10/2/12

Watch this if you can find it.

I will never see this show, because I’m not in the habit of going to the theatre (and don’t live in New York), but I was glad to read that a Broadway adaptation of the documentary film, “Hands on a Hard Body” is about to open. Maybe the film will find a new audience and be available for streaming somewhere (it’s currently not available for rental on Netflix or Amazon).

Short plot summary: a car dealership in Texas runs an endurance contest in which contestants must keep a hand on a brand new fully loaded pickup truck. The last person standing wins the truck.

I remember watching the film when it showed briefly in a theater in L.A. back in 1997. The audience laughed  derisively (“look at those hicks!”) when the interview subjects waxed philosophical about the meaning of the contest in their heavy Texas drawls. But the film itself never demeans its subjects. My sense was that the filmmakers went into the project with a certain ironic distance but then got pulled into the human dramas playing out in this manufactured microcosm. A real gem.

10/2/12

How blogging is like the mattress industry

So, reading around the internets today with the new PC 2.0 on the membrane, it occurred to me (as I passed through Kevin Drum, Andrew Sullivan, Balloon Juice, and the other usual suspects) that to be a professional blogger today you basically have to be willing to say almost exactly the same thing as everyone else for some significant percentage of the time. And then for some of the time you have to say something different, or say something about different things. And the reason people read your blog is because, (a) they know they’re going to get comments on the big issues of the day (in politics, today, the Pennsylvania Voter ID decision), and (b) they will also get some other stuff that is unique to you, more or less.

I don’t think it was like this years ago. That is, I feel like there was much more differentiation among bloggers of a certain type (politics) than there is now, and that one of the effects of the professionalization of blogging has been to push everyone towards more similar content, with minor differences that in the long run don’t amount to too much.

On that same subject this Rohin Dahr piece on the mattress industry is getting a lot of play. Here’s the block quote featured by both Drum and Sullivan:

The top four companies (Sealy, Serta, Simmons, and Tempur-Pedic) make up 59% of the industry revenue. The top fifteen mattress companies make up a whopping 81% of the market. Low levels of competition lead to consumers paying obscenely high prices for mattresses.

As Drum points out, this structure doesn’t seem that surprising in a mature industry. Perhaps that’s why blogging is starting to look like it.

10/1/12

The Tissues of Immortality

From this weekend’s New York Times feature on “Great Moments in Inspiration”:

“When you get to the bottom of a box of Kleenex, the Kleenex turns pink or peach to let you know that it’s the end. You got five sheets left, so whatever you need to get done. So I’ll come up with a line of: ‘Time’s running out/My Kleenex is turning peach.’ …  And that’s how it starts. That’s that quick moment of inspiration — ‘Aw, man, these napkins are turning peach, time’s running out’ — then it’s a metaphor, in a rap, on the radio.” – Lupe Fiasco

My tissues and napkins never turn peach. Ergo, I will live forever.

Q.E.D.

10/1/12

Looper

Maybe it’s inevitable that time travel movies, in which the same events happen and re-happen with difference, seem so well suited to structuralist taxonomy.  The defining element in terms of plot is, of course, the fantasy of altering the past (personal, historical or otherwise), which creates a pretext for the relatively novel prospect (in mainstream film, anyway) of segments of narrative repetition.

Thematically, the film must also take a position on a broader question – namely, can the past be altered, or will time-travel simply provide empirical proof that we are on the traintracks of fate?

On this question, time travel movies are split:

Tragedy – Fate. Sorry, everyone.  Examples: La Jetée (Ohhhhhhh.), Donnie Darko (Awwwww.)

Satire – We can change things, but boy do we mortal fools make a hash of it.  Examples: Primer (What jerks!), Timecrimes (What a jerk!)

Romance – Hooray, the universe bends to our will! Examples: Star Trek IV (Save the whales? Have saved the whales), Back to the Future (Save the 50s!)

Comedy: Are there none, or can I simply not think of any?  Commenters’ choice!  (But let’s not have any Hot Tub Time Machine nonsense.  Risible though the gang’s adventures might have been, the movie goes in Romance and you know it.)

 [Hi! I’m future you.  Unless you’re careful, you’re about read a sort of spoiler of the film Looper, only in the sense that you’ll have an account of the general attitude the film takes toward the possibility of changing the past, present and future.  I read it the first time around, and found that it enhanced my eventual viewing of the film.  But, you decide, McFly. ]

So, Looper.  Romance aged in a Tragedy-Oak barrel.  While reviews of time travel movies often consider the degree to which the movies take time travel “seriously” in the sense of coming up with plausible technological explanations, there is another tendency amongst the tragic films to take time travel “seriously” in the sense of being grimly reverent toward the subject.  Looper maintains that attitude in a way utterly unlike the giddy freedom promised by most of the Romantic time travel tradition.  The will to power is dangerous and tends to ironically replicate precisely the outcomes individual actors seek to alter.  And yet, in Looper, the force of fate is less law than a center of gravity escaped not by rushing ahead, but by reflection.

09/30/12

Reprint: a mission statement, of sorts

For PC 2.0 I thought it might be nice to repost a few things from the archive, a way of remembering where we came from. Today’s reprint is my first post for Printculture, dated Dec. 9, 2004:

I came across the following in a book of interviews with Michel Foucault this morning:

It is the task of philosophy to explain what today is and what we are today, but without breast-beating drama and theatricality and maintaining that this moment is the greatest damnation or daybreak of the rising sun. No, it is a day like every other, or much more, a day which is never like another.

What is today? What are we today, who live today as the central present of our lives, as that which makes our lives present to us? And how can we recognize–as a way of resisting a set of narratives that continue to tell us that this today is a day unlike any before, that we face a set of challenges that have changed “everything”–the ordinariness of today, including the ordinariness of its fear, its war, and its violence?

Whether it’s Sept. 11 or the recent presidential election [remember readers–this was December 2004!], I think the danger of imagining today as the one time (the greatest damnation, the new world world order) is that it gets in the way of thinking productively about an actionable relation to the future. The thing that changes “everything” always comes to us from an apparent outside (Al Qaida, red-state America) and because of that threatens to leave us feeling helpless.

09/30/12

The mysterious proximity of opposites

I wonder how you would explain to a recently arrived alien visitor to this planet that in cultural terms there is a great distance between the fraternity house culture that makes alcohol enemas possible (in the news as a result of this recent case at the University of Tennessee) and a man loving another man.

Most delightful datum from the Tennessee adventure: they were using (I almost wrote “drinking”) Franzia Sunset Blush. Like most of you I will be decanting a Zinfandel tonight to celebrate the miracles of human creativity.

p.s. NY Daily News headline: Bottoms Up?

09/28/12

Why Johnny Can’t Write

The Atlantic has a nice debate up on the history of the teaching of writing that ought to interest several of our posters and commenters. As part of the series, Judith Hochman writes:

I have learned that celebrating writing is not the same as teaching children how to write — how to craft good sentences, develop a well-formed paragraph, and improve their work. Too often, teachers merely tell students to “add detail” or “summarize.” Frustrated students don’t know what to do, and many teachers haven’t learned the proper teaching skills in their graduate or professional development classes to effectively help them.

Make no mistake — done right, good writing instruction can extend learning. Diagramming sentences or doing page after page in grammar texts does not automatically result in better writers, although more able students enjoy these types of activities. There is evidence that confirms that teaching grammar in isolation does not lead to better composing. But research does confirm that when students begin to write more complex sentences, their reading comprehension improves. When they develop outlines, their organization and knowledge of text structure improves. When they respond to verbal questions using the prompts Tyre describes in the article, their oral language becomes more precise and sophisticated.

Stylish Academic Writing

09/28/12

The military-cultural complex

Items towards a longer piece, never to be written, theorizing/outlining the structure of the military-cultural complex:

1. At the Denver Broncos game this past Sunday, frequent announcements during the breaks in the action of various sorts of military heroes recently returned (or still in) Afghanistan, with much applause; also, country music with pro-military, pro-US themes. And of course a flyover by Air Force jets at the conclusion of the National Anthem, which was sung as representatives of the various US armed services (Coast Guard included, natch) stood at attention on the field.

2. The integration of video games, especially first-person shooters, with the US military in both explicit (America’s Army, a squad  combat FPS developed by the US army) and implicit ways. (Similarly, in China, the MMORPG Anti-Japan War Online, sponsored by a branch of the Communist Party.)

3. The outpouring of anti-Japanese sentiment in recent days in China, which includes a variety of amusing and not-so-amusing instances of what strike me as purely “cultural” and actively imagined/imaginary response whose aesthetic dimensions exceed (however slightly) their political ones.

Key here would be to think about how the complex identified differs from the military-industrial complex; though obviously they’re almost entirely integrated it would be nice to figure out where they diverge–where, for instance, the values and norms (or even political positions) associated with the m-c complex would lead to resistance to warmongering or support for cuts in national defense budget. Not sure if that can happen.

09/27/12

Printculture reboot

Hi there, folks. Printculture is undergoing some major changes. Things should look better around here in the next few hours. Thanks for your patience. While you’re waiting, a broken version of the old site and its material is available.

If you had a previous Printculture login, you should be able to use it now to log in to the site.