infobong.com

information superhighway

I'm working on a paper where we were assigned to interview someone who remembers the JFK assassination about their experience and how it related to their media consumption habits. I can imagine a few years down the road, I'll ask students to ask their parents or another older person about when they started using the Internet. I suspect the students will ask, "What's the Internet?"

punk bush

When I saw that Eminem was the musical guest on tonight's Saturday Night Live, I wondered if he would perform his anti-Bush screed, "Mosh." Despite my suspicion it would be an Elvis Costello-style bait-and-switch, NBC apparently let him play his song in his first set. Rather than bleep out his "stomp Bush, f--- Bush" line, Mr. Mathers adjusted it to "punk Bush." The song is pretty moving, and although the performance wasn't as gripping as the brilliantly animated video, Eminem in a black hoodie on stage with Obie Trice behind turntables was still effective. At the end of the song, he eschewed a Sinead O'Connor moment, simply holding up a handwritten sign reading "vote." Yeah, you should vote if you haven't yet.

methods of evaluation

As I'm sure I've mentioned before, I'm taking RTF 398T, "Supervised Teaching in Radio-TV-Film," so I can instruct my own class next semester. The primary project for the semester is creating a "dream course," which in my case is "Making Alternative Media," which will deal with making 'zines, blogs, and guerilla video and their subsequent distribution. Today we turned in test questions for the class. I've decided to post the multiple choice questions I created to see how well readers know alternative media history and distribution.

I realize some of these are tricky and some are a little silly, but click "Yeah... And it dont stop" for the correct answers.

wearing two pairs of jeans

HoneyNo.com is a site that occasionally pops up on Austin Bloggers, and I'm not sure if I find it offensive because of its crass consumerism or because it seems designed to make women even more self-concious about their bodies. A standard HoneyNo post features a photo of a younger woman wearing revealing, but mildly unflattering, clothes and suggestions for future apparel purchases. When I read it, I wonder if the writers work for Gap Inc., considering how often it plugs items from Old Navy. Granted, I'm 29 years old and I dress like a skater, so I have little credibility in fashion matters when my wardrobe is largely limited to black t-shirts and baggy jeans. But this woman, from the picture, looks just fine in her hot pants; its not as if she's unaware her cheeks are hanging out. Let her have her fun and feel good about her body. Its also suspicious that the site doesn't feature any full body shots of its contributors

Today, bOINGbOING features a site from perhaps the other end of the sartorial spectrum. Jen Magazine offers "modest fashion fixes" for young Mormon women, addressing situations like a cute, but immodest, tank top or jeans that are cut too low. One of its suggestions is overalls, which seem to make even slender women look bottom-heavy. My advice to young Mormon readers: you can't go wrong with black t-shirts and baggy jeans.

prerecorded vocals on live

Good gravy, is Ashlee Simson's snafu on Saturday night a national scandal? I had presumed that all the pop tarts lip-synched. Maybe this year's hot Halloween costume will be Ashlee Simpson, hoarse and adorned with a pull cord in the back.

me up in

My dear friend Marnie is hosting a Halloween party Friday, and I've yet to think of a costume. I sense a high level of expectation for costumes, since she sent out a warning email a month ago, so I don't think I'll be able to weasel out this time. I frankly don't like Halloween, and I sort of resent wearing a costume; I think I should think of something clever, but it seems the more clever I get, the more I bomb.

So what should I be? I don't want to wear a costume that involves makeup or masks, since I don't like stuff on my face, and avoiding hats would be nice. Maybe I'll be the Invisible Man and stay home. Jenny wonders if she could she could be Laura Bush or Monica Lewinsky; I suggested Jessica Simpson.

creates confidence

I should probably blog something, so I'll post about what's eating me at the moment. I just ordered a black cup of coffee for here and gave the barista two bucks for the $1.46 coffee. She put the money in the register and moseyed away to talk to a coworker. I was a little embarrassed to ask for my fifty-four cents, and then she was all, "Did you see that?" Was she trying to drop a hint about tipping? I tip from time to time when I just get coffee, but it seems ludicrous to tip a dollar for each plain cup of coffee when it takes all of ten seconds for her to grab a cup. If I was ordering an ornate espresso drink, I would feel obliged to tip, but come on! When I've talked to coffeeshop workers in the past, they agreed with me that espresso drinks merit a tip, but tipping on plain coffee is optional. Maybe I'm just paranoid.

pre-established structures of intelligibility

I'm reading selected chapters of Tabloid Television for Janet's Historiography class. This passage made me chuckle:

No kidding? Regardless of my background as an English undergrad or experience as a magazine journalist, this seems like a common sense, man-on-the-street understanding of journalistic training: to become a journalist, one needs to learn how to write in a certain way. In defense of the authors, I can certainly see how scholars could become so situated in a Cultural Studies, social-construction-of-everything that analysis of social relations begins to exclude common sense understandings of professions.

philosophy of quantification

There are a profusion of dead links to Julian H. Scaff's "Art and Authenticity in the age of Digital Reproduction", so I'm posting the link here for future reference. As the title suggests, its a discussion of digital media within in the context of Walter Benjamin's classic "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."

technology instead of the behavior

I just logged on to Friendster for the first time in what seems like forever. It was a little sad, since my reaction to reading my old profile was, "Man, you used to be funny." I'm happy to see that they've added a feature that allows you to add your RSS feed to your profile. After giving it your feed, Friendster posts the headlines from your blog. Since I use [fragmented] pullquotes as headlines on this site, I'm afraid that the little "My Blog" panel is not going to make much sense.

I recently created a MySpace profile after Melissa mentioned it on her LiveJournal, and I've now had the experience of a student messaging me to say, "I found you!" I'm sure other students have run across my profile on Friendster or whatever before, but now that I work with lower-division students, its a little awkward. Fortunately, I've only listed my educational background on the site.

Friendster was really fun in the summer of 2003, when I used it to track down old college friends, but, gosh, its hard to imagine that these things are the future of Computer-Mediated Communications. Regardless, there's an interested discussion going on over at Many-to-Many over the name "Social Software" and what directions it may lead. I tend to side with the skeptics.

truth burns

This weekend my parents rented Fahrenheit 911 on DVD from the 101st Street Albertson's in Tulsa. My mom said that substantial portions of the film was blacked out. I assumed that it would have been the shots toward the end of charred Iraqi children, but she said, no, segments at the beginning of the film were blacked out. Since she didn't see the original cut, she didn't know what they were hiding, and I can't imagine what would be objectionable in the first few thirds of the flick. Has anyone heard about F911 being censored? It seems like anyone renting the movie would know what they were getting into, so why would Albertson's or the local authorities black it out, except for political reasons?

physical behavior modeling

If Loophole was a little disturbed by my idea for prog-rockaraoke, he's going to freak out over the Roland FR-7 I wonder what market need this is supposed to fulfill: an underground micropolka scene? Conceptual Tejano artists?

people start fights

Hoooo-doggie, I am excited! My friend George is coming down from Norman to play the Flamingo Cantina with his band, The Ills tomorrow night Wednesday, October 13. I like them a lot; they describe their sound as "Live Drum-and-Bass," which is probably overstating things a bit, but they make nifty danceable improvisational music. They do do a cover of Amon Tobin's "Sordid." Its their first show in Austin, so I hope there's a good weeknight crowd. You should come out and check them out; I'll be there.

english-major exegetical superpowers

I can't believe how much time I've spent today thinking of road-trip songs. Obviously this was more interesting to me than the material I need to be working on. I wonder if I can go to grad school in mix-tapeology. I know the answer to this: I'm in a department that studies TV, movies, and Internet crap. I would just need to go take a methods class in Anthropology and start an ethnography of mix-tape makers. I'd call it "Burning Passions: reception, reappropriation, and personal mix CDs."

undergrad paper column

On Sunday morning I returned from the gym to find voter registration forms hanging on each of the doors of my building. When our doors were leafeted two weeks ago, I appreciated the effort, and dug up my voter registration card. But it seemed like a waste of energy in a safe Republican state and a safe Democratic house district. (Thanks to the summer's redistricting, I live in a district that extends from East Austin to the Mexican border.) I'm sure some great kids are - like me - really upset about the current political climate, and feel compelled to take action. But engaging my gentrifying neighborhood in a get-out-the-vote campaign? It seems like there are more productive ways to work out this impetus, and I'm not sure what.

I have a whole raft of issues with the Democratic party, and I won't waste our energy elaborating them when you can go read The Nation. And I have problems with "social movements" and their skepticism of the government and the political process. I do think there are a lot of radicals who quickly dismiss institutions as racist, elitist, and sexist - and engage in a intellectually lazy anti-authoritarianism. They fail to recognize the demands placed on government and political systems or the difficulty with which systems evolve. I don't deny that our political system is racist, elitist, sexist, and increasingly difficult to reform, but the existing institutions will better equipped to deal with the needs of our society than ripping them out and replacing them with new ones. Would we expect that people new to government would be effective at maintaining roads, managing health care, or maintaining order? These are complex subject are that I'm sure require a lot of wisdom that comes from experience.

flummox carpet salesmen

The previews for next week's episode of "CSI: Miami" claimed that the plot will center on "a murder at a flash mob"! I'm not going to suggest that the show presents a distorted view of utopian computer geeks. Instead my reaction was, "Is CBS so desperate to seem hip that they're creating plot lines around last summer's silly trend?"

fashion elements creep

The New York Times has a story on Damon Dash, head of the Rock-A-Fella record label, and his plans to start a unit, RocBox, which will sell both hard drive- and flash-based mp3 players.