Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Simulacra in Film
Posting from a class reaction paper.
For a change, I thought I’d take a different tack for this week’s paper, and discuss film. I feel that Baudrillard’s observation that Los Angeles is fed by Disneyland, like a power station, is reversed. The media coming out this city feeds on its own decentralized power, through writers and producers in love with their own perceptions. I saw Thom Andersen’s obsessive Los Angeles Plays Itself immediately before I moved here, which addresses how we have encountered this city before we arrived here, through characters and scenes floating in fictional movies that have become our reality. I knew Los Angeles through Michael Douglas in Falling Down, navigating south central Los Angeles, in all its supposedly foreign glory; Charlton Henston rocketing through the streets in Omega Man; the starkly-lit Bradbury Building in Bladerunner; and the LA river chase scene in the cult punk flick Repo Man, which paints the city as a wasteland of mundanity, full of, as Harry Dean Stanton (as Bud) put it, “ordinary fuckin’ people. I hate em,” as they pursued drug dealers, aliens, and money. I learned that Los Angeles in films was an urban wasteland: unearthly, dangerous, and complex.
Anderson shows us how much reality has dissolved behind a veil of simulacra, and there is indeed no underlying ground left. Polanski’s Chinatown in 1974 set Los Angeles remains among LA’s most memorable film appearances, despite that it is a fiction, woven from various myths and personalities that resonate with the audience. The antagonist is frequently ephemeral, as the plot revolves around a water dispute. The plot was even built on a myth of the founding of Los Angeles on water stolen from the Owens river valley. The gritty film noir Los Angeles films might refer to corruption and greed in the city’s past, but are merely dealing in symbolic touchstones. As Andersen narrates, “there once was a city here, before they tore it down and built a simulacrum.” The Los Angeles that has been propagated is gone, replaced by a false edifice, while the city itself has shifted and grown beneath it. The city has been defined by its rapid growth, and recent immigrants change the city before it has time to be illustrated.
Still, entertainment needs fodder, and the mill is always churning, squeezing every last location in Los Angeles County. Dexter, ostensibly taking place in Miami, is shot on-site in southern California, particularly in my city of Long Beach, which despite its size (500,000 people), is typically acknowledged only as being part of Los Angeles… Long-Beach-plays-Los-Angeles-plays-Miami. Visible throughout the series are the marina, El Dorado park, and the beach next to Shoreline Drive with the building in the opening scene of Die Hard. Even though my hair stylist came home to find a note on her door from Dexter producers to see about renting her house out for a shoot, there is no way to, as Baudrillard posits, “inject the real” (p. 22) to battle amorphous media entities. Michael Bay quite literally destroys downtown Los Angeles in Transformers, which is strangely treated with no irony. “The challenge of simulation is never admitted by power” (p. 21), and with our Governator, how could we? Our state is literally run by a media creation.
Unlike the comparatively united front of Disney, which has a location in southern California, Los Angeles is playing shades of itself, fractured narratives of truths, myth, and complete fictions rooted in geographic locations that have only the pretense of reality. There is nothing to inject, because nothing can be injected – truth has been subsumed by the entertainment mill in an ongoing hegemonic process.
The most affecting film I’ve seen on the effects of post-modernism and globalism is Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil. Shot on a low budget and using stock footage alongside hand-held shots taken worldwide (particularly in Asia), he does not so much peel away the layers of the post-modern onion vainly in search of that “ground” that Andersen does, so much as examine the way globalism and media collapse space and time. Sans Soleil follows on themes raised by La Jetée: time as a cause of history is questioned through image series. Here he goes further, searching for a way to disembed (as Giddens would have it) imagery from their political and social meanings. He here takes inspiration from Tarkovsky’s Stalker, referring to The Zone. In Marker’s interpretation of The Zone, here a digital video filtering system, authorship is disembedded , released to be appropriated in art. Marker demonstrates the new meaning footage can have when processed and deployed in a different space or time, although his conclusions are elusive. Certainly, according to Marker, using images of a past as a history presents a dangerous over-simplification (Montero, 2007). As Butler observes, released from concerns of the subject, “agency is always and only a political prerogative” (p. 163). Perhaps in Marker’s Zone, images are searching for a context, reversing the typically causal connection of context determining images, much as La Jetée plays with narrative by questioning time. This raises similar questions as Butler’s example of critiquing Powell’s euphemisms for bombing in Kuwait, removing the subject to open up questions of victimization and meaning in an intensely communication-based context.
Ironically, given Baudrillard’s concept of “museumification,” the most real place I’ve been in Los Angeles presents myth as scientific fact alongside historical iconoclasts and oddities. The Museum of Jurassic Technology, housed in an unmarked building in Culver City a stone’s throw from Sony Pictures, is positively sincere in its desire to inject reality back into its subjects. Here, bats can fly through walls, you can cure stammering by eating mice on toast, and horns can grow from human heads. Yet, there is also a rather comprehensive set of dioramas on the history of trailer parks, and upstairs, the rather intense (and complete[!]) collection of paintings of dogs from the Russian space program can be found next to the tearoom. Even the bathroom has real flowers, which I can’t help but feel is a gesture to the real. Authorship is here revered, but it is also inconsequential, likely a lie you must critique to be part of the experience. You begin to question everything. Is that machine that has been out of order for two years deliberately presented as broken? You are permitted to discover and evaluate, to pick up and touch, as the space is “to be traversed, not penetrated,” as Barthes puts it. It’s refreshingly not entertainment, edu-tainment, or a game – these are genuine exhibits that play with the idea of museumification and interrogate the real, ostensibly just outside the door in the city of Los Angeles.
Montero, D. (2007). Film also ages: time and images in Chris Marker's Sans Soleil. Studies in French Cinema, 6(2), 107-115.
For a change, I thought I’d take a different tack for this week’s paper, and discuss film. I feel that Baudrillard’s observation that Los Angeles is fed by Disneyland, like a power station, is reversed. The media coming out this city feeds on its own decentralized power, through writers and producers in love with their own perceptions. I saw Thom Andersen’s obsessive Los Angeles Plays Itself immediately before I moved here, which addresses how we have encountered this city before we arrived here, through characters and scenes floating in fictional movies that have become our reality. I knew Los Angeles through Michael Douglas in Falling Down, navigating south central Los Angeles, in all its supposedly foreign glory; Charlton Henston rocketing through the streets in Omega Man; the starkly-lit Bradbury Building in Bladerunner; and the LA river chase scene in the cult punk flick Repo Man, which paints the city as a wasteland of mundanity, full of, as Harry Dean Stanton (as Bud) put it, “ordinary fuckin’ people. I hate em,” as they pursued drug dealers, aliens, and money. I learned that Los Angeles in films was an urban wasteland: unearthly, dangerous, and complex.
Anderson shows us how much reality has dissolved behind a veil of simulacra, and there is indeed no underlying ground left. Polanski’s Chinatown in 1974 set Los Angeles remains among LA’s most memorable film appearances, despite that it is a fiction, woven from various myths and personalities that resonate with the audience. The antagonist is frequently ephemeral, as the plot revolves around a water dispute. The plot was even built on a myth of the founding of Los Angeles on water stolen from the Owens river valley. The gritty film noir Los Angeles films might refer to corruption and greed in the city’s past, but are merely dealing in symbolic touchstones. As Andersen narrates, “there once was a city here, before they tore it down and built a simulacrum.” The Los Angeles that has been propagated is gone, replaced by a false edifice, while the city itself has shifted and grown beneath it. The city has been defined by its rapid growth, and recent immigrants change the city before it has time to be illustrated.
Still, entertainment needs fodder, and the mill is always churning, squeezing every last location in Los Angeles County. Dexter, ostensibly taking place in Miami, is shot on-site in southern California, particularly in my city of Long Beach, which despite its size (500,000 people), is typically acknowledged only as being part of Los Angeles… Long-Beach-plays-Los-Angeles-plays-Miami. Visible throughout the series are the marina, El Dorado park, and the beach next to Shoreline Drive with the building in the opening scene of Die Hard. Even though my hair stylist came home to find a note on her door from Dexter producers to see about renting her house out for a shoot, there is no way to, as Baudrillard posits, “inject the real” (p. 22) to battle amorphous media entities. Michael Bay quite literally destroys downtown Los Angeles in Transformers, which is strangely treated with no irony. “The challenge of simulation is never admitted by power” (p. 21), and with our Governator, how could we? Our state is literally run by a media creation.
Unlike the comparatively united front of Disney, which has a location in southern California, Los Angeles is playing shades of itself, fractured narratives of truths, myth, and complete fictions rooted in geographic locations that have only the pretense of reality. There is nothing to inject, because nothing can be injected – truth has been subsumed by the entertainment mill in an ongoing hegemonic process.
The most affecting film I’ve seen on the effects of post-modernism and globalism is Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil. Shot on a low budget and using stock footage alongside hand-held shots taken worldwide (particularly in Asia), he does not so much peel away the layers of the post-modern onion vainly in search of that “ground” that Andersen does, so much as examine the way globalism and media collapse space and time. Sans Soleil follows on themes raised by La Jetée: time as a cause of history is questioned through image series. Here he goes further, searching for a way to disembed (as Giddens would have it) imagery from their political and social meanings. He here takes inspiration from Tarkovsky’s Stalker, referring to The Zone. In Marker’s interpretation of The Zone, here a digital video filtering system, authorship is disembedded , released to be appropriated in art. Marker demonstrates the new meaning footage can have when processed and deployed in a different space or time, although his conclusions are elusive. Certainly, according to Marker, using images of a past as a history presents a dangerous over-simplification (Montero, 2007). As Butler observes, released from concerns of the subject, “agency is always and only a political prerogative” (p. 163). Perhaps in Marker’s Zone, images are searching for a context, reversing the typically causal connection of context determining images, much as La Jetée plays with narrative by questioning time. This raises similar questions as Butler’s example of critiquing Powell’s euphemisms for bombing in Kuwait, removing the subject to open up questions of victimization and meaning in an intensely communication-based context.
Ironically, given Baudrillard’s concept of “museumification,” the most real place I’ve been in Los Angeles presents myth as scientific fact alongside historical iconoclasts and oddities. The Museum of Jurassic Technology, housed in an unmarked building in Culver City a stone’s throw from Sony Pictures, is positively sincere in its desire to inject reality back into its subjects. Here, bats can fly through walls, you can cure stammering by eating mice on toast, and horns can grow from human heads. Yet, there is also a rather comprehensive set of dioramas on the history of trailer parks, and upstairs, the rather intense (and complete[!]) collection of paintings of dogs from the Russian space program can be found next to the tearoom. Even the bathroom has real flowers, which I can’t help but feel is a gesture to the real. Authorship is here revered, but it is also inconsequential, likely a lie you must critique to be part of the experience. You begin to question everything. Is that machine that has been out of order for two years deliberately presented as broken? You are permitted to discover and evaluate, to pick up and touch, as the space is “to be traversed, not penetrated,” as Barthes puts it. It’s refreshingly not entertainment, edu-tainment, or a game – these are genuine exhibits that play with the idea of museumification and interrogate the real, ostensibly just outside the door in the city of Los Angeles.
Montero, D. (2007). Film also ages: time and images in Chris Marker's Sans Soleil. Studies in French Cinema, 6(2), 107-115.
Friday, August 14, 2009
Back to the Classroom
I'll be a student again tomorrow, starting a Ph.D at USC. This shift has been a long time in coming; I've been thinking about doctoral programs since I received my MA and moved to California some three years ago. On one hand, I'm completely thrilled. I have a big list of research topics that I am dying to crack open. The lifestyle will probably agree with me, as I've been known to be a huge geek. (I'm brushing up on my APA style as I draft this by reading the 6th edition manual) On another, it's a proclamation that I have much to learn. In that, I can't help but feel humble. The state of communication research is highly fractured, fast-paced, and high-stakes. My past research interests seem like they need more focus and specificity to fully mature. Expect this blog to turn into an area where I'll draft new ideas and proposals over the next few years.
Labels: annenberg, personal, school
Monday, June 22, 2009
Meaning from Iran's Watershed Moment
There is no other post possible right now than one on the Iranian elections, where Ahmadinejad’s claimed victory over Moussavi has resulted in continued fallout. In western perceptions, this is going to be a watershed moment for Twitter, the moment where it proves its worth. Communication coming out of Iran is at a crawl due to lack of cell and Internet connectivity, and journalists have been officially banned from the streets. The number of videos coming out of Iran since the elections has lessened in recent days. So, when the world cannot be watching (as the 60s cry goes), it is certainly tweeting.
Twitter hasn’t so much filled in the communication gaps to get messages out of Iran (creaky old email appears to be the primary method) but it has served as a valuable mode of propagating grassroots information. #Iranelection is still a top-trending topic and will likely be so for some time. The fact that CNN is now examining Twitter feeds live (which Jon Stewart recently lampooned on the Daily Show) makes a case for the downsides of the new agenda-setting role of the technology: our desire for a constant stream of news may simply not be possible, and by using unreliable or unverified sources, we risk entirely changing the role of news.
The Neda video (warning: very graphic content) in particular is extremely affecting. It's a short film of the last moments on this earth of a woman who has been shot in the chest. This small moment has been extrapolated from its surroundings and presented as symbolic of a movement. The moment of death can be replayed over and over. This is both extremely problematic (basically a snuff film, and a private moment that arguably shouldn’t be seen by millions of strangers) and gives agency to an important meme (hopefully provoking discussion and thought on the Iranian election). #Neda has emerged on Twitter as an important tag of its own.
The end result of the protests is unclear, but will certainly be referenced as a pivotal moment in history. As of today, the numbers of protesters has dwindled due to the government crackdown. Although it has been painted as only a middle-class affair, there is dissent
about how true this is.
Mirrored at Annenberg Online Communities.
Friday, June 19, 2009
Thurston Moore's avant-garde want list
In my off time, I'm a record collector. I'm a record collector to the point that I sometimes look back on my habits and wonder what's wrong with me, and wonder why I can't be happy just listening to top 40 commercial radio. I mean, when you get really amped about the Michael Snow LP on Chatham Square or a Folkways record called "Music from an equatorial microcosm," a switch has really flipped inside you. If you're similarly afflicted, check out the below.
A while back I got a copy of Thurston Moore's avant-garde wants list (PDF). It's pretty impressive that way back in the day Thurston was after Raymond Boni on Futura, Drum Dance to the Motherland, and OFAMFA. It's a worthwhile read, if heavy on lots of european jazz that I don't personally find too interesting. It's easy to forget in 2009 how difficult it was back then to find overseas and private-pressed records.
Thursday, April 02, 2009
When schwag goes bad – eBay sends me a gift
I have a little eBay problem. The auction website has grown my minor record collecting habit into a full-blown epidemic. I’ve been on the site for 10 years, and have thousands of searches stored in RSS format, which I compulsively refresh every few hours. Sometimes sellers use techniques for upping hits on their items, such as using blocks of keywords unrelated to the item. This makes my searches return dozens of unrelated items. I flag these auctions, which takes about 30 seconds, no more than a few times a week. Today eBay sent me a weird little notebook in thanks for being part of their “enhanced member reporting program.” Is that what I was part of? I had no idea.
What’s the problem with this? Well, symbolic recognition (stars, votes, friends) is the standard for online communities. When I reported items, I was mainly just happy to get them off my screen, and the sellers rarely spammed again. To receive a physical object for activities I didn’t intend to get paid for was a strange violation of accepted standards. It made me feel like some kind of paid informant - an e-snitch, if you will. The gift itself seems made for snitchery, too, like I’m going to sit around and take detailed notes on items I deem to be unfit for posting. In short, it had the opposite effect on me that eBay was hoping for.
That said, it is a pretty nice, compact, real leather notebook that I will likely use in the future. At least, when I won’t be made fun of for having an eBay-branded notebook.
What’s the problem with this? Well, symbolic recognition (stars, votes, friends) is the standard for online communities. When I reported items, I was mainly just happy to get them off my screen, and the sellers rarely spammed again. To receive a physical object for activities I didn’t intend to get paid for was a strange violation of accepted standards. It made me feel like some kind of paid informant - an e-snitch, if you will. The gift itself seems made for snitchery, too, like I’m going to sit around and take detailed notes on items I deem to be unfit for posting. In short, it had the opposite effect on me that eBay was hoping for.
That said, it is a pretty nice, compact, real leather notebook that I will likely use in the future. At least, when I won’t be made fun of for having an eBay-branded notebook.
Labels: ebay, internet, marketing, notebook, padfolio
Monday, March 23, 2009
Is social media an industry? Sometimes yes, but mostly no
This is an edit of my response to “Is Social Media an Industry?” on mashable
I was surprised to see that nearly 70% of people who voted in an online poll believed that social media was an industry. To my mind, the answer is both yes and no, depending on how you conceptualize “industry” and “social media.” First, there is the issue of the impetus for the question. Just because many people are interested in it, that doesn’t mean it is an industry. There is no established measure of how Google search terms relate to the size of industries, although increased searches do correlate with general interest by individuals.
Social media could be considered an industry for non-market information economies, of the type Yochai Benkler identifies as being critical for the success of the Internet and vastly different from market economies. For instance, social network sites could be considered an industry, as they quite literally build on and trade in social interactions. However, they are poorly, if at all, monetized.
More generally speaking, in market economies, I would argue that the vast majority of applications for social media are not related to a specific industry, but instead are tools used by various industries. Social media (plural: blogs, Twitter, SNSs, etc.) are not an industry. Also, industries are not defined just by popularity, but by the products they create and professionals they involve. "Social media" is a rather ambiguous term used to describe a collection of (mostly) online technologies that rely on connections between people to operate. These technologies are quite disparate, and often individuals and companies use them for entirely different purposes.
In this sense, social media are a vehicle for other industries, such as advertising, journalism, and software development. Each of these industries has very specific products and practices. Social media are integrated on various levels across these industries, but alone, they don’t amount to very much. Social media are tools for various industries, but are typically not their own industry.
I was surprised to see that nearly 70% of people who voted in an online poll believed that social media was an industry. To my mind, the answer is both yes and no, depending on how you conceptualize “industry” and “social media.” First, there is the issue of the impetus for the question. Just because many people are interested in it, that doesn’t mean it is an industry. There is no established measure of how Google search terms relate to the size of industries, although increased searches do correlate with general interest by individuals.
Social media could be considered an industry for non-market information economies, of the type Yochai Benkler identifies as being critical for the success of the Internet and vastly different from market economies. For instance, social network sites could be considered an industry, as they quite literally build on and trade in social interactions. However, they are poorly, if at all, monetized.
More generally speaking, in market economies, I would argue that the vast majority of applications for social media are not related to a specific industry, but instead are tools used by various industries. Social media (plural: blogs, Twitter, SNSs, etc.) are not an industry. Also, industries are not defined just by popularity, but by the products they create and professionals they involve. "Social media" is a rather ambiguous term used to describe a collection of (mostly) online technologies that rely on connections between people to operate. These technologies are quite disparate, and often individuals and companies use them for entirely different purposes.
In this sense, social media are a vehicle for other industries, such as advertising, journalism, and software development. Each of these industries has very specific products and practices. Social media are integrated on various levels across these industries, but alone, they don’t amount to very much. Social media are tools for various industries, but are typically not their own industry.
Labels: facebook, MySpace, SNS, social media, social networking
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Thru-you Mashups
Much as I initially didn't want to like Kutiman's YouTube mash-up compositions, I've come to the conclusion that they are undeniably great. First they are compositionally solid tunes that hold up as more than just tinkering or experimentation. There's also a utopian vibe to kutiman's mash-ups. Musicians of all types - old and young, male and female, of all races and ethnicities - come together under the umbrella of music. Guided tutorials are layered with private bedroom vocalists, product demos, and student performances. In Kutiman's eyes, everyone's videos are equally fair sample fodder.
Ultimately, what I think makes Thru-you succeed is that the personalities of the musicians comes through in their performances and little visual cues. I find myself wondering what the story is behind the mother singing soulfully in "Someday," smiling while holding her toddler, or if the cornball guitarist on "The Mother of all Funk Chords" sincerely believes in his rocking solo. Kutiman takes care to show the musicians' little performance quirks, pacing or talking as they warm up or (god forbid) give the camera a "solo face."
There's a touch of magic here; it seems so improbable that the vocalist, keyboard, flute, and wind chime in "Just a Lady" could mesh together and come out sounding like a dead ringer for Portishead. If ever there was a case to be made for fewer restrictions on copyright (a la Lessig or Negativland alike), here it is.
Ultimately, what I think makes Thru-you succeed is that the personalities of the musicians comes through in their performances and little visual cues. I find myself wondering what the story is behind the mother singing soulfully in "Someday," smiling while holding her toddler, or if the cornball guitarist on "The Mother of all Funk Chords" sincerely believes in his rocking solo. Kutiman takes care to show the musicians' little performance quirks, pacing or talking as they warm up or (god forbid) give the camera a "solo face."
There's a touch of magic here; it seems so improbable that the vocalist, keyboard, flute, and wind chime in "Just a Lady" could mesh together and come out sounding like a dead ringer for Portishead. If ever there was a case to be made for fewer restrictions on copyright (a la Lessig or Negativland alike), here it is.
Labels: copyright, mash-up, music, video, web 2.0, youtube
