Written gag delivered verbally

As in: Media

Mythbusters featured an amusing pun the other evening. In the middle of a project that had Jamie and Adam welding many pieces of pipe together, the announcer used this line:

While Jamie and Adam solder on down the pipe, let's check in on the other mythbusters.

In writing, the joke is a brilliant reference to the phrase soldier on. In speech, though, it wouldn't normally work, since the word solder is pronounced SOD-der.

The Mythbusters announcer, though, found a way around this. He mispronounced solder to sound like SOLD-er, thus making the written joke audible. Hilarious.

Rose colored glasses?

As in: Media

I recently rented Fog of War from Netflix and was impressed by a couple things:

1. Through clever use of music and stock footage, the filmmakers were able to leave all the narration to McNamara, who had a very engaging narrative style.
2. Villain documentary is interesting--I read the autobiography of Joseph Haldemaan, Nixon's chief of staff, and found interesting levels of self-justification and self-blame. A similar situation occurs here: McNamara is pretty blunt about the mistakes they made, but he still comes out looking good.
3. He seems to doubt that Agent Orange hurt anybody.
4. Throughout the movie, I couldn't help but think of Ted Steven's vigorous defense of his pork-barrel bridge boondoggle. I say NO!.

More Self Referential Buffoonery

As in: Media

As you all know, I can't get enough of the Gary Shandlingesque self-referentiality on Boston Legal. Thus, we end the season with one more brilliant moment:

ALLAN: Here's to America the Beautiful... And to another great season.
DENNY: On the same night?
ALLAN: God, I hope so.

:)

Stereotypes (not) overturned

As in: Media

Jenny and I are connoisseurs of made-for-tv mystery movies. Last night we watched Hallmark's most recent McBride mystery—a Perry Mason clone about a defense attorney. While the show makes for some entertaining moments, it also has some really bad moments. In particular, the show follows many of the cheesiest TV formulae, particularly with regard to stereotypes. Here's an example, along with a conversation Jenny and I had. Dialogue and descriptions from the show are indented.

---------------------

Late twenty-something pretty hispanic woman walks into the McBride office. Phil, McBride's assistant who lives on a trust-fund, warmly greets her.

PHIL: Maree! It's been a long time!

MAREE: It's good to see you Phil.

[ Maree reveals that her brother was the hispanic kid arrested for the murder. A wrong place wrong time plotline that doesn't hold up to even the barest scrutiny. ]

MCBRIDE: You two know each other?

PHIL: Yes, we have been friends since we were kids. We practically grew up together.

[ Pause ] (Jenny and I often pause the show to make snarky comments about it.)

JENNY: What? How did they hang out when he was a kid? He's got a trust fund. I bet her mom was his housekeeper.

BRENDAN: Come on, Jenny. I know these shows operate on stereotypes, but that's pretty bad. Her family could have been wealthy next-door neighbors or something.

JENNY: If they were wealthy, why was the brother trying to pawn the watch? A rich kid wouldn't do that.

BRENDAN: He might.

JENNY: Okay, sheesh.

[ Play ].

McBride: So how did you two know each other?

PHIL: Maree's mom was our housekeeper.

*Sigh*

A Year's worth of movies

As in: Media

The ease with which you can click "ADD" leads to travesties like this. My personal queue (does not include Jenny's movies or our Joint queue) is now unbelievably long. The chances that I'll get to see Jackie Brown: Collector's edition, the current bottom-of-the-queue movie, in 2006 are so slim as to be laughable.

TV intake and commentary

As in: Media

NOTE: since I TiVo and get behind, some of these observations are late in coming.

• I don't know why I'm obsessed with The Office. My cousins visited last week and we watched a couple episodes (of the British one). I had to fight the urge to re-watch the entire series again. Tim's resigned depression is so brilliant. My favorite line from this watch-through is when he's talking about a themed nightclub called Henry the Eighth's. He says "There's not a day that goes by that I don't think about that club."
• Boston Legal had more metatextual shenanigans:

  Denny: I'm tired of my Mad Cow being a storyline.
  Allan: This isn't your story, Denny.

  What's next, Gary Shandling-esque glimpses of the camera?
• Smallville: They killed his dad? Come ON! I'm so tired of the Clark/Lana/Lex love triangle. Come ON! Chloe is right there! CHLOE!
  On the bright side, Lionel continues to be a total badass.
• Lost season one disc four sits smoldering by our DVD player, waiting in its Netflix envelope. We hesitate to play one episode because that's committing to playing all four.
• I already miss Arrested Development. The Judge Reinhold show was inspired, as was the house band: Hung Jury. Brilliant.

When Slogans Overlap (OR) The Misdiagnosed Viral Marketing

As in: Comics , Media , Memes

One of my favorite comics of the last few years is Warren Ellis' Global Frequency. I'd heard rumors (that have since proved to be true) that the comic had been optioned for television. Awesome. Then, I saw what I could only think was a bit of viral marketing: a sign that said "Are you on the frequency?"

A bit of investigation yielded confusing results:

Me (to one of my students who reads comics): Does the phrase "Are you on the frequency?" mean anything to you?
Hip student: Global Frequency?

and...

Me (to a trendy member of the office staff): Does the phrase "Are you on the frequency?" mean anything to you?
Trendy staff member: Doesn't that have something to do with Columbia?

Another quick search reveals that Columbia's on-campus TV station is called Frequency Tv.

So I'm curious about viral marketing. If the goal is to spread a meme, how important is it that the meme be unique? One could suggest that the "Are you on the Frequency?" sign fired both synapses for me. Does this make Frequency TV cooler? Does it make Global Frequency cooler? Could the connection be accidental, or is there someone in the Frequency TV marketing group who also checks both Columbia College and Warren Ellis Fan boxes? More importantly, if the "Are you on the Frequency?" poster was meant to lead people to Frequency TV, it's a bad thing for them that the top hit on Google is about Warren Ellis.

Snarky comments about my system tray

As in: Media

From left to right:

• Safely Remove Hardware; my cousins had a mac that used to say "You may now turn off your Macintosh safely." I couldn't resist saying, "I thought it was a Macintosh SE, not a Macintosh Safely." I was a regular Oscar Wilde.
• iTunes: I don't even want to know what the title of the current STP song playing means: Meatplow. Next up, a song by the 1-Drop, a reggae band fronted by Mike Opitz of CSB/SJU faculty fame. A man so dedicated to teaching he once taught class with a concussion. That was a wild day.
• Steam: Do you think Valve spies on me?
• OpenOffice: I let OO hang out in my tray, ready to go. MS Office has to start up from scratch. HA.
• Palm: HotSync This.
• ZoneAlarm: I love the 'internet monitor' bars on my ZoneAlarm helper. Makes visual my computer's chitchat with the web. The firewall has blocked 554 access attempts. Ping that!
• AIM: I signed up for AIM so students could contact me more easily. I don't have any buddies yet.
• Dell E support: The Dell support program (which seems to use Enron's E) makes a wicked loud VROOM sound when it alerts you to impending computer doom. It makes an equally loud MOORV sound when it goes away.
• HP Photosmart Printer: My photo printer sits dormant, unplugged, unloved.
• MSN Messenger: Go away, I'm busy blogging.
• Dell A940: That next grey box is the icon for our printer/scanner center thing. Jenny was skeptical about its size at first, but has come to enjoy having a photocopier and fax machine in the house.
• HP Photosmart Printer: Photo printer's still not hooked up.
• Pentax DeviceDetector: Neither is my digital camera.
• Creative SoundBlaster Sound Control: My soundcard has its own cool volume slider. No lame-o Windows XP slider for me. No sir.
• Time this work break ended: 12:47am. Time I get to go to bed: Avery's next feeding (could be any minute or another hour and a half).

Coming Ashore

As in: Media

During Avery's midnight feeding last night, I watched the most recent episode of Boston Legal. Mmmm. It seems like someone said "It's been a while since we've been reminded how awesome Alan Shore is." Thus, the most recent episode.

What interests me about the episode though, is one line from the end. When Alan joins Denny on the balcony to smoke cigars and drink brandy, he does so for the first time in the episode (rather than the second, third, or even fourth time as often happens in any given installment of BL). When he arrives, he says:

How are you? I haven't seen you much this episode.

As Moe Sizlack might say: WHAAA? Boston Legal, while filled with the usual David Kelly nuttiness, has never nodded toward anything like self-referentiality. And Shore's comment goes un-remarked-upon as he and Denny chat. There's no sly look to the camera, no nothing. He just said "episode" instead of "week". I'd like to imagine a Purple Rose of Cairo kind of deal, where Alan is getting tired of dancing around on the screen and is readying to leap into the real world: he's testing the waters.

Media, Babies, and other stuff

As in: Media

1. Johnny Cash: American 4: The Man Comes Around.
   I bought this CD for the "Hurt" cover, but found the song that arrests me the most is "The Man Comes Around". I suspect the evangelical Cash would be a bit disturbed by the reason the song affects me so much. As was probably his intent, the song gives me chills and makes me a-feared for Armageddon. The reason it gets my boots quakin, though, is because the song features prominently in the urban apocalypse scenes at the beginning of the remade Dawn of the Dead, which I found far scarier than I like to admit. Cash's deep voice brings to mind the scenes of uprest and zombies that give me chills. I guess I am afraid of the white horse and its rider, as long as the rider's a zombie.
2. I bought Stubbs the Zombie but haven't played it yet. The humor looks a bit more sophomoric than I originally expected, but that's fine.
3. I've grown fond of the American The Office, despite my love of the British one too. As I predicted when I watched the first couple episodes of the American one, it works best when it got away from copying the jokes from the other show and introducing its own. Carrel's character is less likeable than the forty-year-old virgin, but there are moments of tenderness, as when he goes home to his empty apartment, only to answer the door for the trick-or-treaters.
4. When do babies start learning words? I hope it's not at six weeks, because during my shift tonight, I've been watching Glengarry GlenRoss. Let's hope Avery's first word doesn't come from that film.

Reading against the grain

As in: Media

iTunes shuffle just played "Outshined," in which Chris Cornell sings that he's:

I'm looking California
but feeling Minnesota

I read that as

I look like I'm a cool-as-can-be badass
but I'm actually quite friendly

That's obviously what he meant.

Inside Jokes

As in: Media

Jenny and I have been catching up on our Smallvilles lately. I've enjoyed this show from the beginning, but the hemming and hawing around the lame-o Kent/Lana love stuff pesters me like a gadfly. Anyhow, on to my witty observations.

Of course, the premise of Smallville depends on inside jokes. The show works well because we know that Lex and Clark will become the most bitter of enemies, we know that Lois will end up being a reporter and that Clark will end up as Superman. All this outside knowledge layers the show in ways deeper than the glamorous press photos would suggest were likely. In doing so, the show helps illustrate Steven Johnson's notion that more recent tv and games work by encouraging a wider net of textual knowledge. Smallville rewards viewers for knowledge of the Superman universe.

Grand media theories aside, the show's writers seem to enjoy building elaborate ways to make inside jokes about the future of Superman. Two prominent examples from earlier episodes are the S for Smallville written on Clark's chest when the school bullies tied him up in the cornfield and the pentagon-shape of the letters in the kryptonian language. Here are some jokes I noticed from this season.

1. One episode this season revolved around Aquaman's visit to a Kansas farm town. Toward the end of the episode, Aquaman remarks that he and Clark should team up and form the "Junior Lifeguards Association." Clark responds that he's not ready for The JLA just yet. Ha Ha!
    
2. The show also features James Marsters as "Dr. Fine," a history prof with a hard-to-get-used-to American accent (I know, I know, he's American, not British). In an episode involving a strain of rabies that gives people vampire-like powers, he and Clark discuss the evil sorority full of vampires. He says "There are no such things as vampires, Clark." Ha Ha!
   
   Bonus meta-humor: the sorority president's name is Buffy Sanders. (At one point, the show implies that Chloe selected the name as an alias for a newspaper story she was writing, in which case we have a notion that Chloe watched Buffy and chose an amusing pseudonym intentionally.)
    
3. One of the most recent episodes featured a guest appearance by Tom Wopat, formerly of Dukes of Hazzard. The other Duke brother, of course, was played by Jon Schneider, now employed as Jonathan Kent. Among the panoply of inside jokes in the episode were: 1. Wopat's character drives a 1969 Dodge Charger (blue, not orange) and 2. zooms around skidding to a stop and throwing gravel everywhere. 3. The passenger door is stuck so he (not kidding here) jumps in through the window. 4. At one point the car flies over the camera in classic DoH style.
   
   Bonus: as we watched, Jenny commented that Tom Wopat looked a lot older than when he appeared on Jane Doe. I insisted it was still him, but was also a bit confused about the difference. Turns out the man I thought was Tom Wopat was actually Joe Penny. I ask you, dear readers: was I crazy to see the similarity? 

Tom Wopat 1980s	Joe Penny today	Tom Wopat today

The First Mailbag of the Year

As in: Favorite Things , Media

For others, it might be Thanksgiving parades or musak at the mall, but for me the first sign of the impending holidays comes when I watch (or more accurately, my insistence leads Jenny to let me watch) Miracle on 34th Street for the first time. Here are a few things I noticed this time around:

• Last year I remarked that it was lame that Cleo had to work on Thanksgiving. Jenny reminded me that Doris had to work too. Good point. I countered by noticing that Cleo is the only black person in the film.
• When Fred, the nice single man across the hall asks to have Susan come to his house, the housekeeper explains to Doris that "He's so very fond of Susan, when he asked I thought you wouldn't mind." Today that would verge on child endangerment.
• Alfred is the most accepting person ever. He accepts that Kris knows his name instantly. Then takes it without blinking when Kris says "Why do you like impersonating me?"
• "What if he's only a little crazy, like painters or composers or some of those men in Washington?"
• When Fred's getting ready for bed, he brushes his teeth and then finishes his cigarette.
• Santa Claus is an evolutionist: "You're the greatest lawyer since Darrow."

Get out the Funny

As in: Media

Some musings on my recent TV intake:

• The Colbert Report is funny. My favorite thing he does: "I'm putting you on notice." Oh yeah, and it's got David Cross on it!
  
  
• Mr. Show on DVD. (Jonathan Frome showed me a single episode years ago, so I added it to my Netflix queue when we subscribed.) I love the pythonesque links between sketches, and the regular return to the beginning of the episode. (My favorite recognition moment so far: the "expert room" featuring a young Jack Black.) At the end of that same episode, the show featured Cross and Odenkirk watching a TV depicting themselves watching TV, and being murdered. They thought it was funny.
  
  
• There was a bit of self referentiality on Law & Order: Criminal Intent last week -- Eames revealed that when she first met Goren (D'Onofrio's character), she didn't like his odd tics or unconventional style. After spending time with him, though, she's come to realize that he's a good detective. Tee hee! That's how we all felt, Eames!
  
  
• Sherlock Holmes. I bought a 5 DVD set at Target for $10 last weekend--a full run of an American SH TV series from the 1954. It's great! Watson plays like a buffoon and Holmes is kindly toward him. Each episode is only about 25 minutes, so they haven't got time for anything too deep. We just watched one episode and I'm hooked. It taps into the same part of my psyche that used to like watching Dragnet on Nick-at-Nite.
  

The Long-Awaited 'Serenity' Post

As in: Media

I'm a Whedon fan, of course, but I missed the Firefly boat the first time around. Since the movie was coming out, Jenny and I zipped our way through the series and finally saw the film. Whoo. I have a few thoughts, but they're below the fold because they're spoiler-tastic.

For those of you who'd rather not venture there, I'll offer the first of my thoughts about the film here:

1. Reavers = space zombies. We all know zombies are cool. But how can you have zombies in space? They're sort of like 28 Days Later fellas, only able to fly spaceships. They have an unquenchable blood rage and they do things like eat people and defile bodies. Very zombie-like. I dub them zombies. From space.

2. Proof positive of Stephen Johnson's suggestion that longer media allows for more complex narratives. In Everything Bad is Good For You, S.J. suggests that recent TV has been able to weave more complex narratives that stimulate us to "lean forward" and engage. He says that part of the reason these texts do so is because they can build larger, more complex stories than a 2 hour film can hold.
   
   Serenity's two layers demonstrate this idea beautifully. While the film probably carries a normal level of interesting hullaballo, the TV viewers will have a more nuanced idea that: a) the doctor and Mel know each other fairly well; b) Jane isn't quite the ass he appears to be; c) Wash and Zoe's relationship demonstrated the possibilities of love in the 'verse.
   
   Hence, the death of Wash, while not unreasonable for an action film, was heartbreaking for people who know the show.
3. The fine art of balanced narrative. Whedon did a great job building a narrative that newbies could follow without re-shooting huge swaths of the series. The only major concession was the stilted dialogue between Mel and the Doc in the first few minutes.
4. Shepard Book got the short end of the stick.
5. Whedonities: robot lover (ala Buffy's three doofuses); kickass girl troubled by otherworldly powers (ala Buffy); crew of renegade space pirates who're much more empathetic than we'd expect (ala Alien Resurrection)

Enjoyable Moments in TV Dialog 4

As in: Media

After I wrote the last entry, I thought I was done, but Jenny and I finally finished watching Firefly on DVD and I couldn't resist one more:

Wash: You think she's a psychic? That's wild. Like something straight out of science fiction.
Zoe: You live in a spaceship, dear.
Wash: So?

Nice. We both noticed this episode setting up a couple plotline moments for future episodes. Oh Joss, why did you have to leave such tantalizing clues?

Enjoyable Moments in TV Dialog 3 (Reality TV edition!)

As in: Media

From the Amazing Race:

"Drive yourself to Washington D.C. Where's that?"
"In Washington state?"

"A hangar is an airplane."
"No it's not. It's a place to park airplanes."

And my favorite, reading from the clue about riding in a NASA gravity simulator:

Who wants to pull three G.I.s?

Enjoyable moments in TV dialog 2

As in: Media

From Threshold:

Molly: [Responding to Arthur's come-on.] No, that's not what I meant. I need your language skills.
Arthur: Your loss. Very well, how can I be your linguistic beeyotch?

Enjoyable moments in TV dialog

As in: Media

From Numb3rs

Charlie: ...Which is the exact same math used in sundials. Agent Sinclair, you are in luck. You happen to be in the presence of two card-carrying members of the North American Sundial Society.

Sinclair: Let the good times roll.

Merchants of Cool

As in: Media

My favorite moments from Merchants of Cool:

1. "That's when it hit me. Pop culture and youth culture work like a giant feedback loop." What a lame-o eureka moment. I thought the whole movie spent its time saying this.
2. Example of a group that couldn't get their little indie record on TRL: "Joe Fabulous." That's awesome. I had a friend in college who liked it if you called her "Mr. Fabulous" in reference to the maitre-D from The Blues Brothers.
3. "Teachers are nerds".

Random thoughts about 'Saw'

As in: Media

Spoiler Alert! I'm gonna write about the plot of this movie and reveal bits of what happened, even the end! Turn back now!

Clowns are Scary

• "It's Seven, with a hint of Cube and The Most Dangerous Game."
• Clowns are almost always scary.
• It's not clear to me how the killer decides who to kill, or why they have to be killed the way they were. One of the brilliant moves Seven makes is to unite form with function. Here, the violent deaths only tangentially relate to the people they're inflicted upon.

• I love the end reveal that the doofus orderly whom we thought to be the killer is, in fact, another victim.
• This killer's motivations are pretty obscure. Apparently, since he has a terminal disease, he's found a new appreciation for life and wants to share that by killing other people. Huh.
• The old canard that, in a mystery, a gun on stage must be used in the third act plays out here. The hacksaw at the beginning MUST be used by the end of the film. Otherwise that teaser poster would be pretty lame.
• Why doesn't the doctor know how to tie a tourniquet? What a doofus.
• Can someone explain to me what Adam's "task" was in all this? Is he just screwed? The others all have to do something to survive, but I couldn't figure out what he had to do.

I wish I'd remembered my medical training!

Remember Sammy Jenkis (1)

As in: Media

Spoiler Alert: If you haven't seen Memento, you might not want to read this post, as I'll probably reveal stuff about the film you don't want to know.

I just watched Memento with my students and am thinking about it a bit. Obviously, the structure of the film brings the loop to the forefront, something I'm sure I'll talk about at MPCA, but what interests me at the moment are Leonard's tattoos. Some floating ideas:

• Tattoos are "all the rage." Why have tattoos become mainstream body art? (When A&E has a show about it, it's mainstream.) I've heard the notion that tattoos are "something to remember 'me' by." Memento obviously plays on that. They're also permanent, and broadcast something about the tatt-ee. Natalie calls Leonard's tats creepy.
• They become metonymic for the shifting reality of the postmodern world. I'm tempted to make a few connections here, but they aren't all that flushed out: the tattoos and notes seem to be metonyms for print and electric communication. The former are more sturdy and reliable, but they may still be inaccurate.
• The tattoos also provide the founding myths of Leonard's life, much like print texts provide founding structures for national mythologies. (CF The Atlas of the European Novel and others.) In other words, the "John G. Raped and Killed Your Wife" tattoo becomes the driving force behind Leonard's life despite the fact that, if Teddy is to be believed, Leonard's wife survived. In that light, they function much like the Horatio Alger myth.

Other things to ponder: the looping narrative and the polaroids.

TiVo Fracas Roundup

As in: Copyfight , Favorite Things , Media , News

Yesterday, the internet was a-flurry with rumors that TiVo was implementing a copy-protection scheme that would prevent users from keeping shows beyond a certain point:

I recently got a sample of Tivo DRM, accidentally I suspect. Recently a Simpson's rerun recorded with a red-flag next to it (an icon I've never seen before). When I selected the episode, I got a message to the effect that "the copyright holder prohibited saving the episode past date mm/dd". I also noted that this episode could not be copied using Tivo Togo (Link)

TiVo responded quickly:

[The TiVo rep] said the copy protection is trigged by a flag in the video signal. The reports appearing on the Web appear to be cases where TiVo misinterprets noise in the signal as a copy protection flag, and imposes the restrictions.

"During the test process, we came across people who had false positives because of noisy analog signals," he said. "We actually delayed development (of the new TiVo software) to address those false positives." (Link)

But apparently, that doesn't make any sense.

In the room are film executives, consumer electronics manufacturers, software and operating system vendors, semiconductor manufacturers and conditional access system designers. When I asked them if they believed that noise could be "misinterpreted" as a DRM flag, they burst into positive howls of disbelief. One present talked about Macrovision's checksums and said that that must have been "incredible noise if it completed the checksum." A semiconductor expert laughed out loud. (Link)

Alas, I end up feeling link this guy

The basic question is why TiVo is implementing these crap features. But if you want to live with the features, the next question is, who has access to the flag controls? If someone inside TiVo flipped the flag on, for whatever reason, TiVo should say that now. If the broadcaster -- through the analog signal being named as the fall guy by Mr. Denney -- can turn the flag on whenever they want, the power of this feature is in the wrong hands altogether. (Link)

and agreeing that "while I'm a fan of the machine, I'll bolt as soon as this new "feature" kills out a show I'd been saving. There are alternatives that don't do this".

Why, TiVo? Why?

Incoming Cleese!

As in: Media

Oh Columbo, you genius!

As in: Media

Last night I watched a Columbo from 1974, which was excellent for its fascinated use of reel-to-reel tape recorders. At one point, Columbo encounters an answering machine and isn't quite sure what to make of it. He leaves the following message:

Hello ... this is ... lieutenant Columbo ... with the Homocide division .... Please give me a call at the main precinct.... The number is ... you can look that up ....

I was wondering two things about Columbo:

1. He nearly always investiages the wealthy. The shtick of the show is that the wealthy/connected murderer believes he's (I've only seen one episode with a female villain) smarter than Columbo. I'm curious about whether Columbo's doofus act would work with people who aren't so arrogant. He does seem to adopt a different level of competence when he's talking to others.
2. How much of Columbo's goofiness is supposed to be an act? He's clearly meant to be manipulating the villain with his disarming manner. I ask because of the finale of this last episode. Columbo goes to confront the murderer for the last time. He brings along a paper bag with the crucial evidence in it. When he moves to pull out the evidence, though, the first thing he finds is a sandwich in wax paper. "Oh. That's my lunch. Don't worry about that, sir."
   
   Why was his sandwich in there? We can assume he went to the precinct to pack his bag 'o evidence. We can also assume that he doesn't need his goofy act any more—the crucial moment in each episode is the moment where he sheds that act and nabs the murderer. Yet Columbo put his sandwich in there.

Stuff I plan to watch this fall

As in: Media

Gonna check out:

• My Name is Earl
• Headcases
• Bones (Boreanaz is back, baby!)
• The Colbert Repórt (It's French, bitch)
• Amazing Race 8

I'm looking forward to the return of:

• Veronica Mars (Watch this!)
• numb3rs (is this coming back?)
• Alias

Sonic Hypocracy

As in: Media

In Entertainment Weekly this week, there's an interesting ad from MicroSoft:

Click for a large (82K) version of the image. The ad touts all the nifty things you can do with your music, including: I find it hilariously hypocritical that the company known for its draconian DRM strategies (Longhorn, anyone?) advocates, in the same breath, "mixing and Mashing." They left out the first step: "Get permission."

See also their web presence for this campaign.

Addendum: Now that the supreme court has ruled against innovation and in favor of big money, we should add "but don't let anyone else listen to your mix."

Now there's an idea!

As in: Media , Science Fiction , The Living Dead

Enterprising screenwriters take note: premise for a zombie movie:

But university officials say all that's not true. They had no role in acquiring the bodies, they're receiving no money. In fact, they never heard of this body show until contacted by the I-Team. We've learned that Perner was able to get bodies meant for medical research and teaching from a factory in Nanjing, China. It worries San Francisco supervisors that these bodies are now on display on Nob Hill. (link)

Given the American tendency (if subconscious) toward racism and xenophobia, the idea of bodies from another country (particularly China, echoing the subtle strain of "yellow menace" we've been hearing in the media of late) "destined for medical research" being used in this sort of exhibit seems the perfect audience-appeal conceit for the release of a government funded T-virus or Z virus. The bodies, infected with this nasty experimental virus, are stolen and improperly plasticized by unscrupulous museum exhibitors. Dripping, infecting, and zombie-based chaos ensues. Audiences flock to the theater.

Star Wars craziness

As in: Media

You had to know I was a Star Wars geek, right? When the last two movies came out, I saw them both on opening night. I saw the Phantom Menace at a theater in Minnesota that boasted a perfect score on Lucasfilm's THX test (one of only 7 in the country, at the time). I saw Attack of the Clones at a small theater in Normal, IL, with a bunch of Rhet/Compers (the weekend of C&W 2002). So what did I do this year? Nothing yet. I have tickets to see it tomorrow. I can't say why I'm not front and center—I'm certainly excited enough. Anyhow, here's how I'm preparing for Revenge of the Sith:

• Watched Attack of the Clones this week, to get all the imagery fresh in my head.
• Bought Star Wars Tales, Vol 2 and read it. Tasty stories from the SW universe help amp up the excitement.
• Talked Jenny into watching one of the other movies (she picked Return of the Jedi).
• Noticed that the OED's Word of the Day today is "Chewa, n. and a. A. n. 1. A member of an African people inhabiting central Malawi and adjoining areas of Zambia and Mozambique." Coincidence? I think not.

Good to go.

The Cold Eye of Sauron

As in: Media

So I read yesterday in slashdot that a group of Federal scientists could hack a WEP encryption in three minutes. (WEP is the standard encryption mode for wireless networks.) If the Feds are willing to advertise that they can crack it in three minutes, how long do you think it takes black-hats? I figured that I should up the ante on my home system, and thus monkeyed around with the security on my router this morning. And while I was doing so, I felt Sauron's all-seeing eye sweep in my direction.

It happened when I told my notebook's wireless card to search for wireless networks. The resulting list included the four expected networks (mine and one other, encrypted, and two un-encrypted) and one additional one, third in the list, labeled "U.S. Secret Service." Uncle Sam was nosing around. A minute or two later, I did another search and it was still there, though it had dropped to fifth in the list. Another moment and it was gone.

Of course, I realize that some jokester could have named her wireless "U.S. Secret Service", but why was it there for a moment and why did it fade away? I imagine a Simpsons-esque boxy van rolling up the street with Flowers By Irene on it. Creepy.

Writing New Media

As in: Composition , Media , Reading

Our reading group meeting was fantastic last night. We met to chat about the first couple chapters of Writing New Media by Wysocki, Johnson-Eilola, Selfe, and Sirc. As our conversation ranged over a wide territory of issues, we started talking about Selfe's piece, "Students Who Teach Us," in particular her description of David, a young man who developed outstanding technological literacy skills while simultaneously failing to succeed in college—so much so that he flunked out. Selfe writes:

To make it possible for students to practice, value, and understand a full range of literacies—emerging, competing, and fading—English composition teachers have got to be willing to expand their own understanding of composing beyond conventional bounds of the alphabetic. And we have to do so quickly or risk having composition studies become increasingly irrelevant. (54)

Selfe buys into the idea that the need for electrate composition in our classes ties to the changing world outside; we need to learn to recognize these other ways of communicating and help teach them. She says, on page 51, that when David's teachers failed to recognize his new technological literacies, the "missed important opportunities to link their instruction goals to his developing strengths" (51).

Pegeen asked why David's instructors should have recognized his new media literacies, rather than his competency in his own dialect. Had his instructors been willing to go to bat against "standard English" and the power-centered grammar rules that go with it, he may have succeeded. In short, our discussion last night asked why new media should be the space through which we "stay relevant" and (implicitly) "change the world." Why not use our knowledge that different dialects operate under perfectly logical grammar systems and our understanding that standard English grammar reinforces power structures that put at a disadvantage the already disadvantaged to argue for the validity of poly-vocality, rather than the validity of new media?

Whoo doggies, it was a beaut of a conversation. Here are a few of the highlights:

1. After a long conversation, we generally agreed on the idea that perhaps it needn't be either/or but rather could be both/and. Teaching and being aware of both kinds of polyvocality allows us to leverage the student's talents best.
2. New Media pulls ahead in many minds because it's clearly recognized by systems of power as important. In part, systems of power also recognize that while digital technologies can allow for sophisticated articulations of thought, they can also be used to replicate existing structures of power (as with, say, TOPIC).
3. With both New Media and Alternative Grammars, we generally agreed that our teaching balances between the rhetorical, idealistic goals of our ethics (in which we recognize and teach the intellectual value of these ideas) and the practical needs of our students who come to the college for credentialing (whom we tell that instructors in other departments won't appreciate what we know here—that this work you're doing has value). The question we returned to is why we're willing to go to bat for new media and not for polyvocal grammars?
4. Perhaps the "both/and" idea becomes increasingly relevant as we think about the ways in which economically disadvantaged groups have made use of new medias to express their ideas; mixing, hip-hop, skratching become spaces where these elements collide/intersect. (To pay homage to that crossing, Doug put in "The Humpty Dance" while we chatted.)
5. Finally, we acknowledged that New Media's popularity also stems from its institutional currency. Because of point 2 above, new media scholarship helps get people published, get jobs, get money. Arguing for alternative grammars does not (Norm lamented that this discussion is much harder to have since the ebonics fiasco).

Our coversation led me to re-think much of how I approach grammar (philosophically), but ultimately won't change what I do with it in the classroom right now. Instead, it will certainly influence my thinking about the value of new media scholarship. I definitely concur with the notion that new media scholarship affords another avenue into the discussion of polyvocality—it might even be the element that opened the door for such a discussion.

Now that's damn good T.V.

As in: Flotsam , Media

I'm hooked. On my office-mate's advice, we watched The Amazing Race this time around and dang! That's good T.V. Most of the episodes are intense, and the down-to-the-wire breaks are awesome. We're very happy that Uchenna and Joyce won.

The only dubious moment on the race—what are the odds that a pilot would let the jetway be put back on the plane for two more passengers? Nonetheless, priceless payback for the moment Rob & Amber pulled a similar coup in episode 3 or 4.	It couldn't have gone to a more deserving team. Always positive, always about being nice to one another and competitive without being unethical (or even cutthroat).

I predict that in the next race, we'll see two tactics that people will have learned from Rob and Amber: there will be a lot more "bribing" of locals to not help other teams in one way or another; everyone will be jockeying for any airplane advantage they can find. Rob and Amber made significant strides in this race because they always sought a better flight, at a faster time. Doug adds that he thinks the hidden rules (which we all agree must be there) will now include a stricture against hiring "guides" to help with tasks—the other R/A innovation that gave them a serious edge.

The Worst

As in: Media , Reading

Regarding American Idol, it seems to me the yucksters over at Vote for the Worst (link unavailable when I checked, see this article) are the strange grandchildren of Michel de Certeau.

This pledge is to keep whoever we've selected as the worst competitor in the competition by voting for them for the entire time alotted every week. Even if you live outside of America, tell people about the pledge and spread the word. At the top of this page, we will post a banner with the contestant that we're supporting. If you so choose, vote along with us and help keep the no talent of the week in the competition.

These folks are indeed making do with what TV offers them. They're interacting, taking this pre-packaged show and making their own fun of it. Perhaps this is where sampling and mixing come in. What if they re-cut AI episodes to look like the people they wanted to win won? Does interacting with the show on its own terms (esp. given the likely manipulation of voting totals by Fox execs) make do, or are they just giving the show more publicity? Perhaps this is just a more direct version of the William Hung phenomenon.

Vote for the worst directly opposes one of my film students from UF, who told me that she was a rabid Clay Aiken fan (during that year on AI), and that she participated with a group of folks who made collage-videos for his songs and posted them online. Making do indeed.

Weekend's Media

As in: Media , Photos

Catching up on TiVo backlog:

• Veronica Mars just keeps getting better. The line from this episode that was so awesome:

  Just another day in the life of a human Google.

  She goes from one search to the next and back. I'm all about hard-boiled detectives right now, and VM fits in perfectly: she's scrappy, she's a working-class private detective in a rich-person's world, her personal morals are the highest thing for her—even when it means busting a good friend. And it's excellently written. Bonus! It got picked up for a second season.
• Did the Kung Fu Hustle. Its slot as the #1 Kung Fu Comedy in America is well-earned. Fantastic.
• Peter MacNichol, how do you capture our hearts so? We enjoyed your stomach-rumbling antics on Ally McBeal, and your friendly mentor-ness on NUMB3RS continues to endear.
• Ocean's Twelve. Meh.
• Finally watched (from tape) last week's Amazing Race. High point: Rob calling Uchenna and Joyce "stupid" while they were quietly kicking his butt. Mid point: Kelly tells Ron he "got out of his commitment to the military" by "being a P.O.W." He gets angry but shows remarkable restraint, given the comment. Low point: otherwise tiresome Ron and Kelly are spared the axe in favor of destitution. Question: will anyone give them anything? (Probably not.)
• Last: saw Pac-Man related graffiti on Thursday:

The Mysteries of Mailing lists

As in: Flotsam , Media

As I've mentioned before, I'm hooked on The Current, which I listen to over the internet. It's a Minnesota Public Radio operation that plays a very wide range of music from a variety of genres and eras. I knew it would be the right station for me during my first listening session. Within two hours, I heard a deep track from They Might Be Giants' Apollo 18 and a bit of Soul Coughing.

Because I support the idea of public radio and my listening costs the station real resources (I'm pulling bandwidth, rather than grabbing already-distributed airwaves), I pitched in a little bit during the last pledge drive. Apparently, MPR sells its member lists to organizations like the Walker Art Center—I expect this package I got is the first of many Minnesota-centered publicity I will receive in Illinois:

What I don't get is how they got my name wrong. I paid by Credit Card online, so it must have been right (the CC company wouldn't have processed the charge if I had mistyped my name). So how did my name get mis-typed on the Walker mailing list? I would assume they could just transfer the names digitally.

An anecdote from my days as a temp: I had a two-week stint working for Microsoft (this would have been in, say, the summer of 1996 or 97) in which my job was to take data from one spreadsheet (all typed) and enter it into another database. I spent the whole two weeks of data entry pondering why Microsoft hadn't worked out a way to transfer the data without a bunch of keyboard monkeys like myself as intermediaries.

Techno-Gotchas

As in: ComicBlog , Composition , Media

Jeff says it again (on WPA-L):

Vowell

As in: Media

I got to see Sarah Vowell give a reading from her new book Assassination Vacation on Friday. Very fun. There were moments where I could hear Violet (from The Incredibles) on stage instead of the NPR commentator. In waiting for the talk, I flipped through her last collection of essays, Partly-Cloudy Patriot and found a passage that I had starred:

The more history I learn, the more the world fills up with stories. Just the other day, I was in my neighborhood Starbucks, waiting for the post office to open. I was enjoying a chocolatey caffe mocha when it occurred to me that to drink a mocha is to gulp down the entire history of the New World. From the Spanish exportation of Aztec cacao, and the Dutch invention of the chemical process for making cocoa, on down to the capitalist empire of Hershey, PA, and the lifestyle marketing of Seattle's Starbucks, the modern mocha is a bitter-sweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention and consumerism served with whipped cream on top. No wonder it costs so much. And, thanks to Sophie and Michael Coe's book The True History of Chocolate, I remembered that cacao beans were used as currency at the moment of European contact. When Christopher Columbus's son Ferdinand captured a Mayan canoe in 1503, he noticed that whenever one of the natives dropped a cacao bean, "they all stooped to pick it up, as if an eye had fallen." When you know such trivia, an act as mundane as having an overpriced breakfast drink becomes imbued with meaning, even poetry. Plus, I read a women's magazine article called "5 Fabulous Morning Rituals," and it said that after you "bask in bed" and "walk in nature" you're supposed to "ponder the sins of the conquistadors." (42)

I like many things about this passage, but the reason I noted it, in particular, is that it demonstrates, in a few short words, the method of Ulmer's "MEmorial." It ties personal experience to daily activity to cultural relationships to history and back again.

This kind of move is exactly why I like Sarah Vowell's essays—she reflects on American culture with both humor and insight; she draws these ties between light-hearted moments and serious ones.

World leader bands

As in: Flotsam , Media

So what with the popularity of Franz Ferdinand, I'm not surprised to be listening to something on The Current right now by a band called "Louis XIV." It seems like only a matter of time before other bands come out with world-leader names (excepting those who already have them, like the Boxing Gandhis). So, I give you bands named after world leaders that I'd like to see:

• Sadat
• The Nevilles Chamberlain
• Anwar
• The Mondale Exposition
• Imelda's Shoes

McLuhan -- Still got it!

As in: Media

I keep returning to this quote—I think it very much encapsulates how I try to think about what hypertext rhetoric should be: Rational? Yes. "Uniform and continuous and sequential"? No.

'Rational,' of course, has for the West long meant 'uniform and continuous and sequential.' In other words, we have confused reason with literacy, and rationalism with a single technology. Thus in the electric age man seems to the conventional West to become irrational.
- - McLuhan, Understanding Media, page 15

So how does one build digital argument (if one does at all)? In my online hypertext pieces, I try to do that using a variety of means, but usually it involves presenting a linear argument of sorts, and then offering other tracks through the "database" of information presented in my project. While I'm pleased with the projects generally (here and here), I'm not satisfied that I'm anywhere near digital rhetoric yet.

This all ties to my two PCA presentations, both of which attempted to present my "digital" research (a chapter of my diss on cybernetics and the random comic) in a spirit that embodied the rhetoric of those pieces. In both cases, the audiences, at the end, stared blankly at me—either unable or unwilling to engage with the stuff I'd offered. Of course, I'm not sure what I'd have asked either. Hrm.

Making Do

As in: Media

Re-read De Certeau's "Making Do" in preparing for my New Media class. Some choice bits:

• [O]nce the images broadcast by television and the time spent in front of the TV have been analyzed, it remains to be asked what the consumer makes of these images and during these hours. (31)
• What is counted is what is used, not the ways of using. Paradoxically, the latter become invisible in the universe of codification and generalized transparency. . . . The practices of consumption are the ghosts of the society that carries their name. Like the "spirits" of former times, they constitute the multiform and occult postulate of productive activity. (35)
• [Tactic mobility] is a guileful ruse. (37)
• [T]rickery is possible for the weak, and often it is his only possibility, as a "last resort." (37)
• Through procedures Freud makes explicit with reference to wit, a tactic boldly juxtaposes diverse elements in order suddenly to produce a flash shedding a different light on the language of a place and to strike the hearer. (37-8)
• [Tactics are] foreign to the rules laid down and imposed by rationality founded on established rights and property. (38)
• . . . strategies pin their hopes on the resistance that the establishment of a place offers to the erosion of time; tactics on a clever utilization of time, of the opportunities it presents and also of the play that it introduces into the foundations of power. (38-9)
• . . . from the sixty-four hexagrams of the Chinese I-Ching or the Greek metis to the Arablic hila, other "logics" can be discerned. (39)

It occurs to me that many of the bits above overlap with my previous post and with my thinking about the Random comic. In particular, my reading of this suggests that projects such as mine become manifestations of tactics--they're actions that make use of these other texts in new and unexpected ways. I wonder how the juxtapositions that Random creates relate to the intentional juxtapositions created by tacticians.

New Interfaces

As in: Media

We talked about Chapter 2 of Manovich in my Writing for New Media class Tuesday, and we tried to brainstorm some new interface metaphors for applications or operating systems. Other than the spatial metaphor, ala Matteo Ricci, we didn't have a lot of luck trying to suggest new interfaces. It's hard to get to the innovation side of the "consistency-innovation" combo.

So I thought I'd brainstorm some of my daily interactions that could yield interesting metaphors:

• Walking the dog. When you walk your dog, your dog is out and about, it visits the places it's interested in, leaves notes (minor and substantial), and greets other dogs. Translation: what about a web-browsing interface that allowed/kept track of current connections ala the "logged in" panel in drupal? However, it would use some sort of pop-up to allow you and the other users to interact immediately. The virtual "sniff."
• An audio tour, as at a museum. You could use a popup window that narrates (audibly) pages as you browse. This could also be understood as the virtual director's commentary.
• Library stacks. A mighty AI engine would be used to categorize websites as you view them. While their links would come into play, the sites in "stacks" next to one another would be by whatever organizing principle you wanted to see. Similar to the division of search results on Clusty. An adjustable range would allow for a minimum of one website on each side, up to many websites. Perhaps you could even click a button to close the current website and just display the surrounding stack. Here's what I'm imagining:
  
  View image in big pop-up

Dylan

As in: Media

So I've been listening to Dylan quite a bit in the past two years (as opposed to before that, when I only had his acoustic greatest hits). As I cycle through the five albums I have, "Motorpsycho Nightmare" consistently pops up as a favorite. Here are some lyrics:

There stood Rita
Lookin' just like Tony Perkins.
She said, "Would you like to take a shower?
I'll show you up to the door."
I said, "Oh, no! no!
I've been through this before."
I knew I had to split
But I didn't know how,
When she said,
"Would you like to take that shower, now?"

Well, I couldn't leave
Unless the old man chased me out,
'Cause I'd already promised
That I'd milk his cows.
I had to say something
To strike him very weird,
So I yelled out,
"I like Fidel Castro and his beard."
Rita looked offended
But she got out of the way,
As he came charging down the stairs
Sayin', "What's that I heard you say?"

I said, "I like Fidel Castro,
I think you heard me right,"
And ducked as he swung
At me with all his might.
Rita mumbled something
'Bout her mother on the hill,
As his fist hit the icebox,
He said he's going to kill me
If I don't get out the door
In two seconds flat,
"You unpatriotic,
Rotten doctor Commie rat."

Well, he threw a Reader's Digest
At my head and I did run,

It's the mix of Americana that I like in this song. Evoking Psycho, the classic "farmer's daughter and the traveling salesman" jokes, the fact that the farmer would be rabidly anti-communist, and that he throws a Reader's Digest. He also says things like "ten thousand miles today I drove."

Quotables

As in: Media

Two enjoyable moments from my media-viewing yesterday:

1. Jack, lamenting about Miles' failure to publish his novel thus far in Sideways:
   "F— the New York publishers, Miles. Publish it on your own. Hell, I'll chip in. Just get it out there, get it reviewed, get it in libraries. Let the public decide."
   My new motto for the web.
2. From the sorely under-watched Veronica Mars:
   Wallace: Man, this is boring. I thought this private eye stuff was all about shooting bad guys and making out with sexy widows.
   Veronica: The sexy widows come later.

Skepticism

As in: Composition , Media , Reading

The other day, I had a long chat with a colleague about electracy, new media, and many other things. I described my theory about Future Shock (at the bottom of the page), and she agreed; she also added that in her experience, it was with generation X that students started being consistently skeptical of not only texts, but symbols, explanations, and conversations about those texts. This is not to say that they were not skeptical before, but rather that a sea change had occurred in which many more were skeptical now than were in the years before the Gen Xers hit college.

Then I read this in Avatars of the Word:

The underlying insight of this strategy [of "teaching the arguments of the field"] is that ours is already a culture permeated by irony. Skepticism about received messages is rampant, leaving any system that depends on transmitting those messages vulnerable. To use the space of the classroom to teach both the message and the critical reception and evaluation of the message is to create an opportunity to reach students at multiple levels. (119).

I'm not sure what I want to do with that passage, but I found the synchronicity pleasing.

More How to Lie with Maps

As in: Composition , Hypertext , Media , Reading

I just finished Mark Monmonier's book. It's great. There's one passage that strikes to the core of my being with a glowing, cartographic, nerdly joy. He writes:

...map publishers have been known to deliberately falsify their maps by adding "trap streets." As deterrents to the theft of copyright-protected information, trap streets are usually placed subtly, in out-of-way locations unlikely to confuse or antagonize map users.(51)

It seems to me that the "trap street" is a fantastic opportunity for hypertext writers. While people working for "transparency" and "clarity" certainly wouldn't want trap streets cluttering up their "site maps," I think hypertext authors interesting in the more playful aspects of the web could use "deliberately falsified" elements deliciously.

When trying to write using hypertext to be more socially active or aware, this passage seems particularly apt:

By omitting politically threatening or aesthetically unattractive aspects of geographic reality, and by focusing on the interests of civil engineers, geologists, public administrators, and land developers, our topographic "base maps" are hardly basic to the concerns of public health and safety officials, social workers, and citizens rightfully concerned about the well-being of themselves and others. In this sense, cartographic silences are indeed a form of geographic disinformation(122).

Perhaps an offshoot of adbusters could be mapbusters--people dedicated to the cartographic education and elucidation of social problems often ignored in maps.

Filmed Theater

As in: Media

For a month or two now, I've been greedily eyeing an ad for One Man Star Wars which I placed on my fridge. When I read Clancy's post about Point Break LIVE!, it reminded me of this play I will not be able to see. I'm fascinated by the remediation of cinema to the stage. We've seen it a lot in the last few years--The Producers and The Graduate both spring to mind as recent adaptations.

For we film scholars, it's particularly interesting given film's early history of being the tagalong to theater's cool older brother. Or, as Bazin put it in "Theater and Cinema—Part One":

The heresy of filmed theater is rooted in an ambivalent complex that cinema has about the theater. It is an inferiority complex in the presence of an older and more literary art, for which the cinema proceeds to overcompensate by the "superiority" of its technique--which in turn is mistaken for an aesthetic superiority. (What is Cinema? Vol 1 87)

Now the ship has turned. Given cinema's huge box office revenues, can we explain theater's turn to cinema as merely monetary? Or could it be that remediation is in full swing? Perhaps the cynic might say that we bread-and-circuses public (close your mouth, dear reader—I embrace the silliness of someone quoting Bazin putting himself in that category) just like seeing stories we already know in new forms?

This post also reminds me of the current relationship between cinema and video games. Despite the early Atari E.T. debacle, video games have been adapting movies for 25 years or so. At present, both media are feeding on one another—successful games might yield a movie, and any action or children's movie with a large budget will certainly yield a spinoff game. Then there are games like Half-Life 2, which work almost like a movie you play.

How can we start to use these remediations? We've seen MOO adaptations of textual spaces, but what else can we do--Flash games? Websites? (Assignment: make a web site adaptation of a favorite movie as a way to motivate a critical conversation about an issue in your community. Use the reader's nostalgia and knowledge of the text to pull them in and discuss the issue.)

One last thing: you may be wondering why I have not seen One Man Star Wars. I spent my theater money for the last few months on tickets to Spamalot!

Dickens rolls over

As in: Media

So I watched Karrol's Christmas last night, an amusing (if schmaltzy) re-telling of the Dickens that asks "what if the ghosts visted the wrong guy?"

Two things amused me about the movie.
1. When the main character and the Scrooge character appear and then disappear at the original nativity, one of the wise men sees them and is bewildered. "I've gotta lay off the Myrrh." Drug jokes about the three wise men rock!
2. When "Jacob Marley" comes to visit the main character, he's a cheery Jamaican guy with dreadlocks (at the left side of the picture). The film suggests that he's related to Bob Marley, who was one of the "original" Marley's descendants. Dickens' Marley apparently had a son who went on a trip to Jamaica.

Miracle on 34th Street

As in: Media

Watched my favorite holiday movie again last night. Things that struck me this time:

• "Madam! I'm not in the habit of substituting for spurious Santa Clauses."


• It sucks that Mrs. Walker makes Cleo work on Thanksgiving: what does Cleo's family do? And why don't we use shoelaces to tie up turkeys anymore?


• "I speak French, but that doesn't make me Joan of Arc!"


• Fred Gailey cooks. What an awesome modern guy.


• Macy's banner over Kris' chair says "santa claus" instead of "Santa Claus."

Music, serendipity

As in: Media , Thoughts from the "L"

1. As the train pulled into the Clark and Lake station yesterday morning, I was pulled out of my reading-trance by someone's earphones. The music was just loud enough that I could make it out; the song blended the speedy first notes of "Chorus of the Bells" with a hip-hop rhythm that I found pretty fascinating. The sounds blended pretty well. Glancing to see who was listening to the music, I realized that it was not, as I'd thought, a clever hip-hop Christmas song, but rather two separate passengers, each listening to his own music.

My musical interlude brought to the surface my PCA proposal for this Spring. The idea of randomness producing interesting/useful meanings seems like a key way to understand electronic media and the logic of the internet.

2. I'm listening to Crash Test Dummies' Give Yourself a Hand this week. It took me a while to like this album, in part because it's different than CTD's other albums. I've come to appreciate the album for its different approach to lyrics, which seem to be more about how they sound than what they say. Reminds me of Soul Coughing.

My favorite line is from "A Cigarette Is All You Get" Brad Roberts growls:

I want to listen to EL-VIS
I want to shake my PEL-VIS

Reminds me of Ulmer's Internet Invention and of Jeff Rice.

Kress and Semiotics

As in: Composition , Media , Reading

From Literacy in the New Media Age:

It is no longer responsible to let children experience school without basing schooling on an understanding of the shift from competent performance to design as the foundational fact of contemporary social and economic life.(37)

Give the governor a 'harrumph!' When Kress writes passages like this, my inner choir he's preaching to stands up and cheers. He supports this statement with many of the same kinds of arguments I've heard elsewhere. His particular take is that the move from page to screen accompanies/affords a move from alphabetic writing (which is based on speech in its temporal glory) to design-as-writing (based on image). Of course, these are useful formulations of ideas I already like.

However:

...[S]ings are always meaningful conjunctions of signifiers and signifieds; it means that we can look at the signifiers and make hypotheses about what they might be signifying in any one instance, because we know that the form chosen was the most apt expression of that which was to be signified. . . . It entails that all aspects of form are meaningful, and that all aspects of form must be read with equal care: nothing can be disregarded.(44)

I can see why this distinction is useful/necessary for an image-based writing system, but I get stuck making the leap (back?) to speech. Pierce's notion that the sign is arbitrary reigns so strongly in the semiotics I'm familiar with that I can't get my head around the notion that spoken signs are significant in their form. A colleague suggested that Kress doesn't refer here to the sign in its inception, but its use at a given time--when I say tree, it's the most apt way to express 'tree' in a given situation. That helps, but I still don't see why "all aspects of form are meaningful" in that situation. How does the single syllable become meaningful in itself? Is there something in the combination of 'tr' and a long 'e' that embodies 'tree-ness?'