Todd Gitlin: Eight Strategies We Use to Navigate the Ceaseless Flood of Media

The Fan develops a visceral, emotional attachment to certain genres or celebrities. This attachment requires a choice (I'll pay attention to New Wave and ignore folk music), and it leads to membership in a community of connoisseurs, or believers.

Where the fan works by affirmation, the Content Critic works by aversion. He is on the lookout for all of the crappy songs and biased news, all the ways in which the media fail politically and aesthetically. If the content of the media could somehow be improved, the world would too.

The Paranoid believes that They are programming Us. Television (the usual culprit) is an addiction, a hypnotic agent. If we are at a loss, drifting or suffering, it must be because They--the Government, the Liberal Media, the Media Monopoly, the Zionist Occupation Government--are pushing the buttons. Though it is extreme, paranoia is a warped version of legitimate fear.

The Exhibitionist glories in media exposure--the cast of MTV's The Real World, the painted spectators holding NBC signs at sports events, those who broadcast their intimate lives via 24/7 webcam. Commanding the attention of spectators, the exhibitionist achieves some exemption from the anonymity of the torrent, some power apparently without risk. But because this power is risk-free, it is trivial.

The Ironist knows that media are nothing but weightless contrivances, so she surfs with ease and without committment, amused and aamused to be amused. She can enjoy the spectacle on two levels--as a faux-naive fan (who always liked the smile of that faded star) and as a knowing insider (who knows that the faded star started touring again because she was broke). The media have adopted, or co-opted, the ironist's style, with the glorification of kitsch and ads that wink knowingly while they continue to pitch.

The Culture Jammer, like the critic, believes that images are power. The difference is that he will directly attack those images, defacing or refacing them. In order to redistribute power he's an active transmitter rather than a passive receiver. Whether he's hacking into a corporate site or unfurling anti-consumer banners in the Mall of America, offense has become the jammer's defense.

The Secessionist knows that media steal our time, and therefore our lives and human capacities. Because the media are beyond reform, she does not bother to displace, jam, supplement, or critique them. She rations television, planning one day to get rid of it, and abstains from cell phones and e-mail whenever possible. She knows how the media can seduce if you let your guard down.

Because the media are politically pacifying, life-throttling, mind-sapping, even physically damaging, the Abolitionist refuses to accept their existence as a good argument for their continued existence. Only one valid question about the media torrent remains: How do you launch the revolution to dry it up?

(Source for this is Adbusters July/August 2002)

Watching the Directors: Terry Gilliam

Terry Gilliam
Watching the Directors



Terry Gilliam has an identifiable aesthetic and a constant thematic affection that floats through all his movies - films like Brazil, 12 Monkeys and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. To discuss such a weighty filmmaker, we are joined by Duke Senter from the Degree of Separation podcast and veteran of the Tarantino and Kubrick episodes. So sit back and enjoy the mammoth episode with an extra 30 minutes of discussion that the studio wanted to cut and mangle, just like they did with Baron Munchausen.

To Listen to the Episode

David Brin: "Star Wars" despots vs. "Star Trek" populists

(From way back in 1999, but I still think Brin's response to Lucas' mythos is relevant to our current situation.)

"Star Wars" despots vs. "Star Trek" populists: Why is George Lucas peddling an elitist, anti-democratic agenda under the guise of escapist fun?
By David Brin
Salon



Well, I boycotted "Episode I: The Phantom Menace" -- for an entire week.

Why? What's to boycott? Isn't "Star Wars" good old fashioned sci-fi? Harmless fun? Some people call it "eye candy" -- a chance to drop back into childhood and punt your adult cares away for two hours, dwelling in a lavish universe where good and evil are vividly drawn, without all the inconvenient counterpoint distinctions that clutter daily life.

Got a problem? Cleave it with a light saber! Wouldn't you love -- just once in your life -- to dive a fast little ship into your worst enemy's stronghold and set off a chain reaction, blowing up the whole megillah from within its rotten core while you streak away to safety at the speed of light? (It's such a nifty notion that it happens in three out of four "Star Wars" flicks.)

Anyway, I make a good living writing science-fiction novels and movies. So "Star Wars" ought to be a great busman's holiday, right?

One of the problems with so-called light entertainment today is that somehow, amid all the gaudy special effects, people tend to lose track of simple things, like story and meaning. They stop noticing the moral lessons the director is trying to push. Yet these things matter.

By now it's grown clear that George Lucas has an agenda, one that he takes very seriously. After four "Star Wars" films, alarm bells should have gone off, even among those who don't look for morals in movies. When the chief feature distinguishing "good" from "evil" is how pretty the characters are, it's a clue that maybe the whole saga deserves a second look.

Just what bill of goods are we being sold, between the frames?

* Elites have an inherent right to arbitrary rule; common citizens needn't be consulted. They may only choose which elite to follow.

* "Good" elites should act on their subjective whims, without evidence, argument or accountability.

* Any amount of sin can be forgiven if you are important enough.

* True leaders are born. It's genetic. The right to rule is inherited.

* Justified human emotions can turn a good person evil.

That is just the beginning of a long list of "moral" lessons relentlessly pushed by "Star Wars." Lessons that starkly differentiate this saga from others that seem superficially similar, like "Star Trek." (We'll take a much closer look at some stark divergences between these two sci-fi universes below.)

Above all, I never cared for the whole Nietzschian Ubermensch thing: the notion -- pervading a great many myths and legends -- that a good yarn has to be about demigods who are bigger, badder and better than normal folk by several orders of magnitude. It's an ancient storytelling tradition based on abiding contempt for the masses -- one that I find odious in the works of A.E. Van Vogt, E.E. Smith, L. Ron Hubbard and wherever you witness slanlike super-beings deciding the fate of billions without ever pausing to consider their wishes.

Wow, you say. If I feel that strongly about this, why just a week-long boycott? Why see the latest "Star Wars" film at all?

To Read the Rest of the Essay

This Brave Nation: Naomi Klein and Tom Hayden

Naomi Klein and Tom Hayden
This Brave Nation



Author, Activist and Former California State Senator Tom Hayden talks in depth with the author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein, about the state of the fourth branch of government: journalists. Both Hayden and Klein became serious journalists in college, and it was during that time that both experienced their defining moment. When Tom Hayden interviewed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr at the 1960 DNC in Los Angeles, he asked questions while imagining the headline, "Tom Hayden Interviews MLK," but by the time he wrote the article he knew there were more important things in the world than personal glory. Naomi Klein rebelled from her liberal, feminist mother until Mark Lepine gunned down fourteen women in what became known as the Montreal Massacre. It was then she realized people were dying for the beliefs her mother fought for, and that realization awakened the activist within her. After both events, Hayden and Klein dedicated their lives to telling the truth about the world, and doing everything in their power to not use subjects like "they," but use "we" instead. It is that distinction that defines their journalism to this day.



To Watch the Video

Watch the previous episodes:

Carl Pope and Van Jones

In any other profession, Carl Pope might be considered a "company man." He has worked loyally and tirelessly in the name of the Sierra Club for thirty years, running the organization – the largest of its kind in the country – since 1992. Van Jones has founded several organizations within the last decade, including The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and Green For All. They both live in the Bay Area. They both care intensely about saving the environment. The thing is, they use very distinct methods, although the lines differentiating those methods are blurring as we race further into the 21st century. From the environment to the economy, from old fashioned door-to-door fliers to streaming internet video, Pope and Jones discuss the myriad elements effecting our lives today and the many possible solutions that are nearly within reach.

Bonnie Raitt and Delores Huerta

Bonnie Raitt: legendary musician, feminist, activist. Dolores Huerta: legendary organizer, feminist, activist. Two women who both achieved great successes in their fields and who are not stopping anytime soon. But while one was marching on the streets for migrant laborers, the other was headlining concerts bringing attention to the risks of nuclear energy. Two distinctly different women who chose such opposite paths and came from radically different backgrounds, but both chose to spend their lives trying to make the world a better place for all of us. In this conversation, Raitt and Huerta talk about their passions, their regrets, their fears, and most of all their dreams for future generations.

Anthony Romero and Ava Lowery

It's hard to call someone younger than 18 years old a "legend," but Ava Lowery is just that in progressive circles. She created a website at fourteen where she made videos railing against the war. Today, her site, PeaceTakesCourage.com, gets nearly two million hits per month. And she doesn't live in a liberal hotbed like San Francisco or New York, rather in a small town in Alabama. Anthony Romero is the son of a proud Puerto Rican who worked hard to support his family while waiting tables. Anthony grew up to not only be the first in his family to go to college, but to become the Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, and someone we thought Ava should have on her cell phone speed dial. Just in case. Together they discuss the legal quagmire the country has become since 9/11, among other quagmires created by George W. Bush and his Administration.

Pete Seeger and Majora Carter

In a Lower Manhattan apartment, one of the greatest living musicians and activists sat down with one of the country's newest great leaders. Pete Seeger, with a list of awards and honors longer than the neck on his famed banjo, still works tirelessly at 88 years of age. He spoke with Majora Carter, the young and indefatigable founder of Sustainable South Bronx, an organization that is re-shaping the neighborhood of her youth through pioneering green-collar economic development projects, about the environmental work he has worked at for more than forty years. And while he's at it, he also finds time to sing a couple songs, demanding the film crew sing along, because it's not nearly as much fun singing to someone as it is singing with someone.

CFP: Exploding Genre (Deadline: December 20th, 2008)

CFP: Exploding Genre

Call for Papers
Exploding Genre
Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture
Deadline: 20th December 2008
Submission Guidelines

Genre has undergone radical transformations since the advent of a media society, in which popular texts are not so much literary but visual. Narrative studies of genre, such as John Cawelti's Six-Gun Mystique (1970) and Darko Suvin's Metamorphoses of Science-Fiction (1979), were quickly overturned by an increasing interest in cinematic, televisual, visual and digital textualities. Studies of different and interrelated media superceded the structuralist interest in narrative. Increasingly generic identity was conceived of as modal, or adaptable between media, consumed and produced by differently situated groups of readers, cultures and audiences.

Genre became differentiated from within itself, no longer identical but constituted at the interface of various media and readers. It was assembled from other genres, a combination of overlapping, discontinuous tropes that played ironically with its own established forms. Postmodernism had broken with both the neo-classicism of the New Criticism and with a historically minded structuralism to produce a new critical view of genre, one that fostered the emergence of hybrid and self-conscious fictions between media. Its readers were no longer seen as isolated but, in their engagement with multiple practices of interpretation, were recognized in distinct communities. Studies like Janice Radway's Reading the Romance: Women, Romance and Popular Fiction (1991) and Henry Jenkins' Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (1992) explored new ways of looking at popular texts within their contexts.

It is with a view to addressing these changes that this issue of Reconstruction will investigate the function of genre in theory and fictions alike. Papers are sought that address the fragmented state of genre theory, spread as it is across studies of new and old media, fan and reading communities, narrative and visual theory. We are interested in the function of genre in different medias, such as comics and games. Why has genre persisted in this age of multi-modal expressions? What makes it tick, travel across media, to return and coalesce in new and old forms of narrative, visuality and intertextuality?

We envisage papers covering a variety of theoretical / discursive positions, including:
- feminist theory
- queer theory
- postcolonial theory
- convergent/transformative media
- new cultural histories
- ludology

Please send completed essays, multimedial performances, etc. to Helen Merrick and Darren Jorgensen at exp.genre_at_gmail.com by 20th December, 2008. We are happy to consider abstracts and proposals prior to this date. Publication is expected in the third quarter of 2009.

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture (ISSN: 1547-4348) is an innovative online cultural studies journal dedicated to fostering an intellectual community composed of scholars and their audience, granting them all the ability to share thoughts and opinions on the most important and influential work in contemporary interdisciplinary studies. Reconstruction publishes one open issue and three themed issues quarterly. Reconstruction is indexed in the MLA International Bibliography.

Studio 360: The Big Gondry

The Big Gondry
Studio 360 (WNYC: New York)
Host: Kurt Andersen



Inspired by his [recent] film "Be Kind Rewind," director Michel Gondry created a special exhibit of movie sets at the Deitch Projects art gallery in New York, where people can walk in and make their own movies. So Studio 360's Michele Siegel gathered her co-workers to remake The Coen brothers cult hit, "The Big Lebowski" -- starring Kurt in the title role.

To Listen to the Episode

Every Third Bite (short film)

The Independent



Link for the Video

Part of Documentary 2.0: Making Media That Matters

NOW on PBS: Torture Tactics--Interview with Alex Gibney

Torture Tactics: Interview with Alex Gibney
Host: David Branccacio
NOW (PBS)



This year's Oscar-winning feature documentary, "Taxi to the Dark Side," tells the story of an innocent Afghan taxi driver who died while being interrogated and tortured by U.S. soldiers. NOW interviews the film's director, Alex Gibney, about torture practices of the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantánamo Bay, and how the issue is playing out in the presidential race. At the intersection of human rights, civil liberties, and national security, how should America respond?

To Listen/Watch the Episode

More on Taxi to the Dark Side:

Bluegrass Film Society Archive

10th Anniversary Screening of 100 Proof

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I would like to invite you to the re-release premiere of the independent film 100 PROOF, by George Maranville and Jeremy Horton. Please take a look at the write-up at the link below.

Herald-Leader Article

I'll see you at the Kentucky Theater tomorrow night.

THURSDAY JUNE 26
5:30 - 7:30 AND 9:30 showings

All the best,

Arthur Rouse
BCTC Filmmaking Certificate Program
Kentucky Film Lab

Dana Stevens: A Movie Only a Spartan Could Love

(From when it was originally released. Courtesy of Stephen Groening.)

A Movie Only a Spartan Could Love: The battle epic 300.
by Dana Stevens
Slate



If 300, the new battle epic based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, had been made in Germany in the mid-1930s, it would be studied today alongside The Eternal Jew as a textbook example of how race-baiting fantasy and nationalist myth can serve as an incitement to total war. Since it's a product of the post-ideological, post-Xbox 21st century, 300 will instead be talked about as a technical achievement, the next blip on the increasingly blurry line between movies and video games.

To Read the Rest of the Review

Music/Art/Film/Wine Festival at Talon Winery this Weekend--FREE!!!

(I arranged the music and I'm excited to see these bands! Come on out--head south on Tates Creek Rd out of the city and you will run into the Talon Winery. Thanks to the fine folks at Talon who are allowing us to hold this event on their site!!!--Michael Benton)

Saturday, June 14th 11:00-7:00 pm
Sunday, June 15th 12:00-5:00 pm
Talon Winery and Vineyards
7086 Tates Creek Road, Lexington

FREE ADMISSION

-Artist Vendor Sales
-Musical Performances
-Theatrical Performances
-Short Film Viewings
-Children’s Art Activities
- Wine Tastings and Wine and Beer Sales
- Food Vendors

Sponsored by Nurses Registry and BCTC Arts on Campus Committee

Bring your family and friends (and a lawn chair) and enjoy the festival at Talon’s beautiful grounds.



Musical schedule:
Saturday:
5-6 PM: Argo Lynn
4-5 PM: What Happened When
3-4 PM: Wes Houp (Delta Blues)
2-3 PM: Rainjunkies
1-2PM: Paul Felice
12-1PM: BCTC Quartet

Sunday:
3-4 PM: For Stella
2-3 PM: Jazzmerized (Jazz )
1-2 PM: Skinny Devil Circus
12-1 PM: Alien Blue

Theatre performance Saturday and short film showing on Saturday and Sunday in the house.



Children’s activities include the following
-Free painting their own design on a fence plank (these to be displayed at the winery grounds after the festival)
-Broom making for children to take home ($3.00 supply costs)


Hope to see you there!

Actors Guild of Lexington Presents Shakespeare at Equus Run with a production of William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, June 12-28, 2008

(Passing on an announcement for colleagues and friends.)

The Merry Wives of Windsor



Actors Guild of Lexington and Equus Run Vineyard will launch season 2 of Actors Guild of Lexington Presents Shakespeare at Equus Run with a production of William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, June 12-28, 2008 at beautiful Equus Run Vineyards in Midway, Kentucky. The Merry Wives of Windsor is being directed by Centre College theatre professor and Equus Run Artistic Director Anthony R. Haigh (director of last season’s hit production of Love’s Labour’s Lost) and will feature a stellar cast of some of Central Kentucky’s finest talent. Come see Shakespeare’s fattest of knights, Sir John Falstaff, as laughter reigns supreme and feminine wisdom triumphs over a jealous husband, confused lovers, and a web of merriment in this light-hearted comedy. For tickets and more information, please contact the LexArts box office at 859-225-0370 or email boxoffice@lexarts.org

Directed by Dr. Anthony R. Haigh
June 12th -June 28th at the Equus Run Vineyard in Midway, KY
Show begins at 7:00pm

TICKETS
Thursday & Friday Shows: Adult $15, Seniors & Students $10
Saturday Shows: Dinner & Show $25, Show only $18


This production features BCTC Theatre and Film Coordinator Tim Davis and BCTC Theatre students Kevin Greer and Zach Hightower.

Come one come all!!!!

Thanks,
Tim Davis

Reconstruction 8.2: Cartoons

(Our new issue is now available)

Reconstruction 8.2: Cartoons

Cartoons Issue Publication Announcement
Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture is proud to announce the publication of Vol. 8, No. 2, 2008: Cartoons, guest edited by Davin Heckman. Featured in the issue:

* Davin Heckman, "Suspended Animation: Meditations on the Time and Space of the Moving Image"

* Ngwarsungu Chiwengo, "Memory, Ideology, and Exile: J. M Kibushi's Mwana Mboka"

* Joanne Knowles, "The Simpsons and the Nuclear Family"

* Sean Chadwell, "Technological Determinism and the Poisoned Apple: The Case of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs"

* Paul Ward, "Animated realities: the animated film, documentary, realism"

* Laurie Cubbison, "Not just for children's television: Anime and the changing editing practices of American television networks"

* Matthew Diebler, "'Thank Goodness He-Man Showed Up': Hypermasculine Cultural Posturing and the Token Women of 80s Animated Action Teams"

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture (ISSN: 1547-4348) is an innovative cultural studies journal dedicated to fostering an intellectual community composed of scholars and their audience, granting them all the ability to share thoughts and opinions on the most important and influential work in contemporary interdisciplinary studies. Reconstruction publishes one open issue and three themed issues quarterly.

Reconstruction is indexed in the MLA International Bibliography.

Reconstruction continuously accepts submissions for its annual open issue, and is now accepting submissions for the following upcoming themed issues:

* The Avant-Garde as Critical Practice (August 15, 2008)

Please consult Submission Guidelines for all submission requirements, and Call for Papers for individual CFP requirements and guest editor contact information.

Reconstruction is always interested in proposals for future themed issues. If interested in proposing a themed issue, please consult FAQ for Prospective Guest Editors and contact Reconstruction Managing Editor for further information.

All submissions and submission queries should be written care of reconstruction.submissions_at_gmail.com.