Critical Themes in Media Studies Conference

Anyone living in New York–come to the Critical Themes in Media Studies Conference this Saturday at The New School! The conference, in case the image above is too small to read, takes place this Saturday, April 4th from 10 am to 8 pm at 66 W. 12th Street in Manhattan and is free and open to the public. It will kick off at 10 am with a keynote address by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! and will continue through the afternoon with a variety of panels involving themes in media studies. For more information and a full list of the presenters, visit the conference’s website here.

I’m on the planning committee for the conference and we’re hoping for good turnout on Saturday–hope to see you there!

Stalker Story Soundscape

So yeah, sorry….for those of you who were holding your breath, you’ve probably long since passed out. To everyone else (aka, my parents), my sincerest apologies. But really, what/who doesn’t lapse a bit in mid-March?

Unfortunately, this lapse may continue into the beginning of April, since my life is a blur of perpetual work right now and I have numerous large assignments due in the next few weeks that I’m trying to juggle. 

But in the meantime, here is a new post on my Concepts class blog which contains a link to a very rough sound assignment I did in conjunction with the story I wrote of the class several weeks ago. This assignment was to create a sonic representation or a soundtrack for that story. Due to lack of good equipment, good sound editing software, and more or less any skill, the quality leaves much to be desired, but it’s a first attempt so I suppose it can only get better from here. I also posted an excerpt of the part of the recording I considered most successful. Neither is very long–the full version is just over three minutes, and the excerpt is just over one minute.

Just My Image-ination

Here’s a silly, slightly creepy little story I wrote for an assignment for my Media Practices: Concepts class. The assignment was to reverse-engineer a narrative–to take six of the photos from the photography assignment and create a story around them, so that they become the illustrations, in a sense, for the narrative. Well, since most of my photos were simple, straightforward portraits or more abstract shots with a stalkerish quality, I decided to go with the latter category and wrote an abstract story about a stalker. Maybe if I’d done any creative writing since high school, this would be better, but it is what it is.

Back To The Future

Here is a synopsis, analysis and personal response to the 1962 short French film, La Jetee, which I wrote for my Media Practices: Concepts class. Sorry I haven’t posted a lot of non-class-related stuff of late–things are quite hectic right now and promise to be for several more weeks at least, but I’ll do what I can, when I can.

If you’d like to watch the film before reading my response, you can find it here.

Synopsis:

In La Jetee, an unnamed man has a very strong memory of his boyhood involving a glimpse of a woman on the end of the main pier at Orly airport in Paris and a man falling to his death—this turns out to be the precipitating event which sets his future course and actions. After Paris is destroyed in a global World War III apocalypse and people are forced underground, he is selected as a new guinea pig by those responsible for the destruction, in the attempt to secure help from the past or future in order to save the human race from its current state of doom. The experimenters work on the protagonist, stripping away his present and sending him into his past, beginning from his strong memory of the Orly pier. On the tenth day he begins to reach images from the past. On the sixteenth day, he finally arrives back on the Orly pier. In returning to this memory, he is able to find the woman again and on the thirtieth day they meet and he is sure they are meant to be together—along with the transformative childhood memory, this becomes a precipitating event, motivating the protagonist throughout the rest of the story. The woman’s motivations are unclear, though she appears to embrace their sporadic encounters and to feel the same connection as he does. Together they travel to various points in the past— in a garden, sleeping in the sun, and later wandering (on the fiftieth day) through a museum of his memories. He realizes she is dead and that they can only be together if he stays in the past with her. But, instead the men who are conducting the experiment decide he is ready to be sent to the future. In the future, Paris is rebuilt and he convinces the leaders of this future world to give him the means of saving humanity—he returns to the present and the experimenters have exhausted their need for him. He waits to be executed but the men from the future come to find him and bring him to the future—he opts instead to return to the past to be with the woman. Back on the pier at Orly he runs towards the woman, but recognizes a man who has trailed him from the present and realizes there is no way to escape the framework of time—in the climactic final moment, he realizes that the childhood memory of the man falling to his death was, in fact, a prescient glimpse of the moment of his own death.

Throughout the story, the protagonist moves numerous times back and forth fluidly between the past, present, and future. The story is grounded in the present of post-apocalyptic underground Paris, with traveling occurring backward and forward from this point. The final climactic moment occurs in the past, which, however, is in some sense the farthest point in the future, since it proves to be the final moment of the protagonist’s life.

Response:

I found La Jetee powerful, captivating, and ultimately somewhat unsettling. While I haven’t seen the Terry Gilliam film, Twelve Monkeys, which was supposedly inspired by the story and concept of La Jetee, I was overwhelmingly reminded of the work of Michel Gondry, particularly his 2004 film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, while watching. The scenes in that film which feature the two protagonists, played by Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, escaping into their minds, hiding, literally, among their memories in the attempt to save their history together and prevent it from being erased, while not representing the exact same plot line seemed to deal with similar themes and conflicts and present a similarly fluid idea of the chronology of time and the nature of memory in relation to space and human beings. This rupturing of the commonly understood boundaries of time and space, centered around the desperate attempts of the protagonists to stay together and be together, venturing through much the same kind of fragmentary world, their own museum of memories, I found deeply reminiscent of La Jetee.

The use of sequential still images rather than uninterrupted film was very effective in creating the kind of dystopian feeling of fractured reality that was reflected in the facts of the story as it unfolded. It gave the film an episodic feel, as if grasped from snatches of memory, flickering in and out of reality, and helped to enhance the disrupted and disturbing sense of moving back and forth in time, not being anchored in any one state of reality for very long. It also helped to build a sense of drama. I keep thinking back to what Herbert Zettl said about the way in which sometimes very blown out, black and white photographs draw the viewer in more emotionally than more “realistic” photographs where more visual information is present because they invite or force the viewer to fill in what is missing, to invest themselves more emotionally and intellectually in the image in order to fully constitute it. It’s an idea I’m very interested by and one I’m interested in working with in my own work in the future, and it seems to me that this accounted for some of the emotional, visual power of La Jetee.

Drop Dead Gorgeous

Here’s just a quick link to a review/analysis I wrote of “Weird Beauty”, an exhibition of modern fashion photography currently on display at the International Center for Photography. While I can appreciate the aesthetic qualities of these images and find some of them truly amazing and, indeed elevating, I do think, as I’ve discussed before, that all too often, the fashion industry and the imagery that represents it couch both masochism and sadism toward the female body, justify the degradation and destruction of it in various capacities, as merely artistic expression and exploration. While I believe true exploration and discovery through art, even or especially when it explores and depicts extremely taboo or troubling subject matter, is extremely valuable and important and has broader implications for society as a whole, I often question whether that is really what is going on in some of these images, whether any higher ideas are really being explored or whether the primary goal is merely to be provocative for provocation’s sake with the aim of attracting attention and selling products. Anyway, some of what I’ve written in my class posting on this exhibit overlaps with previous posts I’ve written on this blog, but I expand upon these ideas within the specific context of these images.

Into The Music

So, I am not the biggest fan of Jimmy Fallon (or even the tiniest bit of one, actually), but I tuned in to the end of his first show as host of Late Night on Monday night to catch a performance by my favorite musician, and as far as I’m concerned one of the greatest musicians possibly ever, Van Morrison. Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be any videos of just Morrison’s excellent performance, so below is Hulu’s video of the entire show–if you fast forward to around the 35 or 36 minute mark (the easiest way to do so is to click on the last white dot on the right in the bar at the bottom of the screen), it should cue you up just before the performance. Morrison recently released a live recording of his iconic album Astral Weeks and on this show he performs the song “Sweet Thing” from that album–the man is well into his mid sixties and still sounds as incredible as ever. Okay, so the man is a little crazy (I like to call it “eccentric genius”) and a lot cranky, but somehow that only enhances his charm. I’ll spare you long, rambling rhapsodizing on his genius and just recommend you watch this performance, then dig into his catalogue beyond the well known Astral Weeks and prepare to become a believer, if you aren’t one already.

more about “Into The Music“, posted with vodpod

Comedy’s Nude Legends

Hill, Rogen, and Segel: never-nudes?

 

Representing something of an intersection between my recent post on ethics in photography and  other previous posts on gender inequality and portrayals of women in the media, Jezebel takes on the recent Vanity Fair photograph spoofing a 2006 cover image of Keira Knightly and Scarlett Johannsen draped naked around the (clothed) designer, Tom Ford. The send-up is featured in an article entitled “Comedy’s New Legends” and, like the original, was photographed by iconic photographer Annie Leibowitz. It portrays comedy pals Seth Rogen, Jason Segel and Jonah Hill sprawled in flesh toned body suits, draped around a clothed Paul Rudd. The first time I saw the cover, I just thought, “Well, that’s not particularly funny,” but something about it rubbed me a little bit the wrong way as I thought about it, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on what. Well, Jezebel has compiled excerpts from a bunch of different reactions to the image, from blogs like Pandagon, Salon and others which have helped me to articulate what it is that bothered me–the fact that the entire premise of the joke, the entire reason the image is ridiculous is that nudity in the context of sexual objectification is being reified as the domain of women, something that for a group of men to participate in is patently ridiculous, laughable. I realize that for some this may seem to read to much into the image, and I don’t think it was probably premeditated to mean anything of the sort, but there are imbedded assumptions which form the basis of the joke. As Melissa McEwan at feminist blog Shakesville, quoted on Jezebel, puts it:

“Even when women do what they’re meant to do by the fucked-up standards of The Patriarchy-get naked and submit themselves for public objectification-they’re going to get mocked for doing it. Because, even though we’re ostensibly laughing at the Judd Apatow Boyz for their uproarious send-up of a sexy female-oriented VF cover, implicit in that laughter is a condemnation and marginalization of the female-oriented cover: See how silly it is when a man does it?Ho ho ho.”

It is silly to see these men trying to assume the roles of sex objects, the photo implies, because they are men, and therefore despite imperfect bodies, they have been able to become famous and popular through their bodies of work (pun intended), rather than their physical appearances. Meanwhile, talented female comedians like Tina Fey (who has lost a significant amount of weight as  her fame has grown and increasingly been forced into the molds of idealized beauty and sexual desirability, photographed for Vanity Fair and other magazines in a progressively more revealing succession of ensembles) are expected to meet certain standards of attractiveness in order to be palatable and in order for their talent to be given a platform.

Tina Fey, from the January 2009 issue of Vanity Fair

Both Jezebel and Mary Elizabeth Williams of Salon discuss the complicity of Annie Leibowitz in the production of this and other questionable images. As Williams puts it:

“That this drivel is being peddled by the same woman who shot one of the most famous male nude photos ever — the beautiful, vulnerable image of John Lennon curled up against Yoko Ono for Rolling Stone, just makes the whole business all the more cynical and pitiful.”

Do I think that within the realm of media imagery there are far more egregious examples of sexism? Sure. Does that mean it’s petty or not worth it to discuss this example? Certainly not. In fact, sometimes the examples which are less egregious are those which are harder to recognize and therefore too often do not get discussed. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, too, I think that sexism couched in comedy is often seen as out of reach of cultural criticism, met with retorts that amount to “calm down, can’t people just take a joke?” or “but we were just kidding!” However, I believe comedy is still an area in which sexism (and racism–the New York Post’s chimp cartoon, anyone?) is very much alive and well. The very fact that the cover story of the issue of Vanity Fair in which this photograph appears, entitled ” Comedy’s New Legends” features only men on the cover and almost entirely men in the article is very telling. And then, of course, there are Christopher Hitchens’ disgustingly misogynistic pieces (published, again, by Vanity Fair), such as the one entitled “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” a piece which was “rebutted” by another Vanity Fair cover story, this one entitled “Who Says Women Aren’t Funny?”, which, frankly, seemed more intent on answering the question “Who Says Women Comedians Aren’t Hot And Sexy?”, what with its accompanying photo shoot, which featured female comedians like Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Kristen Wiig and others making like Paris Hilton and Lindsey Lohan. With splayed legs, lots of bare skin, smoky eye makeup, and amped up hair, the photos as a whole were more straightforward imitation than camp, and seemed aimed at putting these women on display as sexual objects in much the same way as the starlets they were imitating. Less conventionally attractive SNL comedian Cheri Oteri was notably absent from the photos and later confirmed that she had not been invited to participate in the shoot.

Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, and Tina Fey in the April 2008 issue of Vanity Fair

What I am getting at is the fact that this new photo comes with a larger context, one which only bolsters and strengthens the critiques of Jezebel, Salon, and others.