and longing. The event wasn’t a particular success, and I don’t have a big thesis — but just a tiny observation: that for every grand evaluation of the impact of technology, there is an immediately available example of its very opposite. Every online alienation might contain the shadow of a genuine encounter in another time/space dimension. We should keep tracking both story lines.

Filed Under: Art, Interpersonal Communication, Social Media

A Brechtian Fire Alarm

February 13, 2013 By 1 Comment

Last week I had an experience at the theatre that made me giddy.  In the Foundry Theatre’s production of Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan currently playing at La Mama’s Ellen Stewart Theater, Brecht’s so-called “alienation” or “defamiliarization ” effect comes across without didacticism or heavy-handed militancy, and is alternatingly funny and devastating.  But it was a circumstantial mishap the night that I went to the play that added an additional layer of complexity to the experience.

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Shen Te (in red) and various cast members. Photo from David Gordon’s theatremania.com review.

In Brecht’s play, the kind-hearted prostitute Shen Te, deemed a “good person” by a trio of traveling gods, struggles to uphold her commitment to generosity and love, even as every good deed renders her vulnerable to brutal manipulation and betrayal.  Pushed to the edge of despair, Shen Te resorts to impersonating a fictitious cousin from a neighboring town, a man who makes decisions based solely on personal gain, and thereby climbs to a position of precarious prosperity.

At the end of the play, Shen Te asks if there is not something deeply wrong with a world in which basic kindness and generosity are systematically punished with hardship and poverty?  The gods, however, disagree.  They refuse to consider a structural reworking of human society, contenting themselves instead with watching the occasional human struggle to do “good” against the odds.

One aspect that struck me particularly was the production’s use of drag to deepen the central concern of the play.  Taylor Mac’s drag rendition of Shen Te, with his bald head and chest hair unapologetically visible alongside a red dress and heels, destabilized from the start the assumption that Shen Te’s persona is the true identity and the exploitative cousin, Shui Ta, the disguise.  This is not to say that Shui Ta was portrayed as more “real” than Shen Te.  Both personas were disguises—or, perhaps more accurately, both were shown to be contextual manifestations of a multifaceted individual, capable of both profound selflessness and cold calculation, brought out by material necessity.

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Photo from Charles Isherwood’s New York Times review.

Also, I was oddly lucky to see the show on a night that afforded an additional level of meta-theatrics beyond the defamiliarization of character or social/economic system.  Five minutes before the end of the play, right before the big reveal of Shen Te’s double persona, a small fire broke out onstage.  In a direct address to the audience (and actors, crew, etc.) that Brecht would have been proud of, actor David Turner pointed and shouted, “there’s a fire!”  It took me several long moments to realize that the fire was real.  Since the fire was small and quickly extinguished, I can tell you how much I loved the ensuing moments.  Audience and actors milled about in the lobby, not quite knowing how to acknowledge each other, while the fire department checked out the theater and deemed it safe.  When the show started up again, we witnessed an unusual moment in professional theatre: the actors took their place onstage with the house lights on as audience members resumed position, announced they would take the scene back a few lines, and then flipped back into character.  Taylor Mac made an impromptu reference to Ellen Stewart’s spirit speaking through the fire (Ellen Stewart founded the La Mama Theater in the 1960s), before resuming Shen Te’s final debate with the gods.

Call me romantic and impressionable, but this unexpected interruption drew a curious attention to the act of gathering to see a play, and although a degree of momentum was lost in the final reveal, something was gained through a heightened awareness of our collective commitment to finishing the play.  The threat of fire and the attention to safety foregrounded our physical-ness, our materiality, and our vulnerability to external circumstances, further confirming the conflicted Shen Te’s conclusions.  It’s a mishap I won’t forget.

Filed Under: Art, Culture, Uncategorized

Visual Puns

February 6, 2013 By Leave a Comment

If you’ve ever been curious about Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, or if you’ve read some of it and found it impossible, or if you just like trippy Youtube clips, this video can help.  It’s a visualization of Wake page 439, and it does a pretty good job of translating the text’s puns and portmanteau words into a visual collage and dissolving imagery.  The video project seems to me like a limit case of trying to match images to language, to move literature from the page to the screen, raising questions about translation and interpretation along the way.  Plus, it features the voice of Joseph Gordon-Levitt.  I’m assuming that’s better than James Franco.

 

Filed Under: Art, Fun, literature, Media

Reading Kids and Dogs

November 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

For the first time, I am simply going to post a link to another person’s content: Madeline Gabriel’s post, “Should You Share That Cute Dog and Baby Photo?“ on her blog “Dogs and Babies.” But of course, since I am an academic, this “simple” redirect will be followed by a few points of analysis.

“peaceful and companionable”

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Filed Under: Art, Blogs and Blogging, Cross-Cultural Communication, Interpersonal Communication, Non-verbal Communication, Reading, To Ponder, What if . . .

Overstimulated

November 26, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Sometimes when I don’t know what to do next, because there are too many things that should come first, I have a cup of coffee instead.  Inevitably, this makes my heart beat a little faster, and every task on my list seems to clamor even more urgently to the top of the page.  Soon, I’m staring at the empty Word document on my laptop, resisting the temptation to check my favorite food blogs yet again, trying to jump in somewhere.

A recent cac.ophony post highlighted the bombardment of news (albeit sometimes news of a personal nature) we’re exposed to via social media networks.  Keeping up-to-date with news (whatever that means) sometimes feels like a second (third?) full-time job—that is, after keeping up with the strict diet of five academic books a week that I must get through between now and January.  Between reading about the death toll in Palestine, developments in the civil war in Syria, and updates on post-Sandy suffering and destruction, there are also cac.ophony posts to peruse.  This is another responsibility, because being part of a formal intellectual community means consuming and participating in its discourse.

Another recent post by my colleague and fellow Fellow encouraged readers to consider the functions performed by our “diversions.”  Increasingly, I find it difficult to distinguish between main tasks and diversions.  Is it a diversion to read news analyses about U.S.-Israel relations while I’m supposed to be reading academic books about neoliberal imperialism?  Is it a diversion to compose this blog post in my mind while I’m supposedly reading Rustom Barucha’s The Politics of Cultural Practice?

I’d like to follow my train of thought for a few moments back to a different kind of diversion, but one that still holds bearing on the world of academia and higher education.  Over the summer I decided to nurture my theatre directing work by taking a class on “devised directing” at the Primary Stages Einhorn School of Performing Arts. In one assignment, the task was to create a short piece of theatre based on a dream.  I ended up staging a recurrent anxiety dream I’ve had about teaching in an undergraduate classroom.  It was satisfying to bring an aesthetic vocabulary to a few experiential aspects of being a graduate student, an educator, an academic.  There was a hazily lit moment of a figure (played by the wonderful Bianca Christina Gallifuoco, my collaborator and friend) donning a costume-like professorial outfit and preparing herself mentally before entering a brightly lit classroom.  My favorite moment was one that we developed while improvising: the professor figure starts directing her students toward a certain page of the course syllabus, but freezes mid-sentence, unable to find the document or articulate a thought.  When she tries to reboot by literally pulling words out of her frozen mouth, all she can retrieve is the ominous sound of a ticking clock.  By the end of the piece, the floor is covered with an avalanche of papers printed with articles and teaching notes as well as chains of paper-doll students emerging from a briefcase, and a giant looming cardboard clock hangs upstage.

When we created this project, I thought of it as being mostly about worries around losing direction in the classroom, as well as the daily performances that go into academic and professional life.  But that frozen moment in front of an enormous stack of reading, when the only signal you can manage to emit from your open mouth is that of a ticking clock, speaks volumes to me today about the paralysis of information overload.  Over the summer it felt productive to follow this diversion from formal professional accomplishment.  In the thick of this particular semester, the most diversion I can afford to indulge in is probably writing about that performance piece on this blog.

But it got me out of my head and onto the page, didn’t it?

Filed Under: Art, Asides

On What Might Be the Value of Reading Middlebrow Criticism

November 23, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I confess that a lot of my extracurricular reading consists of “middlebrow” criticism, writing by The New Yorker critics like Louis Menand, James Wood, Alex Ross, Joan Acocella and also, for example, The New York Review of Books, which maybe isn’t as “middlebrow” as The New Yorker but still generally accessible to an educated audience, and other things like themillions.com that contain journalistic or belletristic-type writing about the arts.  I’m currently reading James Wood’s little book with the brazen title of How Fiction Works.  It’s a self-consciously middlebrow text; he says in the introduction he’s writing for the “common reader,” which might be code for “non-academic audience.”  So why, as an aspiring academic, do I read this stuff?

My enjoyment of middlebrow criticism has something to do with my own history.  I grew up in an essentially bookless household and my interest in literature and my eventual decision to go to graduate school to study it was aided and inspired by my experience with the middlebrow establishment.  I really have The Los Angeles Times’ Book Review, KCRW’s literary show Bookworm, and an early encounter with Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation to thank for giving me access to the house of criticism.  I suspect that many who continue to profitably read or even contribute to middlebrow criticism grew up in similar circumstances, where literature was not so much an inheritance as a great discovery.  Harold Bloom pretty much fits this model.  James Wood does too.

So a late adolescent reading habit has stuck with me, but it’s also the case that I often find middlebrow criticism memorable and meaningful in way that a lot of “scholarly” articles aren’t.  Maybe it’s because there’s often some element of judgment involved, the value of a new book or film or whatever hasn’t been determined yet, so the middlebrow critic has the chance to make a memorable first impression, to find a resonant, memorable phrase that suggests the work or the experience of the work.  Or maybe it’s that most scholars have to sideline their subjective responses, to take an “objective” stance, so you can’t really tell whether they particularly admire or respect the objects they work on, whereas with the middlebrow critics there’s subjectivity, there’s judgment, sensuous response, an explicit love of subject.  If scholarship deepens knowledge, then this middlebrow criticism reminds me of the value of what I’m doing, that literature is important and there are real stakes to thinking about it.

I’ve also found that this kind of criticism is a great resource for students, particularly students in introductory literature courses.  I have pointed students to The New York Review of Books many times, especially to Daniel Mendelsohn’s essays, as examples of clear, jargon-free writing about novels, films, and theater.  I’m planning on using some of the great examples in Wood’s book to discuss the techniques of fiction; his concise presentation of free indirect style is a godsend.  But perhaps more than any model or example for students, this writing shows them the contemporary relevance of thinking about literature, the fact that there is a larger conversation about books that they might not know or have cared about before.

Filed Under: Art, Reading Tagged With: , , , ,

Interviews (not the academic kind)

November 15, 2012 By 6 Comments

This is a piece about using technology to document and preserve as well as connect anew. It is also about advocating for audio documentation as a break from the insistent and incessant visual realm. Rest your screen eyes (after you read this) and just listen. I hereby issue a challenge to you:  this Thanksgiving, be the weird/annoying relative/friend who is always up to something and can’t just relax in front of the parade, dog show, or Detroit Lions. Tell them you just have to do this one thing…

Select one relative or friend, perhaps a parent or the oldest person at dinner, and ask to interview him or her. If you have a smart phone, then you have a piece of recording technology John and Ruby Terrill Lomax could scarcely have imagined when they lugged around heavy equipment like this in the 1930s:

Library of Congress, American Folklife Center

Even without an external directional microphone, the voice recording feature on smart phones is an incredible tool. The oral history project StoryCorps has declared the day after Thanksgiving “National Day of Listening.” I see this as a very intentional effort to combat the competitive shopping delirium of “black Friday.” StoryCorps provides an excellent list of questions that suit a variety of themes such as Working, Religion, Family Heritage, and War.

Even if you think you’ve heard  every one of a person’s stories one hundred times, themes can open new territory. When I interviewed my father in the StoryCorps booth in 2007, I focused on his childhood memories of World War II. He had told me many times about peeling the foil from the paper of Wrigley’s gum wrappers and getting cash for the foil. But it was not until the recorded interview that he described the profound trauma of seeing news reels with concentration camp footage during Saturday movie matinees. I have a CD of the interview, and it remains startling when my father bursts into tears on the recording.

Starter questions such as “what is your earliest memory?” or “what are you proudest of?” put people in the zone of recollection. These questions can break surfaces that, through habit and routine, have congealed over something potentially rich and evocative; like a dull skin coating a luscious mousse. If you take up this challenge to conduct a Thanksgiving interview, and do wind up breaking through the stubborn skin to discover something profound, please report back to the blog and share your experience.

When we conduct interviews, we are not only communicating across various entities (curricula, generations, turkeys); we are creating primary documents for the potential researchers of tomorrow. A Speaker’s Guidebook (O’Hair et al.) discusses the use of different types of evidence for making a strong, clear argument. The types of evidence include: extended, brief, and hypothetical examples; lay and expert testimony; narrative or anecdote; facts; and statistics. The oral history interview potentially provides the listener / would-be researcher with most of these types of evidence. In this Lomax recording of

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

the Lomaxes intended to document a short lullaby, but inadvertently documented the use / employment of a black woman transplanted from Virginia to Texas who nursed well over a dozen white children across two generations. This snippet of musical ethnography suddenly becomes relevant to the research of labor historians, women’s studies scholars, African Americanists, and southern culture historians, to name a few.

Not only can interviewing foster emotional connections and provide future researchers with material, it can be a powerful and effective pedagogical tool. When I taught Introduction to Acting at Baruch, the final assignment of the semester was for each student to interview a family member and to create a monologue drawn from that interview. The project was inspired by the performer Anna Deavere Smith. Smith’s bio describes an approach to performance that “combines the journalistic technique of interviewing her subjects with the art of interpreting their words through performance.”

Whatever one thinks of Smith’s final performances, her methodology provided a strong model for my class. Students conducted the interviews, edited them for clarity and narrative focus, and formulated blocking choices based on the emotional beats. Without exception, the work was much more affecting, detailed, and fully realized than anything that had come out of students selecting monologues from edited collections.

Filed Under: Art, Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, Fun, Higher Education, Interpersonal Communication, Language, Liberal Arts, Media, Music, Oral Communication, To Ponder

Activist bookselling and the life of Karibu Books

October 23, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I’ve been thinking about the essay,”My First Lesson in Activist History (page 45 at this link),”  about the rise and fall of an activist, African American bookstore chain in and around DC, for weeks.  The author, Brother Yao (Hoke Smith Glover III) was the founder of Karibu Books and is a professor at Bowie State. His essay  brings up questions for me about the liberal marketplace and its effects on the circulation of ideas, expression, and critique. Also I think the digital journal in which it is published, Tidal Basin Review,  is rich, beautiful, dense. That means navigating it (at least on my internet connection) is slow. I like that. Missing my former Schwartz colleagues, this essay made me want to ask those of you who think about free communication/information systems like digital commons, and those of you who think about veteran coffee shops, and other kinds of public spheres, what you make of this story of the wondrous, maybe too brief, life of Karibu Books.

Filed Under: Art, Audience, Culture

Prolegomena to failure

October 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment

We used to read liner notes like they were Bible verses.  I am prone to lamenting that texts like these are gone in the virtual space from which we fish for mp3’s these days.  Long before we could wikipedia our favorite bands to find out what their deal was, we appealed to what was available to us. Yes, long before my life was ruled by incessant url’s, I relied on the majesty of toner to know what culture was:

Most of what we knew we learned from each other.   Mainly it was stupid.  We argued over the correct pronunciation of Ian MacKaye’s last name; we informed each other that Op Ivy was essentially reforming under a new name and scrambled to buy tickets to their first show; there was a new split 7” coming out on colored vinyl of such and such band; Greg Graffin was actually a college professor.

 

What we didn’t spend on cigarettes—the greatest joy of our evenings spent loitering endlessly in parking lots outside of a diner that was central to all of us who attended three different high schools respectively—was spent at record shops or mail-ordering away for vinyl to the far reaches of Olympia or the sprawling East Bay.  When they finally arrived in the mail, we would carefully slide the record out and try to discern what was etched on the inner rim of the record, were we lucky enough to receive such a secret message.  Placing the record on the turntable, we would turn our attention to those elaborate liner notes. We couldn’t post this stuff anywhere, you know, with no facebook pages or twitter feeds, so we photocopied those hand-lettered lyrics sheets and witnessed by pasting them to telephone poles and street signs, to the front of newspaper stands and the backs of bus benches.  Chock it up to teen angst but we were the faithful.

Yeah, some of it was stupid, and sure, we reveled in those short soundtracks of our constantly breaking hearts, singing along: “I believe in desperate acts, the kind that made you look stupid, look like a fool,” and using it as a directive.  I don’t believe in desperate acts anymore but I still love this album.

And some of it seems smarter than I would even want to give my 15-year-old self credit for.  We listened pretty closely for that quick 1:27 on Bad Religion’s Suffer when we heard:

Tell me can the hateful chain be broken?
Production and consumption define our hollow lives.
Avarice has led us ‘cross the ocean,
Toward a land that’s better, much more bountiful and wide.
When will mankind finally come to realize
His surfeit has become his demise?
How much is enough to kill yourself?

We listened to Fifteen and agreed:

I’ve been having a hard time trying to justify
The clouds arising from the cars we drive
And a little too easy seems just a little too hard today
And I’m afraid my children are going to have to watch the world waste away
Been having a hard time trying to accept the fact
That paying money for four walls leaves the slavery intact
And a little too easy seems just a little too hard today
And I’m afraid my children are going to have to watch the world slip away
I know, I know, I know, life has become slavery
Costs two dollars a minute and additional charges to pray to god today
See I’ve been looking for some guidance but the voice on the phone ain’t got a damn thing to say
And a little too easy seems just a little too hard today
And I’m afraid my children are going to have to watch the world fade away
I was born a little too late to see the dream that they called America
See I only want to be a Free man but it’s against the law to sleep on the ground in Gods land
And a little too easy seems just a little bit insane
And I’m afraid I’m going to have to run for my life one of these days
I know, I know, I know, life has become slavery

(the cursor follows me now and asks if I want to post this to facebook.)

And to Screeching Weasel:

We don’t believe in god or jesus christ anymore
We don’t need colleges to validate our lives anymore
We don’t need twelve steps to show us how weak we’ve become anymore
We don’t need to buy into a system that offers empty promises anymore
We don’t need protection against anything anybody might say
We know that government can’t improve our lives anyway
We don’t need to drug ourselves anymore to keep the boredom away
We don’t anything except relying on ourselves for a change
I can see a new tomorrow
Now

What we felt was a failure all around us, one that we did not want to inherit.

But we have. There was no revolution.  Little has changed and I am surely more complicit than I would like to admit.

Like Saul became Paul, the biggest sinners become the most zealous believers.  But does it also work the other way around?  I marched for Occupy Wall Street but I never once slept at Zuccotti Park.  I worried that it felt fascist to be one of the echoer’s of the People’s microphone, atomatonically repeating things I had not thought about before they came from my own mouth. I am as skeptical as they come.  What of these actions do we perform just to make ourselves feel better seeing everything that is wrong with the world?  I agree with Žižek that we contribute to the Children’s Fund to forget about hunger: we buy organic produce and think we have done a small part to save Mother Earth.  But radical change, the necessary changes, are frightening.  We congratulate the courage of Pussy Riot for saying f you to the state and Putin but would everyone still like them if they found out about how their leftist politics also include demonstrating by having public orgies while pregnant as Nadezhda Tolokonnikova did in a Moscow Museum in 2008?  I doubt it.

 

Filed Under: Art, Culture, Fun, Internet, Music, Politics, Social Media, Social Networking
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