infobong.com

distressing lack of consensus

FCC Commissioner Michael "Mercedes Divide" Powell has a guest editorial in today's New York Times. In the piece, he attempts to counter much of the criticism from the right and left over the FCC decision to relax ownership rules of broadcast outlets. Although he acknowledges the shift of quality content from broadcast to cable outlets, he fails to address one of the larger concerns about media diversity: the concern that poor persons will have access to a narrower range of ideas in broadcast media. He says, "In reality, those five companies own only 25 percent of more than 300 broadcast, satellite and cable channels, but because of their popularity, 80 percent of the viewing audience chooses to watch them," which on the surface appears to be compelling argument, but he entirely ignores the issue of distribution. Out of those 300 channels how many are available to basic cable subscribers, let alone broadcast-only viewers? Distribution is determined by business relationships, and its unlikely that the independent cable channels are going to be carried by many cable or satellite providers. Conversely, the channels that come from media megacorps - Disney's ESPN, AOL-Time Warner's CNN, and USA Network's USA - are found on nearly every cable network.

Powell also doesn't mention how the FCC lifted the rule preventing a company from owning a newspaper and a broadcast channel in the same market. He doesn't address the effects of a scenario where a one-paper town, like Austin or OKC, finds its broadcast news controlled by the same agenda-pushing organization that controls its paper. Finally, Powell doesn't address the effects on consolidation in the radio industry, which was deregulated before television and other media. The ascendancy of Clear Channel, Infinity, and other radio conglomerates has been met with widespread criticism for their ideological bent and delocalized cost-cutting measures.

double-digit antipathy

Apparently film studies falls within the range of discourse at the Los Angeles Times, after all. "Brilliant film historian" Janet Staiger forwarded me this response to an earlier Magazine feature critical of UCSB's film studies program and film theory in general. The earlier Weddle piece attacked the discipline as useless in finding work in "the industry," for using jargon, and for being a little left-leaning. Staff writer Manohla Dargis' response argues that film studies is far from a monolithic system of thought (or "metaphysics" in Weddle's inflammatory cant) and instead provides a plethora of approaches and frameworks for apprehending films.

One passage in the piece left me bemused. Dargis relates how she and another student confessed to fetishizing films, which led them to study them in grad school. In Janet's class last spring, I often wondered, "Why do we have all this film theory, but there's no comic book theory? Or cereal box theory?" Or, more importantly, Internet theory? Of course, the Internet didn't emerge until the late sixities and didn't gain popularity much later, but comic books, as we understand them today, emerged in the 1930's, roughly the same time as the "Classical Hollywood Era," and, if I remember correctly, cereal boxes arrived during the Depression, as well. Certainly a certain amount of fetishization would account for film's popularity as an object of study, while comics and cereal boxes remain largely neglected. I'd love to see neo-Formalist take on the narrative in Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth or debates about how Tony the Tiger can be both a cat - a generally feminine-gendered animal - and reflect a macho hypermasculinity.

comes in colors everywhere

Center City Philadephia


Spruce Hill, West Philly

notoriously hard to complete

The Sixers might trade Keith Van Horn for my favorite basketball player, Latrell Sprewell! OK, I have other favorite players now - Vlade Divac, as well as Mavericks Steve Nash and Eduardo Najera - but Sprewell was the first player I really got into. I liked the Knicks in the wake of their trip to the 1999 Finals, but the team had a swift decline culminating in Coach Van Gundy's quick resignation and their trading Camby to the Nuggets. Having lived in Philly, I could definitely become a Sixers fan if the king of cornrows and Allen Iverson are on the same team. Too bad Larry Brown is already gone. The story suggests Sprewell might wind up somewhere else, in one of those Byzantine multi-player trades. He could wind up playing for my favorite team right now, the Dallas Mavericks, which would be awesome.

disrupted and corrupted

Boy Howdy, my posting here has seriously slowed down! I've been working overtime at my creepy summer job, so I haven't been able to browse the Internet much, let alone provide you with some bloggy goodness. Expect postings to be slow through the middle of August, when I'll go back to my regularly scheduled lifestyle.

quick tailored response

The Bush White House has earned a reputation for its inaccessibility and secrecy. Former spokesperson Ari Fliescher is, of course, the banner-bearer for their tactics with his evasive non-answers to reporters' questions, but the approach pervades the adminstration, from Vice President Cheney's refusal to provide documents to Congresss and the GAO, to witholding of investigation information to 9/11 victim. This policy has been extended to the electronic realm, it appears, The New York Times reports that constituents are now unable to simply email the president; the Bush adminstration has implemented new email rules that require citizens to answer questions about their political leanings and confirm their messages through an automated system. Surveillance worries aside, this is troubling, since it contracts the access ordinary people have to their elected and appointed leaders.

scurried and clawed in excitement

This New York Times story about a kitten held by MTA transit police made me think I should get myself a kitty for company. My lease forbids pets, however, and although I had outside cats as a kid, I think I'm mildly allergic to the critters. In Philly I lived in a large rowhome with my roommates' funk-nasty cats, and I felt sick all the time. Now that I'm away from the cats (and other city grime) I feel much healthier, so I suspect that having an indoor cat is not in the cards for me. Maybe I'll bring my aquarium down from Tulsa, and get a cute, cuddly fish.

cruel hoax for students

This week's LA Times Magazine features a cover story critical of "film theory," the conceptual framework academics use for understanding film, and the UC Santa Barbara undergraduate film studies program, which emphasizes theory. I was a film studies major as an undergrad, and although I don't consider myself a film student, I'm a grad student in UT's department of Radio, Television, and Film, so I'm well-acquainted with film studies. The author, David Weddle, says his daughter chose the program since she wants a job in the film industry, which leads me to think, "Well, duh, you major in film studies if you want to study film; you major in film production if you want to make movies." Throughout the piece, Weddle is clearly unreceptive to the aims and ambitions of film theorists, mocking the discipline's jargon with faux-populist humor:

Oh please, I learned "synecdoche" at my small-town Oklahoma high school, and I find it hard to believe I would have had a better high-school education than a privileged Angelena. It seems Weddle's project with the piece is to attack the liberal and progressive positions common in the academy by ridiculing the technical language academics use in their work.

At some points in the piece Weddle is dead wrong. He describes semiotics as "a metaphysical inquiry into the nature of cinema." Semioticians use a materialist approach, assuming that processes exist within the physical or cultural world, rather than exist on a plane divorced from the real world, while metaphysics attempts to relate existence to an idealist realm. Moreover, he fails to acknowledge semiotics saw popularity in other disciplines like English, anthropology, and mathematics. He also doesn't distinguish between semioticians and neo-formalist critics like Kristin Thompson.

Weddle says his professors used Aristotle's Poetics in their approach to film. I've read bits and pieces from Poetics and a fair amount of Neo-Aristotelian film scholarship, and, in my opinion, its argot and theory is no less impenetrable than more contemporary frameworks.

In arguing contemporary film studies is worthless to students, Weddle presents a series of knee-jerk reactions, arguing that the ideas taught are useless in finding work, the product of "Fascist" elitists, and inferior to the ideas taught a generation ago. The piece is intellectually lazy and journalistically unbalanced, but will unfortunately resonate with a public that's increasingly conservative and hostile toward intellectuals.

downtime with individual dudes

Last Fall, I blogged about General Electric subsidary NBC's purchase of Canadian arts network Bravo. At the time, I suggested the merger might produce entertainment shows with an artsy edge, such as Law and Order: Existential Angst. Now it seems truth is indeed stranger than fiction. Newsweek reports Bravo will roll out a reality show this month that might be called "Joe Rough Trade." Boy Meets Boy follows the match-making reality show formula, only the gay main character picks from a pool of eligible guys, with some some gay-acting straight guys in the pool. If the hero picks a straight guy, the lucky breeder gets $25,000.

shiny fragments from parts

Edith blogged a while back about the fracas over the similarities between The Flaming Lips' "Fight Test" and Cat Stevens' "Father & Son." In this interview, Wayne told The Guardian Stevens now gets 75% of the royalties from the song after the group settled with the former folkie. I later ran across a story from The Calgary Herald that suggests Paul McCartney may have taken the melody of "Yesterday" (which I understand is the most-recorded song in history) from an older pop tune called "Answer Me."

That bastion of rock-and-roll culture, The Wall Street Journal, got into the plagiarism fray earlier this week. According to this New York Times story, the Journal published a piece Tuesday that accuses Bob Dylan of taking phrases verbatim from a book called Confessions of a Yakuza in lyrics on his latest album.

A grad student with a Poststructuralist bent might roll his eyes, invoke Barthes, and mutter, "Like, duh, all cultural products are simply rearticulations of earlier texts." Of course, the file-sharing wars demonstrate that the music industry still cling to Romantic notions of authorship., so that argument is not going to get a lot of play outside a New York Times story. Its interesting to note, however, how much recorded music plays a part in musical appropriation. In one of my undergrad music classes we were taught that Blues, as we generally understand it, did not really emerge until the 1930s when musicians began aping records from the likes of Robert Johnson and Ma Rainey, which solidified the genre's keys and song structures. Moreover, record companies were inclined to release songs that audiences could immediately recognize as "The Blues."

array of sporting subjectivies

What happens when you cross cultural studies with market analysis? You get "Postmodern Puma" by Andrew D. Grainger and David L. Andrews:

For what it's worth, I've worn a pair of baby-blue Puma Californias nearly every day for a year now, and they're in surprisingly good shape, considering the amount of walking I do.

Converse, whose Chuck Taylor "All-Stars" are often fetishized by punks and indie rockers, ain't indie no more. After struggling through bankrupcy and closing its last domestic plant, the company has been assimilated by the Borg. Nike announced yesterday it would buy Converse for $305 million. According to this New York Times story, Nike plans to slap the brand on down-market shoes, enabling it to sell products in Wal-Mart and other discounters without diluting the Nike brand.

pining away

As a follow-up to an earlier post detailing the weirdness of Wild, Wild West Philly, I dug up some old digital camera pictures of Sam's Place, the grungy corner store-slash-deli I used to call "anarchy coffeeshop."

Ruth cheerfully slaps some cream cheese on my bagel.


Ruth took this picture of one the resident cats climbing out of the sink.


45th and Pine from the deck outside Sam's Place.

conspiracy theorists crying foul

My old boss Scott Bekker has a story up on ENT about the Microsoft implementation of Trusted Computing, formerly known as "Palladium." (I used to write for ENT, as well.) In " Palladium: Don't Fear the Nexus," Scott details how the platform will use a combination of hardware and software to protect end-user systems from yucky stuff like viruses and the like. It will also require revamped processors, chipsets, video cards, and input devices to operate.

ENT is a magazine for professional Windows adminstrators, rather than enthusiasts or end users, but the story does not address a few of the larger concerns observers have about Palladium. For example, Digital Rights Management is mentioned in many stories about Palladium: will end users be prevented from using open multimedia formats like mp3 on these systems? Will other operating systems like Linux run on hardware designed for this scheme? Or will it be treated as malware or simply inoperable? This could be another closed platform like the XBox, where legitimate experimentation on the hardware is highly discouraged. Microsoft has a track-record of using hardball tactics with OEMs, so I wonder if open systems not designed for this scheme will be widely available, tying more users into Windows.

jewel-ing right now

The Washington Post profiles Anthony "The Moo" Moussa, creator of the esteemed njguido.com, a site devoted to the macho side of the Garden State. (from Kottke.org)

light yellow paste

This Weblog used to claim "we're stuffing cheese in places you never dreamed about" in its tagline, and, although it may not have delivered on that promise, I'm still a lover of both metaphorical and gustatory cheese. So I was delighted when this week's ResearchBuzz newsletter featured the CheeseNet cheese reference site. Its World Cheese Index provides information on a variety of cheeses and is searchable by animal, texture, and country, among other things. Although the site says it is "intended to educate about different types of cheese from all over the earth," I was disappointed to find no information on cheese from Mexico and other non-Western cultures, so I dropped them a little note with their feedback form.

Hopefully I'll be getting the nitty-gritty on Quesos Fresco and Oxaca in no time.

wish i was a balla

At a party last night, a fellow reveler noticed my T-shirt with Ben Franklin dribbling a basketball and asked me if I got it in Philly. I told him yes and that I had moved here last summer from Philadelphia. He was all, "Oh, that must be a change. How do you like Austin?"

"Oh, I like it allright. I grew up in Tulsa, so it seems pretty normal to me."

This created a bit of a stir on the front porch, as I had unintentionally uttered a heresy in a town where seemingly every third car bears a sticker exhorting us to "Keep Austin Weird."

Austin has an abundance of what I call "bohemian infrastructure" - record stores, coffeehouses, comic book shops, and the like - but living here just doesn't seem that weird, at least coming here from West Philly. In my neighborhood there, I would go get coffee and bagels at a dingy grocery store run by anarcho-syndicalists and sit outiside on a motley assortment of park benches and plastic lawn chairs while older granola types watched their kids play on the sidewalk as they passed around a bowl. My corner featured two Ethiopian restaurants, a Senegalese cafe that sold the spiciest falafel you'll ever try, a storefront Industrial Workers of the World office and the W.E.B. DuBois bookstore. At my gym, I would lift weights while huge African men shouted at each other in French and the laundromat provided free copies of The People's Weekly World. Living there, I was constantly exposed to new ideas, cultures, and lifestyles.

In contrast, Austin seems crazy stoopid whitebread. I keep wondering what's so weird about Austin. Granted, I've got my head down most of the time, preoccupied with grad school, so I may have missed out on the weird part of Austin. I have run across some lovably weird stuff here, like the "hipster stripmall" on North Loop or the Rhizome Collective, but weirdness doesn't seem to be as woven into the fabric of daily life here as in other places.

A few months back, the Austin blog community held "Austin Blog Day," where participants all blogged about the same Austin-related topic and shared their responses. Perhaps a great topic for the next event would be, "What makes Austin so weird, anyway?" so newcomers like me can have a tip sheet for finding Austin's weirdness.

stupid number all day long

Listening to The Kinks' "Party Line," I thought of a paper idea that I'm sure I'll never use. The paper would "attempt to understand the social role of telephony through the textual analysis of popular songs." Aside from "Party Line," texts might include the B-52's "6060-842," Chuck Berry's "Memphis Tennessee," "Hangin' on the Telephone" by Blondie, and, perhaps, "Pennsylvania 6-5000." I'm excluding Tommy Tutone's "867-5309" because, um, I don't like that song. These are just the few songs that I thought of off the top of my head; I'm sure readers could think of more tunes.