zigzigger

Video Games Seminar

2012-01-24T10:54:00.002-06:00

In Spring 2012 I'm teaching a graduate seminar on video games. (That link takes you to my syllabus on the course blog.)

Juror #12

2012-01-13T21:25:00.001-06:00

I was a juror in a criminal case earlier this week. I went for jury duty with the idea of comparing the experience with representations of court proceedings in narrative media. I wasn't exactly hoping to be selected for a jury, but I also wasn't trying to avoid it. What follows are just my observations, and I hope I don't seem to be making them out to be more noteworthy than they are. My experience as a juror was probably pretty typical. The case wasn't dramatic, and the outcome wasn't surprising. I didn't learn a lot, or make friends, or find my life changed. But I'm sure I will find the experience to have been quite memorable.

There is a widespread notion that one should avoid being on a jury. The whole experience is supposed to be unpleasant, and you're supposed to prefer being rejected to being selected. But assuming the trial is short, I would now rather serve on a jury than sit around for two days waiting. Being a juror certainly isn't fun and it isn't really that interesting either, but sitting around waiting for two days is Kafkaesque tedium.

The biggest difference for me between representations of court cases in fictional (or for that matter non-fictional) narrative and my own experience is that storytellers work hard to make narratives interesting. It's no one's job to make a real court case interesting. For instance, on The Good Wife, there are many secondary characters whose eccentric traits are played for comedy, like Ana Gasteyer's Justice Lessner who insists that lawyers preface every statement with "In my opinion..." It's no surprise that real courtrooms are unlikely to contain such types. More importantly, the conflict and drama of a well-made story are constructed to engage an audience. There are high stakes and narrative twists and turns -- reversals, complications, enigmas, surprises. I didn't encounter any of this, but I did witness some banal, everyday suffering that engaged me emotionally.

The first day of jury duty begins at the entrance to the courthouse, an imposing 80 year-old Neo-Classical Revival edifice of limestone and marble, where you pass through metal detectors and find your way to room 106, jury management. They check you in and you find a seat. At the Milwaukee County Courthouse there are several rooms for jurors. I initially sat in the first one I saw, an auditorium with seating for about 100, with plush theater seats and flat-panel TVs hanging from ceiling mounts. I found a spot near an outlet, plugged in my MacBook, connected to the free courthouse wifi, and went about my usual business. After a few minutes an orientation video began and I paid half my attention to it.

In the introductory segment, we were warned that the representations of a trial in movies and TV are not very accurate. This is a big theme in the legal discourses addressed at jurors: don't expect this to be like a courtroom drama. But nothing in the orientation video contradicted my sense of how things work in the courtroom, which is almost entirely learned from fictions. The video explains things like voir dire, objections, opening and closing statements, counsel approaching the bench, etc. It's a perfectly adequate instructional program but anyone who has seen movies like Anatomy of a Murder or watched Law & Order now and then would know all of this already.

Soon afterwards the lights dimmed and a movie began. I picked up my things and went to find the other rooms, realizing that the people who planned to read or work were camped in a different space. This is where I spent most of the morning, at a table near an outlet, drinking coffee from a machine. The morning wasn't very different from one I might spend in a coffee shop except that I was surrounded by bored, silent strangers in an institutional space with harsh fluorescent lighting, anticipating an unknown future. Many people had books, newspapers, magazines, kindles, or smartphones to pass the time, and some had earbuds or headphones. Some appeared to be attempting to sleep. Very few had laptops like me -- maybe three others out of well over a hundred people. Everyone appeared to be bored and wishing to be elsewhere, but the silence bothered me more than the resentment of having to serve. It felt like a rather lonely crowd.

Around 11 a.m. a voice on the PA began to call names and numbers. If you don't hear your name, you just go right on doing what you were doing, being bored and resentful. When your name is called ("Michael Newman, 12") you gather your things and line up in a hallway standing on a number painted on the floor. Mine was called just before noon. We lined up and a man instructed us to go for lunch and be back at 1:00 for assignment to a courtroom. A lot of jury duty is just being herded around, here and there and back here.

I got a sandwich from the courthouse cafeteria and sat alone reading. I gave up my table when I went to buy a cup of coffee rather than leave my things unattended. Now the dining area was more crowded and I asked a man in a suit if I could sit with him. Noticing my juror badge he warned me that he couldn't talk if I was on the case he is trying. I told him I hadn't been in a courtroom yet and I asked what kind of cases he tries. He can't talk about that.

Two minutes hadn't passed before he began telling me about the kinds of cases he tries. He's a criminal defense lawyer and the courthouse is by his telling a place where the problems of sad, poor people get worse. He told me about men landing in jail because of traffic tickets leading to suspended and revoked licenses. He told me about domestic violence cases and drug cases. If you take away poverty, drugs, and mental illness, he told me, there's not much left going on in the courts. And he agreed with me that all of these things are connected in fairly obvious ways. We also talked about jury selection, and he said that "smart" people and people who work in law enforcement are often bounced from juries. Lawyers would prefer not to have a professor on their jury. (He did once have a sheriff's deputy on his jury -- which he now thinks was a bad idea.) I told him about the orientation video and we talked a bit about how the law is represented in TV and movies. He said jurors should be made to watch 12 Angry Men.

After lunch we were taken up to the fifth floor and led into a narrow corridor called a bullpen. There were 25 of us lined up. We were told to turn off our phones and men were made to remove hats. A sheriff's deputy gave us instructions about where to go in the courtroom and after a voice boomed out "all rise for the jury," we were led inside. The courtroom was a stately space with a soaring ceiling, high windows facing a courtyard, and wood panelling with classical embellishments of pilasters, pediments, and numerous carvings of eagles.

We were seated in the jury box and adjacent wooden seats and voir dire began with the judge's introduction and the first of many words of thanks for our service. The back-and-forth between judge and jury, and subsequent portions of the trial when she gave us instructions and told us where and when to go and come, were the one part of the trial that I found unfamiliar. These moments are seldom represented in legal narratives; there is nothing dramatic or intriguing about them.

We were asked a series of questions to be answered with a raised hand, and possibly with follow-ups from the judge. Does any of us know the lawyers, the defendant and his wife, or the judge? The first identification was made by the judge herself: one of the jurors was formerly a colleague of hers at a law firm. Did he think he could still fairly serve? Yes. No one else had any knowledge of the parties involved in the trial. The case was to be one of alleged domestic violence: does any of us think he or she could not be a fair juror in such a case? Has any of us worked for a law firm, or in law enforcement? The case will probably take more than one day, but probably not more than that. If it had to go to a third day, was there anyone who would be unable to make it to court? After this series of questions we were asked one by one to stand up and state our marital status, whether we have children and their ages, where and how long we have lived in the county, our employment and our spouse's, and two hobbies. At this point I was pretty sure that five jurors out of the 25 would be struck: the lawyer who was acquainted with the judge, another who had been a criminal defense lawyer until a suspension from practicing, a man who said his own ongoing divorce would make it difficult for him to participate, and two jurors who had medical reasons why they would be unable to come to court on the third day. I thought they would probably excuse me too.

The prosecutor then asked us some questions. He was clearly trying to begin his prosecution during this stage by making a strong impression and telling his story first. I don't remember all of his questions, but two that stand out were about juror expectations of evidence. He asked if anyone watches shows like CSI, and one juror raised his hand and was asked this follow up: does he expect the kind of evidence presented in a real-life courtroom to be as detailed and scientific as what you see on TV? No, of course not. The other question was about how you can tell if someone is lying. He asked if anyone has children, and many raised hands. He asked if anyone can tell when their children are lying, and many hands remained up. He called on one juror, the suspended criminal defender, to explain how he can tell when someone is lying. These two lines of questioning were clearly an effort to prepare us for receiving the evidence to be presented during testimony in a way that would advantage his case. No objection was raised.

When it was the defense attorney's turn, he passed on asking jurors any questions, which I found surprising. I expected the lawyers to be using voir dire to maximize their chances of getting a sympathetic jury. But neither appeared to be concerned with including and excluding jurors who might help or hurt them. The prosecutor was using voir dire as extra time for his opening argument. The defender seemed uninterested in the process. Maybe he was naive or incompetent (I was constantly looking for signs of his incompetence), maybe he was trying to hurry through the case, or maybe he was confident that any jury would acquit his client. This is what the experience was often like for me: trying to read other people's motives by filling in the limited array of cues presented, and being frustrated by being given much too little to go on. Narrative representations of trials can be ambiguous, but they generally will pay off your attention to human behavior in the end because they organize their information to solicit a particular response. But very few of my questions about these people and their inner lives will ever be answered.

The lawyers followed the judge into her chambers and we sat in silence and did nothing, as we often did as a jury. After a few minutes I began to read a magazine. When they returned the judge asked the people whose names she called to stand. This was an awful lot like a results night on American Idol, with one group of contestants to Ryan's left and the other to his right. When she was done calling names, half of the jurors were sitting, half were standing. Which half would be the jury? (At this point Idol would have cut to commercial.) I knew I was on the trial when I was standing and the man whose surgery was scheduled for Friday was sitting. But the lawyer who had been the judge's colleague stood as well. This was as as surprising to him, he later told me, as it was to me.

The charge was disorderly conduct. The judge read the statute, which is awfully vague. You can be guilty of disorderly conduct if you act in a way that tends to cause a disturbance. But it is a violent crime, and we were to decide whether the defendant, an African-American man in his 40s dressed in a baggy striped sweater, had acted violently against his then wife, an African-American woman of similar age. We had been prepared during voir dire to hear testimony from four witnesses: the wife and the police officer who responded to her emergency call for the prosecution, and the defendant and his aunt for the defense. The opening statements were brief. The prosecutor told the alleged victim's story. The defender said very little, mainly that there were two sides to every story. He used a simile that I found unpersuasive and a little odd, which he would use again in his closing: the two sides of a story are like two sides of a coin. But there is that thin third side, and that thin side is credibility. We would need to judge which story was true based on who we thought was credible. He said nothing specific about the defendant or his alleged victim. I wondered about his competence.

On the first day of the trial we heard testimony of the alleged victim, of the police officer, and of the defendant. The alleged victim, the wife, was asked to narrate the events of the day in question, when an altercation between the husband and herself in their home had led to his injury and to her calling 911 to report his abuse. She was not claiming, however, to have been significantly injured during the incident. He had left, to be taken to the hospital seeking care for a wound inflicted by the wife, and was absent when the police arrived.

The police officer who took the call testified, which revealed some inconsistencies between the wife's story and the police report he wrote the night in question. The incident had taken place a year ago, and all of the parties involved remembered the incident in partial, sometimes inconsistent fragments. The cop seemed unable to remember very much without consulting his report. Accounts varied widely in terms of the time the incident occurred, and how long it took.

The husband testified, contradicting many details of the wife's story, but the day ended before his testimony was complete. We were instructed to return at 9:45 the following morning to resume hearing it.

I went home thinking that the case for convicting the defendant seemed weak, and wondering why the case had been brought to court at all. But more than that I felt sad, really sad. The parties were poor, desperate people. Their marriage had failed -- they were divorcing, and are now divorced -- but they continued to live under the same roof. The husband had been jobless for a year and a half and had nowhere to go. The wife continued to hold a job, but it could not be very well paying. Their house was in foreclosure and both would be moving out soon enough. I wondered if people who are not suffering a life of poverty are ever brought up on domestic disorderly conduct charges. I didn't doubt that the two had fought on the day in question, and that they probably were quite nasty to each other. She argued that the cut on her husband's head, for which he took several stitches, had been inflicted in self-defense. I didn't doubt that the husband had been nasty to the wife. But I also didn't think he should be convicted of a violent crime without the presentation of more compelling evidence than we had seen. I had reasonable doubt.

I took my responsibility seriously, feeling like a man's future was in my hands. It was hard not to be able to talk about it. At dinner that night with friends I talked about being a juror on a trial but I didn't say a word about what kind of case it was. In the morning when I stirred prematurely, a little after 5 a.m., I immediately started to think about the case and couldn't fall back asleep. Some things I kept wondering were, why was this case being tried? What will the consequences of a conviction be for these people? Why is the DA's office pursuing disorderly conduct charges in such instances? What's the context? What social forces have caused this situation? What do the other jurors think?

I found it frustrating that my usual ways of thinking and understanding were unavailable to me in this experience. To find out about this situation, I would have liked to be able to do research, but jurors can only consider the evidence presented at trial. However, our background knowledge enters into our considerations in myriad ways. For instance, our assumptions about race, gender, and class can be significant factors in our judgement, no matter how much we think we can avoid "prejudice." We know a fair bit about how the law works in our society, and mostly as a product of exposure to various forms of media. My interest in assessing the competence of the defense attorney was a product of knowledge of the justice system: poor defendants cannot afford to pay lawyers, so they are represented by public defenders who might have fewer resources, less experience or expertise than the lawyers hired by those with money. I don't know anything about the attorney defending this case that you can't tell from looking at him (he's a middle-aged African-American man in a grey suit and tie), but I wondered if he was a good lawyer. The prosecutor, younger and white, seemed like he could be a bit of a bully, as might often be the case in lawyer shows, but it's his job to try to convict criminals. Did he have a choice about whether to try this case, or had his boss assigned it to him? Did he think it was a case worth trying? Did he feel any compassion for the man he was trying to convict? Was the judge thinking that one side or the other had an advantage?

I wasn't allowed to take notes during the trial, I wasn't allowed to talk about the trial during the trial, and I wasn't allowed to look up anything about the situation. In my scholarly work I do research by collecting evidence, making arguments, drawing conclusions, putting things in context. None of the usual ways of doing these things were allowed in this case. I found this frustrating and stressful, given that the ultimate outcome of my judgment was to affect people's lives in potentially quite serious and long-lasting ways.

On the second day I returned to the courthouse and entered the jury room through the bullpen. Courthouse architecture separates jurors from other participants in a case by moving jurors in and out of a door to the rear. The front door by the section of seating for observers (a section separated from the rest of the room by ten-foot-high glass, like the cashier booth in a ghetto fast food joint) is never used by a juror. At the end of the bullpen corridor is a small room where a sheriff's deputy sits at a desk. On the wall is a charging station for tasers and hooks for manacles to restrain prisoners. This room is where criminal defendants being held in custody pass through on their way from the county jail to the courtroom. Another door leads to a stairway upstairs to the room where juries deliberate. In contrast to the august courtroom, the corridors and backrooms are dilapidated. Paint is peeling from the walls in the stairwell. The worn jury room table looks like something you'd find for sale in an cluttered antique mall for $100. A west-facing window opens high over the city from behind the stone foliage of a Corinthian capital on the exterior, but nothing on the interior is the least bit distinguished. A buzzer on the wall is labeled ring once for a question and twice for a verdict. We waited here for the trial to resume, the sooner to be given an opportunity to buzz twice.

The defendant took the stand for the completion of his testimony, and his aunt testified next, corroborating his story of what happened after he left the house on the night in question. The judge then gave us instructions for deliberation and sent us upstairs on a break. We sat around this room making chitchat, texting and playing Angry Birds, forbidden from discussing the case. The main topics of conversation among jurors were weather and parking. The courthouse is downtown and parking all day is expensive and not subsidized. I rode my bike the first day and took the bus the second.

Closing arguments took ten minutes each. The prosecution again warned us not to expect CSI forensics and to decide based on the facts we had been given. The defense again likened the sides in the case to the sides of a coin and urged us to assess credibility. We took 45 minutes for lunch and then the twelve jurors returned to deliberate. (An alternate had been dismissed before lunch.) The bailiff collected our phones on a cafeteria tray to ensure that no juror would have contact with any person outside the jury room. Everyone on the jury had a phone, and I didn't inspect them closely but almost all appeared to be "smarter" than mine. The lawyer who knows the judge was made foreperson, taking possession of the two forms issued by the judge to be submitted as a verdict, one for guilty, one for not guilty.

The jury was polled by show of hands. One or two jurors weren't sure, two were prepared to convict, and the rest voted not guilty. The jury was fairly evenly split by gender. Three jurors were black, two might have been Latino (I don't remember their names and can't tell just by looking). The youngest was 18 or 19, the oldest around 60. The two who voted guilty were a young black woman and an older white woman. Most of the time of our deliberation was spent in back and forth between these two guilty voters and others expressing doubt. It seemed that the pair in favor of convicting believed the wife's story rather than the husband's, and were not concerned as the rest of us were by the inconsistencies and implausibilities of the various accounts. Neither one of the guilty voters spoke very articulately about the case, or made any serious effort to persuade the rest of us and see the error of our judgement. The younger of the two was unaware that juries must come to a unanimous verdict, and was expecting the majority to rule. In this regard at least, she would have been well served by watching more movies and TV shows with legal settings. She also remembered an important detail of the police officer's testimony wrongly in a way that disadvantaged the defendant, but was not about to change her vote after being corrected. She maintained that the defendant should be found guilty.

After less than half an hour the bailiff appeared to check on us as he said he would periodically. As instructed, we went silent at his knock on the door. He was in a chatty mood and started to share details of his personal life. He just hit the big five oh and has three young kids. He hates working out on the treadmill but likes to play basketball. (This was apropos of being a bit winded by climbing the stairs to the jury room.) But on Thursdays, the guys at the courthouse gym sometimes don't show up for the basketball game...

As soon as he left the room, the foreperson asked for another poll of the jury. All twelve hands rose immediately for not guilty. Perhaps being deprived of phones hastened the process. Could be, but no one wanted to be there in the first place, and no one seemed willing to endure a long deliberation. In effect, the majority did rule. In the courtroom the judge read our verdict aloud, asked us one by one if this was our decision, and dismissed the jury ("all rise for the jury"), thanking us again for our service. For the first time, the defendant looked in my direction. I saw no expression worth noting on the face of the prosecutor, or of the defendant's ex-wife sitting on the other side of the high glass. I didn't notice the defense attorney's expression but I wondered if he was at all surprised to win the case as I reevaluated my sense of his competence. We were led out through the bullpen and a few of us said polite goodbyes as we scattered at once through the corridor to elevators, bathrooms, and stairwells. Downstairs I passed by the young woman juror, the one who would have convicted the defendant and who didn't know verdicts must be unanimous. She was standing inside the courthouse door clutching her phone. Snow was falling and there was still enough time to go somewhere and do something on a Thursday afternoon. I said "see ya" and gave her a friendly wave as I walked out to catch my bus.

Faves, 2011

2011-12-31T06:00:00.001-06:00

Good grief! Not another year, another catalog of cool shit. Isn’t practically your whole life -- or the important, internet parts of your life at any rate -- an interminable sequence of people imploring you to look at this, look at that, be impressed by me and my taste!? Do we need quite so many tips and MUST READs (must I, really...really?), so much advice, so much performance of discernment and intelligence and habitus?

As in previous go-rounds, I have not done a very good job with keeping up with the newest of everything. I might like your favorite movies and TV shows of the year when I see them in 2012 or 2025 or 2041, God willing. I seem especially bad at even knowing what new music is around, and when I look at the year-end top 10s and top 100s, I feel gratified to recognize a few titles here and there. Although I spent half the year doing research on old video games, I have hardly played any new ones. I’m best at watching TV these days, but even then we have little more than an hour each evening between the kids’ bedtimes and our own. I guess I could try to squeeze another show in here and there while working out at the gym or at my desk eating lunch. But the pdfs and blog posts and newspaper or magazine stories on my screen need me then.

So here goes: my favorite things of 2011, the last year of the 12-inch extended dance mix version of my youth. I turn 40 in a few moments (ok in February) and am anticipating the narcissistic burdens of feeling middle-aged to drop on me like a lead blanket, so until then I am going to keep on feeling young. Young-ish.

The Silver Screen: Still Bigger and Louder than Most Television Sets, Still Can’t Fast-Forward the Boring Parts

Many of the handful of 2011 releases I saw at the cinema were kidpix I would not likely have seen but for my dadhood. The less said of The Smurfs the better, but The Muppets was a brilliant and clever romp, and I would gladly watch it a second and third time in the theater. “Travel by map” has become a familiar phrase for me and my 7 year-old, and we have taught the toddler (too young for trips to the cinema) to laugh at “Mahna Mahna.”

It’s gotten to the point that I don’t even read that much about movies and assume the word-of-mouth filter will help me figure out what I really need to see. Opportunities are fairly rare for Elana and me to see movies together, and I seldom go alone these days. Early this year we saw many of the Oscar-buzz films of 2010, including Winter’s Bone, True Grit, The King’s Speech, and The Black Swan. True Grit was my favorite film that I saw in 2011, but it belongs to last year. Seems odd to be comparing it to The Muppets, not just because of genre and audience. They don’t seem to belong to the same time, despite having been released within twelve months of each other.

Of the not-for-kids genres, I most highly recommend Tree of Life and The Descendants, both of which are about painful family ties. Tree of Life has some parts I would gladly have fast-forwarded past while watching on DVD, but the naturalistic scenes with the kids growing up and the hard father played by Brad Pitt, are gorgeous and evocative. The photography conveys an uncommon spiritual power, and the film, as someone on tumblr said, is as powerful as still images or as animated GIFs as it is unfolding in cinematic time.

The Descendants is just sad through and through, and funny in many places. I don’t know why, after years of thinking about it, I still don’t understand the pleasure I take in feeling sad at the movies. I’ve considered the usual explanations (catharsis, etc.) and they don’t satisfy me. I could say more in detail but I’m against spoilers, and one of my greatest pleasures in seeing this film was that everything about it was a surprise. All I knew was Alexander Payne and George Clooney. I didn’t even know to expect it to be set in Hawaii.

I’ll give an honorable mention to Bridesmaids for shooting a few exteriors in familiar spots in Milwaukee and offering a kind of feminist comedy for a broad audience. I like Rose Byrne as a comic actress though it’s hard for me to shake my associations with her dour character in Damages, and the Melissa McCarthy bits are a tad more outlandish than is my taste. However, I laughed quite a lot pretty much from the beginning to the end.

Word and Image

In describing favorite things I have read, I'm going to say as much about technology and interface as about content. This year, the way I have read has often seemed just as important as the words and pictures.

Although my scholarly work addresses media of the moving image, I still get much of my pleasure from media of the printed word, even as they are increasingly delivered through the same channels (screen devices) as the moving images of games, shows, and films. Increasingly I become frustrated by the constraints of the various formats of print, and not just of hard copies. One of the things I most want from reading materials is their ability to lay flat on a surface, like the reading ledge of an elliptical trainer or a table where I’m eating a meal. I also like them to be easy to read while laying on my back in bed or while standing around in the kitchen waiting for a slow stream of water to dispense from our fridge. For these uses, the tablet or iPod touch may be an ideal device. I also want numbered pages for teaching, which makes the Kindle device (for me an iPad) a bad option in some instances. But another thing I want is easy annotation, and PDFs beat Kindle books because they can be transferred easily from device to device. Even PDF annotation isn’t as good as writing in the margins of the page, though. I also want access to any digital form of media anywhere or anytime, but some reading requires internet connection, which I don’t always have. And electronic devices have batteries that run out, among other issues. As an author of books and other old-fashioned kinds of publications myself I would like to make my words available on whichever platforms, through whichever interfaces, the reader most desires. But constraints abound.

Three of my favorite ways to read, depending on the nature of contraints in any given situation, are the Kindle app, the GoodReader app, and Instapaper. Each of these is for a specific kind of publication. The Kindle app is for books or portions of books (more on this momentarily). The GoodReader app is for PDFs, which may be documents I have written myself and am revising, or magazine or journal articles, or book chapters, or books I downloaded from the web, perhaps legally. Instapaper is for anything published on the web, from news stories to blog posts. Using the website ifttt I automate certain tasks so that my Instapaper fills up with reading material over the course of the day, giving me material to read in the evening and the following morning, or when I have time to kill and my iPod handy, like when I’m sitting in the play area at the mall or waiting for the dentist. For instance, if I star a Google Reader item or favorite a tweet, it sends the content (including the material in the page linked from the tweet) to Instapaper, which I read later on my iPod or iPad.

Despite a widespread consternation I sometimes share with many others over the fate of book retailing, which makes it seem like it’s an important civic duty to patronize bookstores (though not Amazon), I still generally avoid paying for my reading materials. I won’t buy a book I can easily get out of the library, and I won’t buy a newspaper I can get for free online. I hate the pricing of Kindle books, which I think should come free when you buy a paper-and-paste book and should certainly be cheaper than paperbacks. I do buy them sometimes for convenience. But more often I read the free sample chapters.

During the summer, which is my genre-fiction season, I solicited recommendations for mystery novels and my Facebook friends came through with more than a dozen titles of books I wanted to read. The one I actually picked up was a Reacher novel by Lee Child (don’t remember the title but it was great), which my mother-in-law passed on to me when she was done with it. I read a large handful of the first chapters of the other books I was told to try, and I always started reading a new one waiting in my app rather than heading over to the Amazon.com to buy the rest of the one I had started. The free samples aren’t the same kind of immersive, suspenseful engagement as reading a whole book, but it gives you more of a smorgasbord kind of experience of tasting lots of different things, and I quite liked it. I probably read one kindle book for every ten I sample, though I sometimes get a book I have sampled this way out of the library if I decide I want to keep going. I wonder how much I’d change these habits if Kindle titles were cheaper. I doubt very much. I recommend the first chapters of Tana French’s In the Woods, Jo Nesbo’s The Red Breast, and Walter Mosley's White Butterfly (which I did read till the end, but the library's copy).

I also recommend all of Nicholson Baker’s House of Holes and Meg Wolitzer’s The Uncoupling, both 2011 titles. I have never disliked any writing by Baker, though, including his non-fiction, so take that into consideration. My favorite contemporary novel that I read this year was Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot, though not for the skewering of the culture of theory I was hoping to relish (it's much more minor a part than I anticipated) nearly as much as the bravura shifts in point of view, the depths of characterization, and the telling of a good love triangle story.

Sometimes I tinker with a ranking of all of the social networks that I have used. It’s not that interesting, and I generally abandon such foolish diversions quickly. But no matter where flickr, tumblr, or Linked In might rank, Facebook is always last and Twitter is always first.

twitter > something > something > something > facebook

Twitter’s structure allows for other websites to use its content in interesting ways and one site that does so is stellar, a network aggregating favorited tweets (also flickr photos) in a kind of crowd-curated best of twitter. (These are my faves.) As far as I know the user base thus far is limited (I asked to join and was quickly let in a few months ago). It’s a nice supplement to twitter in which you can see what other users are collecting and what they are indicating as worthy of other people’s attention.

The year in hastags could be its own long essay. My favorite of the year has been #humblebrag, a form of discourse you have found annoying all along but never really recognized as its own thing until this name for it came along to put everything instantly into focus. I would give it the word of the year award if I were magically tasked with the important job of choosing it.

For me, tumblr is mainly for images. I skim or skip more than a couple of lines of text in my dashboard. Like twitter, I find tumblr works best when you follow a critical mass of others so that every time you check in, the flow is totally new. My favorite thing with tumblr is to flip fairly quickly through a whole day of posts in the TumbLiking app a few minutes before falling asleep. I don’t often remember my dreams but I would like to think the surrealistic juxtapositions of imagery I find in these (and many other) tumblrs is helping me keep the demons away from my slumbering subconscious mind. Here are some of the ones I like these days:

unhappy hipsters

photojojo

ummhello

murketing

i love old magazines

this isn't happiness

nick drake

life magazine

bookshelf porn

hipster animals

dear photograph

nails and burgers

rides a bike

fuck yeah 1980s

slaughterhouse 90210

old video game ads

As for the blogs, I will refrain this year from listing every one written by a person I have met in real life. At this point I’m not noticing many new blogs coming along each year, which makes sense but is still a little sad considering how many awesome people could be blogging. Here are a handful of new-ish ones that I always look at as soon as a new post appears, even if I have more important things to do:

The Late Age of Print, by Ted Striphas, about the fate of books in these digital days, among other things.

Casual Scholarship, about video games, by Carly Kocurek.

My grad school buddy Ethan de Seife’s blog on a sparkling miscellany of topics, including cartoons, Ice Cube, soda commercials, and rock lyrics.

Feminist Mom in a Postfeminist World, a personal blog by a film scholar, Pam Wojcik.

Miriam Posner’s blog, often concerned with tools of digital scholarship.

The History of Television’s Futures by Max Dawson, not updated lately though :(

Of the venerable older sites, I am generally moved to audible laughter by Ludic Despair. I never hesitate to recommend The Awl to anyone who doesn’t know about it. Media scholars cannot ignore News for TV Majors and the fortnightly link roundups at Antenna by Chris Becker. Allison McCracken’s essays on Glee (1, 2, 3) were my favorite posts on Antenna not written by Chris. xkcd is still my choice of web comics, but honorable mention goes to The Oatmeal, for “if you do this in an email i hate you.” l I used to like Gawker, then I hated it, now I like it again. I still read Metafilter but not religiously. My abiding "guilty pleasure" is Dlisted.

I like the content of The Language of Food, a scholarly site with infrequent posts in great depth on topics in the history of foods and the words used to describe them. Another thing I like about this site is how it offers a model of slow blogging. Only three posts this year! I aspire to such a careful and stingy routine. I wish for less but better blogging for us all in 2012.

MeTube

My sense from twitter glimpses into the daily routines of others is that television is a much more frequent presence for them. If I can help it I never mix business and pleasure when it comes to TV (e.g., watching while grading or emailing), and lately I pay little attention to the stuff the kids watch now as the older one has taken a liking to violent Japanese cartoons and the little one is at the Wiggles and Teletubbies stage. I'll care more for his shows when he moves onto the Backyardigans-level fare. It’s a constant effort to watch enough TV. Recently I had the bittersweet father-son moment of breaking the hard truth to a 7 year-old that one often must choose between television and sleep, and that sleep is ultimately the smart priority. (This is what twitter people call a #firstworldproblem, but a problem is a problem!)

The show that makes me laugh the most is Curb Your Enthusiasm. The Jewish humor and the social commentary really just kill me. Larry David’s characterization as “social assassin” expresses so many of my own repressed desires. It often seems that the show was made especially for me. All those hip thirty and fortysomething women who think of Tina Fey as their imaginary best friend? That’s me and Larry David.

The show that made me cry was Friday Night Lights, the final several episodes one by one. If you haven’t made it to the end yet and have any tears to shed, prepare to be a sobbing mess.

The show that made me most eager for new episodes to air was Homeland. A couple of months ago we would prioritize The Good Wife over Homeland for fear of being spoiled by loose-lipped twitter reactions to The Good Wife, which seemed to inspire more chatter. Then the priorities flipped. A brilliant political thriller and character study. Less impressive to me as cultural commentary and meditation on the war, but still an engrossing show with actors I love.

My favorite prime-time drama of the old-fashioned network variety (actually the only one I watch unless you count Prime Suspect, which seems doomed) is The Good Wife. We binged on seasons one and two over the summer, so it feels like this was a Good Wife year, and I have trouble remembering which parts were from 2011 and which parts were from earlier. Smart stuff.

I am also in awe of Louie and Parks and Recreation, for very different reasons. Louie’s seeming formlessness and crudity are bracing and inspiring. The show is clearly about something, but its absence of conventional narrative structure and its willingness to be disgusting and shamefully personal make it seem especially fresh. I’m not such a huge fan of Louie CK’s comedy, and I actually don’t like most standup at all, so I surprise myself by liking the show so much. And Parks and Rec has a warm heart and generous spirit, and a brilliantly witty style of writing outlandish but lovable characters.

Portlandia is spot-on satire of hipsterism and alternative cultural ethos. Nothing I have written about indie culture will ever be as good as Portlandia at conveying contradictions between countercultural opposition and self-congratulatory elitism.

I like moments and characters from other programs. Liz Lemon and Jack Donaghy, the occasional scenes of The Big Bang Theory, contestants making Drew Carey grin on The Price is Right, hugs and tears on practically any reality show. The Idol finale still offers plenty of showbiz, and Jennifer and especially Steven (with his Chicos-esque wardrobe and Jewish grandmother demeanor) made the judging portions of the show occasionally watchable.

Tunes

I’m hesitant to name any music at all since I follow it so little, but I’d like to mention Lady Gaga, not just Born This Way but also her HBO and ABC specials. I like the music and listen to it a fair bit. But aside from a few sparkling pop classics like “Born this Way,” “Poker Face,” and “Bad Romance,” I find most of her songs forgettable, in the sense that I actually forget them. But I really do believe she is a force for good in the world, for preaching love and tolerance. I’m not a 100% fan of the “It Gets Better” campaign because of its failure to account for the shitty lives so many people lead as adults, and especially for its hegemonic middle-class presumptions, as if any gay person must be like the ones who grow up to work at Google or The Ellen DeGeneres Show or the State Department. I think “Born This Way” and the larger message of Lady Gaga’s appeal to her little monsters is doing similar work, and potentially more effectively.

I also listened to plenty of Adele, Fleet Foxes, and Gillian Welch. I like old music, which I think is what it’s often like to be old. When the Teenage Fanclub song came on in Young Adult, the movie basically had me in its pocket, and when the character rewound to play it a second and third time, well. I will always recognize every pop hit from around 1981 to 1988. For music from before and after that period my knowledge is spottier. I doubt this will ever change.

Favorite Thing

I cannot stop loving the animated GIF. It doesn't usually occur to me that an animated GIF is a short silent movie, though I have seen this pointed out in a number of appreciations of the form. Silence is part of its appeal, but surely what is most great about the GIF is its mixture of appreciation of a momentary, ephemeral pop culture pleasure, and the repetition of that significant moment potentially forever. Unfortunately, this neat formula misses some of what I love about many GIFs that are not captured from film or TV, that are not found footage or remix culture. GIFs are absurdly catchy, like the hook of a pop song. And they're like a spinning carousel set to the same snippet of circus music, circling back on the same spot again and again, an infinite loop of crazy fun.

They can also be subtle or creepy, even minimalist. Some of my favorite GIFs are perfect loops of a repeated action appearing to be an endless back and forth, round and round. This is one thing a GIF can do that lends itself, for instance, to use in porn sites (totally fucking NSFW!) where the in/out of straight sex is made to appear like efficient factory mechanics. But a GIF can also seem to capture a single moment rather than a repeated action. Or it can offer a sequence of moments without a sense of repetition. There's no one best kind and the form is actually fairly versatile. I also noticed sometime in 2011 the growth of GIFs displayed in grids of multiple panels (2x3, 2x4, 3x4, 3x5, etc.) and GIFs incorporating captions and subtitles. I guess I'll expect to see new trends in GIF creativity in 2012, can't wait.

Another thing to love about the GIF is that for now at least, making and sharing them occur in an amateur province of a web culture in which increasingly the corporate voice is enmeshed with the ordinary person's. As far as I know, NBC is not yet offering its own GIFs of last night's Community for the fans to post on tumblr. Our own appropriation and sharing economy still define the GIF's life online.

Finally, the GIF is a critical tool. It's the amateur scholar's most ideal form of quotation of the moving image. The fans are showing us the way we might illustrate our more serious-minded efforts to support our words with images in scholarly discourse.

My new year's resolution last year was to make animated GIFs. I spent a bit of time trying it out, and I need to devote more effort before I know what I'm doing and can share GIFs with the world. I was glad to learn, however, that like anything worth making, it's not always easy to produce something that looks simple but actually has depth and meaning.

GIF links of note:

Uproxx lists the 20 most important GIFs of 2011.

If We Don't, Remember Me. is a tumblr of subtle, often poetic "living movie stills" GIFs. Like theses ones from Belle de Jour and Ghost World.

Similar: tiny cinema.

Anil Dash celebrates the form, including an appreciation of the Animated GIF Museum

Other Cinema celebrates the GIF as an example of nostalgic cultural revivalism, and as evidence of a move away from realism and toward artifice in contemporary online and digital culture.

Kelli Marshall appreciates the GIF in terms of its recreation of early cinema aesthetics and technologies.

Design Modo offers a page of "3D animated photo" GIFs, images staged and shot to be animated GIFs rather the the more common repurposed scenes.

Change the Thought's GIF tag is a rich source of
trippy and mind-bending and graphically experimental GIFs including the spinning circle image at the very end of this post.

My Fucking GIF Blog is self-explanatory.

The Gifzette is a snarky, critical daily news site ("All the News That's Fit to Gif") illustrated by a big animation.

A page of GIFs of Kirsten Dunst's anguished reactions sitting next to Lars von Trier at Cannes is a nice demonstration of the power of multiple frames of GIFs presented together.

And gifgifgifgifgif is the best. I took many of the images in this post from them.

If you have a cocktail handy, please drink with me to more crazy, funny, sad, stupid, smart, and favorite things in 2012.

Laugh Track

2011-11-09T15:20:00.002-06:00

I have a post up at antenna called Notes on the Laugh Track, which is a blog version of some thoughts I presented last month in Madison at a conference on TV comedy. Some of the ideas in it may be familiar to long-time readers; for more, see these old posts:

-Hating on Jezebel James: The Laugh Track as Bad Object

-Upgrading the Situation Comedy

-Tween Comedies and the Evolution of a Genre (this one is from In Media Res)

PowerPoint

2011-10-26T19:41:00.003-06:00

The International Journal of Communication has just published a new section of essays on academic labor edited by Jonathan Sterne, and I'm really excited to have my work included in it. The essay is one I co-wrote with a friend I made at a Zionist summer camp in Canada in 1987, Ira Wagman. It's called "PowerPoint and Labor in the Mediated Classroom" (pdf). It draws on various sources, including my experience teaching a large lecture course (Intro to Media Studies) for many semesters and feeling like the PowerPoint component was taking up too much of my time and energy, even as I was always unsure I was using the slideware well enough. We tried to write our essay as both an assessment of PowerPoint, its functions and its value, and a set of practical suggestions not so much for how to use the software, but how to think about using it.

Gchat Status, an Appreciation

2011-10-26T04:50:00.000-06:00

It is possible to do something special with a Gchat status, though the number of authors doing it thus far might be in the low double digits. The Gchat status, like much of what we do online these days, is a form of verbal communication, and the status is an art of language like poetry or rhetoric. Tweets and blog posts and Amazon reviews and comments on a Facebook photo can likewise be places for good writing, but I have chosen the Gchat status for this appreciation because it strikes me as a functionally unique instance in this particular moment, and because I happen to have been noticing Gchat statuses that I really like lately.

Gchat, the IM service of Gmail, lives in the sidebar of your inbox, though you might not have noticed it. It’s the only IM experience I’ve ever had. While I’m probably on the young enough end of Gen X to have been introduced to AOL and ICQ and other formative experiences of my Millennial friends and family, I was strictly an email person before my Gchatting began. At first I only ever Gchatted with one or two people -- my younger sister whose IM chops were developed in her teen years and an old friend living in another country where phone calls would be more expensive than IMs. Over time I have kept up with eight or ten friends and students (and students who became friends) with regular Gchats, and in my immediate family (mother, sister, wife) we use it as much or more than the phone. There are also contacts in my chat window with whom I have never or very seldom chatted, but whose statuses I regularly see and enjoy.

Gmail’s chat sidebar offers a narrow space for a status, which like a tweet or Facebook posting can take a variety of forms: a word, a phrase, a question, a quotation (with or without quotes), the title of what you’re reading (or writing), a report, an observation, an exclamation, a curse or blessing, a call to action, a cryptic reference, a fragmentary image, or a link to your new blog post or to a video you think is cute of pets or babies. On Wisconsin! Office job. This is what I do. Now 20% smarter! When is 112:30? Just chillin’. Snowdrift. feministmusicgeek.com. And you are? It is definitely too soon to be writing Interim Reports. Home. Asleep (how did I type that while I was asleep??!?).
I’m going to eat my feelings for dinner. Most of my contacts either have no status or have one that they update very infrequently -- effectively never. Some write a new one every few days or even more often.

The characters in a Gchat status are limited to around 500, but anything longer than around 20 characters (it depends on how wide your letters are -- you’ll run out of room for big A’s faster than little l’s) is truncated at that point and finished off with ellipses. When you mouseover the name in your chat list, a window appears with the contact’s picture, the full status, their gmail address, and a few buttons offering options to chat, email, and change settings. Thus approximately 20 is not exactly a character limit, but it is functionally important: most of the time people will only see that much. I’m more likely to mouseover a new status, or a status that hooks me in the first 20. I’m less likely to mouseover a link without description, because the likelihood of my following a link is always lower than of just reading a status. If you think 140 characters makes tweets into the most exemplary form of contemporary web brevity, Gchat statuses offer us even less room for expressing ourselves. But as in any form, constraints can be opportunities.

There are a number of things I find especially pleasurable about Gchat statuses. Unlike most of the things you can write nowadays on the internet, the Gchat status offers no direct feedback mechanism. You can’t like or favorite a status, you can’t share or retweet it, you can’t start a comments thread under it, you can’t give it thumbs up or down, digg it or bury it, or give it between one and five stars. You can’t mark it as spam or as inappropriate content, and you can’t recommend it to your friends with one click. Just try to share it on Facebook -- try it! I love how self-contained the Gchat status is, content to be its own thing and not a come-on inviting your participation.

On the other hand, there is one way of finding out more about a status or expressing your admiration for it: starting a Gchat. The absence of likes and retweets is actually an incentive to use Gchat for the central purpose of IM: person-to-person communication. Sometimes I have had others begin chats with me by asking more about my status, which works especially well with quotations of my one year-old son. (E.g., NO, Dada! got quick chat responses from his grandmother and aunt). One time a friend liked a link to a video and told me as much in a chat message. I have no real issue with the depersonalized nature of likes and faves and thumbsups, but I have noticed that sometimes they seem to offer a substitute for more interactive and substantive communication.

Another constraint of the Gchat is its total ephemerality. Unlike so much of our web lives, the status does not become part of an archive or timeline or profile. It doesn’t turn up in web searches, and doesn’t ever appear in roundups of tweets or comments. There is no way to link to a status, no way to easily save them for posterity. Aside from myself, I don’t know of anyone who collects them. I don’t believe the Library of Congress is on the case, and I don’t imagine we will ever see publication of the Gchat statuses of tomorrow’s great novelists or presidents, though you never know.

The beauty of a nice Gchat status is in part a function of it having appeared in a place you weren't expecting something so good. It is also a function of being an artifact of so little practical value, addressing an audience of perhaps a few dozen people, probably fewer, who are unlikely to respond in any way, and whose reception is untraceable. Unlike a blog, you can't keep track of user data. Unlike twitter there is no count of chat status followers. The status doesn't occupy a point in the web reputation ecology. It barely matters, isn't meant to last, and can hardly ever hope to make more than a gentle ripple in a great sea. It is approaching the purest mode of creativity, a gift. Sometimes I wonder if the chat statuses that I like are meant to please only the writer, and the public performance of this private expression is almost accidental. But of course these are appearances only. Communication ordinarily serves more than one function. A status is always, among other things, an expression of status. It just does a nice job of not always seeming so.

*

LIKE MAH STATUS.:

images by me and dorywithserifs (used under a Creative Commons license)

Legitimating Television: Blogversation

2011-09-23T09:29:00.003-06:00

This is cross-posted at Dr. Television.

In this post, Elana Levine and I aim to offer a look into the origins and purpose of our new book, Legitimating Televison: Media Convergence and Cultural Status. We include an abstract of our argument (which is also our back cover copy), and then engage in a “blogversation” about the project and its aims.

Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status explores how and why television is gaining a new level of cultural respectability in the twenty-first century. Once looked down upon as a “plug-in drug” offering little redeeming social or artistic value, television is now said to be in a creative renaissance, particularly as critics hail the rise of “cinematic,” Quality series such as Mad Men and 30 Rock. Likewise, DVDs and DVRs, web video, HDTV, and mobile devices have shifted the longstanding conception of television as a family-centered household appliance, offering a new understanding of TV as a sophisticated, high-tech gadget.

Newman and Levine argue that television’s newfound, growing prestige emerges in concert with the convergence of media at technological, industrial, and experiential levels. Television is permitted to rise in respectability once it is connected to more highly valued media--and more highly valued audiences. Legitimation works by denigrating “ordinary” television associated with the past, and thereby denies the continuities between past and present. It also distances the television of the present from the feminized and mass audiences assumed to be inherent to the “old” TV. It is no coincidence that the most validated programming and technologies of the convergence era are associated with viewers of elevated economic and cultural status. The legitimation of television articulates the medium with the masculine over the feminine, the elite over the mass. In so doing it reinforces cultural hierarchies that have long perpetuated inequalities of gender and class.

Legitimating Television urges readers to move beyond the taste question of whether television is simply “good” or “bad,” and to focus instead on the cultural, political, and economic issues at stake in television’s transformation in the digital age.

Why we wrote this book

EL: While we have been excited by much of the scholarship emerging that deals with the many changes television has been facing, and continues to face (economic, technological, experiential), we also noted some gaps in that scholarship. We kept noticing these discourses of distinction in popular, trade, and scholarly talk about TV, but no one seemed to be talking about it or acknowledging their implications. And once we started noticing it, it was everywhere! I, for one, worry about all of the “future-casting” that seems to be going into contemporary talk about TV (scholarly and popular) and wanted, in part, to do the historian’s work of noting both the continuities with and the disruptions to the past in contemporary developments. So we wanted to historicize a lot of the conversation about convergence-era TV, and specifically to do so around questions of cultural hierarchy and value. In addition, we wanted to inject more of a cultural studies-influenced sense of struggle over television’s status in the cultural hierarchy, something we don’t see a lot of attention being paid to these days.

MZN: We have now seen a fair number of attempts to grapple with how television has been changing during the digital age. Some say television has changed so much that it’s not even television any more (e.g., one book has the title Television after TV), which seems like such a radical break. We wanted to make an argument about the cultural implications of convergence as it works in relation to TV, and in particular how issues of social power underlie many of the shifts we observe in TV’s identity under convergence. We see the old concept of TV as crucial to the newly legitimated medium. A lot of people seem to be aware of some of the same things we observe, but I think our concept of the legitimation of television explains recent developments in a way that has not been done, and puts their meaning into focus. The gender and class implications of television’s legitimation have not been very well recognized.

Influences

MZN: Lynn Spigel’s Make Room for TV and William Boddy’s New Media and Popular Imagination are most foundational in my thinking about our work, as both are ultimately concerned with how people think about television as a medium, and what place television has in our everyday lives as a result. We are also building on essays by Derek Kompare and Matt Hills about TV on DVD, and by Dana Polan and Christopher Anderson on the cultural status of Quality TV, particularly around HBO and its series. More in terms of background knowledge and approach, I am always inspired by Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, which is a book I think everyone across the humanities should read. Bourdieu, of course.

EL: I come to the project with the same influences, although I would also add two other streams of work: British Cultural Studies approaches to television, especially John Fiske’s Bourdieuian takes on cultural hierarchies and appreciation of the tastes of “the people.” For me, the study of television has always been about seeking an understanding of and empathy with a culturally denigrated medium and the subordinated social positions of those who find in that medium their culture. The legitimation of the medium, as much as it is still struggling to achieve dominance, seems to me to dismiss all of that. And that feels like a betrayal of what both television and the cultural studies-influenced field of television studies mean to me. I’d additionally add feminist scholarship on TV melodrama/soaps, especially work by such scholars as Tania Modleski, Jane Feuer, and Lynne Joyrich. These scholars understand deeply the gendered nature of cultural hierarchies and attend to television’s feminized texts as a challenge to such easy dismissals.

Challenges of writing about the present

MZN: When you write about the present, you aim at a moving target. You can think you have figured out what to say about something, and just as you are saying it, the subject changes or new developments complicate your points. You lack historical distance and risk seeing change as more important than it is. We tend to think of our present moment as a break from the past, and to see ourselves as somehow special. Actually I think part of our book’s contribution is in questioning this very tendency toward misapprehending the present, and failing to recognize historical continuities. We call it a history of the present and a polemic, and I wonder if a history of the present can avoid being a polemic in some sense, as our concerns are so immediate and so present in discourses we encounter day by day.

EL: Yeah, I worry about the “ranty” nature of the book at points, but I also feel so strongly about the ideas that I’m kind of proud of the rants, too. My worry is not so much that we come off sounding cranky, but that that crankiness will soon be seen as short-sighted, in that it misses a development that is about to come. Still, we’ve been studying these discourses for a number of years and, if anything, see them increasing rather than decreasing or changing.

What do we hope will come of Legitimating Television?

EL: I hope that readers of our book will think about contemporary TV and the discourses surrounding it in new ways, that they will start to notice the discourses of legitimation all around us and the ways in which these discourses operate in tension with those of denigration. I hope that scholarship that focuses on the economic and technological convergence of TV and other media will not reproduce the classed and gendered hierarchies of so much legitimating discourse--or will at least be more self-conscious about it. I hope that the critics and other journalists talking about contemporary TV will avoid the either/or dichotomy of trash or art that pervades discourses of legitimation and delegitimation and consider the ways their words shape the way we all think about TV. Mostly, I just want to see thoughtful, socially and politically engaged work on TV that has an historical sensibility and that tries not to reproduce damaging cultural hierarchies.

MZN: I’m eager to see more scholarly engagement with television texts in aesthetic terms, and some of this book indeed works in this area, e.g., the discussions of sitcom and drama forms. My previous work on TV storytelling is also an effort in this area. But I’d like to see aesthetic considerations of television proceed in full consciousness of the power of aesthetic discourses, and to the extent possible without the naive appreciation of “good TV” or denigration of “bad TV” that reinforces the cultural hierarchies central to legitimation and delegitimation. This is a challenge to be sure, but one that I think must be undertaken if TV studies is to maintain a critical perspective. Similarly, with new technologies and audience practices, we ought to be wary of endorsing the so-called control and activity of new ways of watching without recognizing drawbacks and their ideological implications.

What you should know before you read

MZN: I wonder if some people might see the book and infer that we’re rooting for TV to be legitimated. Sometimes when I tell people that the book is about the idea that TV has gotten better, they seem excited by the thought and eager to endorse it. (Others are more cranky and say things like, “I disagree!” or “I don’t watch television.”) Our purpose is to document and analyze legitimation as the emergent common sense, but also to argue that it’s not ultimately a force for good.

EL: You put that so democratically. We say legitimation is bad! But, at the same time, it’s important that readers know: 1) We love TV. 2) We know there are some benefits to the legitimation of television, but think the discourse as it now stands does too much damage to television writ large and to classed and gendered conceptions of cultural and social worth. 3) That is not our living room on the cover.

Legitimating Television, Process

2011-09-19T07:05:00.000-06:00

This is the first of two planned posts about Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status, the book I have written with Elana Levine (Amazon). In this entry I reflect on collaboration as a scholarly endeavor, and elaborate a bit more about the processes of academic work, picking up where I left off in my last post on the academic summertime. A subsequent post will discuss the book’s ideas.

Like most academic works, ours is the product of years of research. My computer files tell me that I began to take notes on the topic of legitimation of TV about four years ago, fall 2007. But our project began at least a year or two before that moment, which is just the time that legitimation became a concept bringing our thinking about television’s changing cultural status into sharper focus.

We began by collecting research on TV on DVD and what I was thinking of as the cinematization of television in terms of audiovisual style and storytelling, but also in terms of distribution (as on DVD). I’m not sure when this was exactly but it was likely around the time that so much popular press attention was being given to the significance of discs for television’s business model, story forms, and cultural circulation. For instance, between 2004 and 2007 we saw a steady stream of articles in newspapers and magazines singing the praises of DVD as a solution to some of television’s enduring problems, such as:

-James Poniewozik, “Show Business: It's Not TV. It's TV on DVD,” Time, April 19, 2004.

-Scott Collins, “Some Television Reruns Hit Their Prime on DVD,” Los Angeles Times, November 13, 2005.

-Toni Ruberto, “DVDs offer viewer freedom,” The Buffalo News, September 17, 2006.

-Claire Atkinson, “What to Watch? How About a ‘Simpsons’ Episode From 1999?” New York Times, September 24, 2007.

DVDs (as well as DVRs) were also central to the discussion of television in Steven Johnson’s 2005 book Everything Bad is Good For You, key to his brief in favor of contemporary popular culture as a kind of cognitive pencil sharpener. The repeatability of television made possible by the digital revolution was supposed to have improved television and pushed its place in the cultural hierarchy from disreputable trash to a more elevated level.

Television scholars were remarkably quick to assess the implications of this new development. Derek Kompare and Matt Hills wrote important articles on the topic -- both highly recommended to anyone interested in how TV has changed in the past decade -- just as the popular press was also grappling with the same developments:

-Derek Kompare, “Publishing Flow: DVD Box Sets and the Reconception of Television,” Television & New Media 7:4 (November 2006), 335-360. (pdf)

-Matt Hills, “From the Box in the Corner to the Box Set on the Shelf: 'TVIII' and the cultural/textual valorisations of DVD,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 5.1 (April 2007), 41-60.

But the moment I most vividly remember as having made an impression on me, an impression that would remain as we worked through our ideas and towards the book, was even before these popular press discussions became commonplace. One day in January, 2003, we were wandering around a Tower-records-type retailer (this was in Paris, which is why I remember the date but not the name of the store), and were quite overwhelmed by the television section of the DVDs. It had not been that long since shows were first appearing in season and series box sets, and to see the number of American Quality TV series packaged so lavishly and appealing to our sensibilities so strongly was really shocking, as was, in my recollection, the typical price tag. I remember the HBO titles like The Sopranos, and I’m sure there were cult shows like Buffy. I recall that store’s TV on DVD section was quite large at a time when TV on DVD was still pretty new and exciting.

Season box sets of highly regarded programs produce such a different identity for TV shows as objects of intense consumer desire and significant commodity value, especially compared with the earlier reputation of television as disposable and ephemeral mere entertainment. In this new figuration, television was clearly attaining a newly high value that was quite the contrast against its historical identity as mass culture, as a vast wasteland, as the idiot box or boob tube. Over the span of time between 2002 and 2007, then, Elana and I began to collect research materials and to talk about how we might write something that would engage with this shift (individually or together, I’m not sure when we decided this was something to do together). A lot of our thinking coalesced in a series of conference papers we gave, which developed our project and provided an initial base of evidence and concepts on which the book would build. At the same time, both of us were busy with other things and this work was rarely if ever on the front burner for long (for starters, I had another book to write), which is partly why is took a long time to come to fruition.

In general I believe it’s beter to avoid working up new material for a conference presentation, and to try to present material that’s more or less publication-ready. This way you don’t stress out for three weeks before the conference figuring out what you are going to say, you don’t end up deciding you don’t like your topic after all and trying to give a different paper under the published title, and you don’t give a really rough draft that makes you look sloppy and abuses the audience’s attention. Perhaps more importantly, if you are working up new material, you might end up writing something 12 pages long that never goes anywhere, which seems to me, despite what I’ve said earlier about reconsidering what it means to be productive, like a squandered opportunity.It’s unusual that 12 pages of work all by itself is publishable as is in a journal or book in today’s academic publishing world, though maybe that’s too bad.

In working on Legitimating Television, though, we did a lot of our initial writing for conferences, and these presentations were a great value to our process. Elana and I both gave conference papers that became book material at Console-ing Passions 2008 in Santa Barbara, and 2010 in Eugene. We both gave papers at the one-day Unthinking Television conference in Fairfax, Virginia, in 2009, that found their way into the book. Of the book’s eight chapters, four were to a great extent built around those six conference papers, cutting and pasting parts here and there and integrating different papers together. My 2008 CP paper ended up partly in chapter 4 and partly in chapter 7 (see the book’s table of contents below). Elana’s 2008 CP paper gave chapter 6 its main ideas and some of its examples. Her 2010 CP paper was the basis for chapter 5, while mine was mostly integrated into chapter 4. The book also includes work here and there that first appeared on Zigzigger (this post on widescreen TV lives on in chapter 7), though with much modification. We also included a few bits and pieces from an unsubmitted column I wrote for Flow when I was a columnist (2008-2009). I decided not to submit it because it seemed too much like the introduction to a book and not enough like a column for a web publication. Chapters 2, 3, and 8 are just about all new, but the rest of the book is a patchwork integrating material previously shared in some way with an audience as work in progress.

Some people have asked us how we went about co-authoring a book. It’s not that unusual to see original research monographs have more than one author, but in the humanities it’s still something a bit out of the ordinary, and people seem to wonder how the process unfolds. Our training in graduate school, especially in the humanities, assumes single authorship and offers little guidance in producing collaborative research. Editing a book or writing a textbook might lend themselves more to collaboration than this kind of work, though I haven’t done either of those things so I can’t speak to their finer points.

We might think of collaboration as having greater or lesser degrees of intellectual integration. There may be some projects where work can be divided among collaborators in a way that doesn’t require them to share all of the same ideas and expectations, and to work out arguments and evidence together. Ours is the kind of book that does require that kind of collaboration. We conducted research separately and wrote separately, but we did not divide up the work into discrete sections and each keep to our side of a line. We wrote the chapters one at a time (you work on this one, I’ll work on that one) but they are all still products of our collaboration. Sometimes the ideas of a section come more from one person but the words are composed mostly by the other. I wrote most of chapter 6’s first draft, but the conceptual work was mostly Elana’s. There are parts where the research was done by one of us and the other wove it into an argument. In chapter 2, for instance, I wrote a section of a couple thousand words to be integrated into a longer discussion written mainly by Elana, but she revised my part to make it fit, and I revised hers after that. And in revision, there was never any sense of the words being proprietary. Some parts of the book were revised so many times by us both that they really were written by two people. Having said all of this, there are passages of the book only I could have written, and passages only Elana could have. I would rather preserve the veneer of total collaboration than reveal which parts these are, but people who know us will be able to figure them out. There are also phrases I’m especially happy with that I wrote, and quotes that express a thought especially nicely that I found, and I feel pleased about these. There are similar passages that Elana wrote or quoted, and I admire these no less, but in the way you admire someone else’s good job.

Sometimes I infer that the subtext of the co-authorship question is that for a married couple it might be a special challenge to write a book together. This would depend on the couple, but for us it was undoubtedly easier to co-author a book with each other than it would have been with anyone else. We talk about TV all the time anyway, and our “work” and “life” are continuous. The ideas benefited from the continual hashing out during car rides and over lunches at home, and we could discuss progress bit by bit as each of us worked on separate parts. I think it helps to live with your co-author, though I can see that in other situations it might be preferable to be separated by some physical distance. I like collaboration for many reasons: it solves the problem of scholarly loneliness and isolation, it makes possible synergistic productivity, and it might lead to a multi-dimensionality that one person’s work can never have. I also believe it provides some of the same rewards as solitary scholarship at a reduced rate of labor (though certainly not reduced by half). I like collaborative writing and I want to collaborate more in the future, though a collaboration I might have with people other than Elana will have obviously different dynamics. (I have co-authored one other publication, a journal article soon to appear that I look forward to linking to when it’s out. That experience, writing with someone other than my wife, has also made me eager to collaborate more.)

Most of the book’s research had been accumulated by the time we signed a contract with Routledge in fall 2009, and the writing was done in a sustained effort between the spring of 2010 and the early winter of 2011. It’s definitely easier to write a book quickly with two authors, though having an infant child (born in late 2009) whose care both authors are responsible for providing can add more than a bit of difficulty. It also, however, provided us time away from teaching, which was technically family leave but (now I speak mainly for myself) actually freed up some extra writing time. We wrote the book mostly
one chapter at a time and passed them back and forth through cycles of editing and revision. In the final weeks, once all eight chapters had been drafted, we often worked across a coffee shop table to facilitate discussion of revisions. When the page proofs arrived a few months ago we returned there to pass them back and forth marked up in different colors of ink. We still go to that coffee shop sometimes and sit across the table from each other. Of course we’re pleased that the book is done, but we also miss those days.

Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status
Contents
1. Legitimating Television
2. Another Golden Age?
3. The Showrunner as Auteur
4. Upgrading the Situation Comedy
5. Not a Soap Opera
6. The Television Image and the Image of the Television
7. Technologies of Agency
8. Television Scholarship and/as Legitimation

What I Did on my Summer Vacation

2011-09-01T08:27:00.001-06:00

Fall is practically here. The public schools are back in business and a fresh crop of freshmen have appeared at UWM, wandering the campus in packs and wearing those lanyards they must give out with room keys and ID badges, but which no one seems to need once classes start. We don’t begin the semester until after Labor Day but my course syllabus has been ready to go for a few weeks. I’m starting now to think more clearly about what the course will actually be like. It’s an advanced new media course which I am adapting from a graduate seminar I taught last fall. I have just begun a year-long fellowship at the Center for 21st Century Studies, which is the reason I’m teaching only one course each semester in 2011-12, and on Monday I claimed the keys to a new office with a view of the city and the lake.

I love (ok, enjoy and get various rewards from) teaching, but I also love the annual summer break from teaching. From May to September I have been granted 122 happily classroom-free days. Academics get irritated when civilians think we have the summer off, but this kind of conversation is so familiar and in my experience well-meaning. Actually, I say when feeling like talking about myself, I’m kind of busier during the summer. Graduate students are hurrying to finish MA theses, sending me work to read chapter by chapter and thesis by thesis. Service is supposed to pause but it doesn’t. I worked this summer on an assessment for the large lecture course I taught for many semesters. If teaching a new course or even a modification of an old one in fall, books and articles need to be collected and ordered and requested from the reserves at the library, but only after a process of deciding which to assign. Peer-reviewing manuscripts is an all-season task, though I am still not asked to do very much of it. Research has the biggest claim on my time, and I have spent much of this summer reading, taking notes, writing and rewriting, editing, revising, looking up dates and names on Wikipedia and IMDb and Google Books, corresponding with coauthors and editors, planning future research, and more generally managing a number of ongoing projects. Since May I have been juggling work on a couple of journal articles, a couple of book chapters, a co-authored book soon to be published, and two large projects in the early stages of research. I’ve been making conference plans for fall and spring. I also spent some of my time researching a project that I decided to abandon despite having spent a lot of time thinking about it and shlepping to the library to claim ILL books (maybe it will linger in the deep archive of my mind, some day to be integrated into another project or brought back to life on its own).

Summer is also a time of leisure, though, and I always feel a tension between the need to “be productive” as an untenured prof, and the desire to enjoy the season, the welcome visits from friends and family, the outings and trips and times of recreation and fun. This makes the summer not only busy but unfortunately stressful. I know this is a “white whine” and I don’t really work for a living like the vast majority of people who toil at jobs that really feel like work all day, all week, all year. But time is finite and an afternoon at the beach sometimes, perversely, looks like a missed opportunity to “be productive.” An afternoon of “being productive” can also seem like a missed opportunity to have fun, which is after all why God gave us summer. Even supposedly multi-functional fun+productive time, like a weekday afternoon at the movies (privilege of the film scholar!), can seem like a decadent indulgence. One day in early August I was going to spend an afternoon writing an essay while my sister and brother-in-law, visiting from out of town, took our 7 year-old son to a water park. After waffling briefly I opted for the water park and was pretty glad. But at the change of seasons I always feel frustrated by the incompleteness of the summer’s work, by the inevitability of goals unmet (even if I knew they were unrealistic all along).

Despite the prevailing cultural mandate of summer exuberance, my favorite time of year lately is actually the first few weeks of January. Our campus wedges a three-week winterim session in between fall and spring, and if you don’t teach winterim (I haven’t and will avoid it until we feel like we need the money) you have a nice month-long break from the classroom. The Christmas-New Year’s week is a wash as school and daycare are closed, but the first three weeks of the year are almost perfect. The kids are occupied all day, the weather is shitty, there is no sense that January ought to include leisure, and the weekdays are free for reading and writing, which is how I prefer to spend them most of the time. But the afternoon at the movies or the long lunch can be that much more pleasurable in winterim, when the rest of the world is really at work, the grind of teaching isn’t making every week into a struggle just to get to Friday, and there is so little expectation of fun. When I say that I wish the summer would be more like the winter it’s not just that I like indoors better than outdoors and sweaters better than shorts.

The problem with the academic summertime is a problem of how to think about academic work. Academic time (at least in my experience) has to be seen as fluid and multidimensional. The interest lately in promoting “work/life” or “work/family balance” is misguided, for a number of reasons, one of which is that work and life, business and pleasure, aren't separate. (Another reason is that it depends on a gendered conception of both life/family and of work, requiring women to shoulder an unfair share of the burden of an inequitable system of academic labor, childcare, and domestic responsibility). The idea that time is spent either on business or on pleasure, and that time spent on one is stolen from the other, is deeply ideological, rooted in an ethos of productive labor and industry that ultimately serves the interests of capitalism and class stratification. It is the right-wing politicians and neoliberal culture that sees the individual academic's productivity in terms of quantifiable return on investment, and questions the value of teaching and study as an end in itself. This is the same culture that makes academics eager to demonstrate their long working hours and quantify their productivity to answer the call that higher education pay, that it be economically accountable rather than an institution worthy of pubic investment. But even putting the deep ideological problem aside, it's also wrong to think of productivity in terms of the typical quantifiable metrics of an academic worker in hours of labor or courses taught or scholarly output.

The idea that producing articles, chapters, talks, books, blog posts — and more generally work to be lines on a vita or entries in an annual report — is "being productive" is a consequence of a flawed system for qualifying academics and establishing reputation and value. We can't easily change the system, but we can change how we think about our work. It's true that publishing is a sine qua non of academic success today, and that it is unfortunately more likely than teaching to lead to many people's professional fulfillment. But quantity isn't quality, and sometimes it's more productive to spend your time taking a walk or watching TV than forcing words out of your miserably typing fingers. One really good paper should be a more impressive accomplishment than half a dozen mediocre ones. My summer’s aborted research project, which was going to be a series of brief essays on Billy Joel songs (maybe blogged, maybe to become a short book), led me to a number of really good articles and videos, and inspired me to listen to the entire catalog of a recording artist I have felt strongly (positively) about (well, until An Innocent Man, after that I can’t really take that much of him) for almost thirty years. It helped me clarify in my own mind what I find so interesting about Billy Joel (this must wait for another time), which was satisfying in itself. Another of my big new projects, a book about taste in popular culture, might accommodate some of my ideas on this topic, so this research could prove "productive" down the road. But if it isn't, I don't really care. I liked reading and listening and thinking about Billy Joel these past few months, and I refuse to see it as a waste. I refuse to force myself to write an article or chapter on this when I don't know what shape it would take, who would read it, what scholarly conversation it enters into, and whether I have enough expertise to analyze the material as I might want to and interest to see it through to completion.

Sometimes I find the most useful and rewarding scholarly experiences are these kinds of meanderings, readings in topics that I decide are wrong turns, obsessions that come and go. Some inform my work in some way, eventually, and some turn out to be diversions, hard to know. Sometimes as a media scholar you can get into something seriously for months or years, and figure out what to do with it later. This seems to be my habit. I've watched cooking shows fairly avidly for ten years, sometimes more avidly than others. This summer I wrote an essay about a Food Network show, Everyday Italian with Giada de Laurentiis, for an edited book. I didn't realize six or seven years ago when I started watching Giada that this time was ultimately to be "productive," except maybe in practical culinary ways.

My other big new project, the one I proposed in my application for a Center fellowship, is research on the early history of video games in the home and the connection between games and television especially in the 1970s and early 1980s. I have been reading up on this for almost a year, trying to discover scholarly literature on this topic (it's scant) and assessing what primary sources could prove useful in a social and cultural history of games. To the extent that my childhood experience playing Atari and Intellivision in friends' basement rec rooms informs this work, that time was also "productive." But I see this project as something I intend to spend years doing. I don't know if I will write anything this year, as I collect, read, and make notes on popular and industry press and try to get my hands on the games themselves. That’s why I also have the taste project, which is more writing-ready. Scholarship can be like slow food. I'm not just cooking a dish all day, I'm growing the vegetables, raising the hog, waiting for the wine to get to be a better age. The payoff will come much later. But even thinking of the reading and note-taking as productive is too limiting. Time I spend thinking about it while driving kids to lessons and practices and half-watching youth soccer games, while walking across campus or riding my bike to a coffee shop, or while telling friends about my work are also part of the process. And sometimes it’s more productive to take a nap or watch a baseball game or bake a cake and come back to work later.

Some of the most tedious labor of the summer was the work Elana and I did on proofs of our book Legitimating Television, which is supposed to be coming out in a couple of weeks. Some of our standard academic practices, like conforming to Chicago style, insisting on knowing the place of publication of books we cite (who needs to know?), determining the dates of film releases (you weren’t sure which North by Northwest I was talking about?), are actually counterproductive. They suck our time and energy and divert our attention from more worthwhile activities. But when you do them you’re “being productive.” The proofs required long and careful attention to small details, and this took effort and put other pursuits on hold. But we’re happy the book is coming out and eager for people to read it. It’s the product of years of “being productive” in the usual various ways, and our process in writing it will — I hope — be the toping of another blog post soon to come.

Other things I did on my summer vacation:

-Watched 2 seasons of The Good Wife, and a fair bit of thirtysomething and Parks and Rec.
-Read A Visit from the Goon Squad and House of Holes.
-Listened to Gillian Welch, The Harrow & The Harvest.
-Went to see Tree of Life at 2pm on a Thursday, and watched The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou on DVD one sunny morning.
-Read Walter Everett, "The Learned vs. the Vernacular in the Songs of Billy Joel," Contemporary Music Review 18.4 (2000): 105-129.

photos from recent summer vacations are by .michael.newman. published under CC attribution, noncommercial, no derivative works license

The Television Image and the Image of the Television

2011-05-06T15:16:00.001-06:00

Next weekend I will be at the Media in Transition 7 conference at MIT, where I am giving a paper called "The Television Image and the Image of the Television" (pdf) about flat-panel HDTV sets. This work is part of the book I have been writing with Elana Levine, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status, which we are told will be published in September (though the copyright will be 2012). The full paper has been posted as a pdf at the conference website. If you come hear me present at the conference, you will get to see lots of pretty pictures of HD television sets, like the one above from the March 2011 issue of Dwell. My paper identifies the switch from 4:3 CRT sets to 16:9 flat-panels as one facet of the wider cultural legitimation of television during the era of media convergence. It addresses the upscale and masculinized sophistication of the new sets, and their significance for TV's convergence with cinema and gaming.

Mad Men Class

2011-04-30T15:59:00.005-06:00

In the past few weeks I have begun to teach an independent study with Lynn Reed, a student in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program at Skidmore College. The topic is Mad Men: Serialized Television Narrative and Depictions of Social History in the Early 1960s (link is to the class blog). This program allows students to do courses with faculty they approach who have some expertise and interest in topics they want to study, and I'm really grateful to Lynn for getting in touch with me because I have been finding the experience rewarding and (if I can speak for her) I think she has too.

I wanted to mention this here not just to share the syllabus, which I think will be of interest to serious Mad Men viewers, but also to link to Lynn's writings on the show and related readings, and to publicize her good work. Thus far she has written about character motivation in serialized narrative, character goals in the episode "Nixon vs. Kennedy", the dislocation that comes with cultural change, Reisman's ideas about conformity as applied to Don Draper, and "cool" in the 1960s, among other topics.

The course description to follow is Lynn's. The readings and viewings were put together collaboratively.

Mad Men: Serialized Television Narrative and Depictions of Social History in the Early 1960s

The acclaimed cable television drama Mad Men depicts the process of cultural change in early 1960s America through narratives of the personal and professional lives of men and women in a New York City advertising agency.

The series two most central protagonists, creative director Don Draper and secretary-turned-writer Peggy Olson, are attempting to:
-re-make themselves and re-tell their own stories,
-while working in an advertising industry that defines desires and creates narratives to sell products,
-at a time in which the country is re-making itself, re-telling the story of what it means to be an American and who can participate in the telling of that story

In this independent study, we will examine both the social history of the early 1960’s, and the ways in which this serialized television narrative tells the story of cultural change in this period (1960 – 1965).

From that examination, we will also look at larger questions. Contemporary politics and popular culture debate the meaning of “the sixties” through broad symbols and shorthand references. Does this study of Mad Men and the social history of the early 1960s tell us something about the current cultural fault lines that are seen as resulting from “the sixties”? Can it tell us something about which cultural changes have been accepted and absorbed by American culture and which are still up for debate?

Reading and Viewing Assignments:

The book Mad Men: Dream Come True TV, a collection of scholarly essays on Mad Men edited by Gary R. Edgerton, will be published April 26, 2011. The essays will be assigned reading and integrated with the syllabus as appropriate. (MN note: this is the language as we drafted it in the syllabus; this book has now been published and I just got my copy this week.)

Week 1-2 -- Overview of Television Storytelling & Serialized Narrative

“From Beats to Arcs: Towards a Poetics of Television Narrative”, Michael Z. Newman
Storytelling in Film and Television, Kristin Thompson
Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen, Glen Creeber

Mad Men episodes:
1.6 “Babylon”
2.7 “The Gold Violin”
2.12 “The Mountain King”
3.6 “Guy Walks in to an Advertising Agency”
3.11 “The Gypsy and the Hobo”
4.4 “The Rejected”

Week 3-4 -- The “Crisis of Conformity” in the late ‘50s

The Conquest of Cool, Thomas Frank, chapters 1-3
The Lonely Crowd, David Riesman
“The White Negro”, Norman Mailer
The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment, Barbara Ehrenreich

Mad Men episodes:
1.1 “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”
1.8 “The Hobo Code”
2.11 “The Jet Set”
3.7 “Seven Twenty Three”
4.7 “The Suitcase”

Week 5-6 – Changes in Advertising and American Culture

Conquest of Cool, chapters 4 – 8
The Hidden Persuaders, Vance Packard
A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America, Lizabeth Cohen
The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida, chapters 1-2

Mad Men episodes:
3.2 “Love Among the Ruins”
3.13 “Shut the Door. Have a Seat”
4.5 “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword”
4.7 “The Suitcase”
4.11 “Chinese Wall”

Week 7-9 – Feminine Mystique and the early Women’s Movement

The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, Stephanie Coontz
Sex and the Single Girl, Helen Gurley Brown
Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown, Jennifer Scanlon
Shaky Ground: The Sixties and Its Aftershocks, Alice Echols, chapters 1-4

Mad Men Episodes:
1.3 “Ladies’ Room”
1.13 “The Wheel”
2.6 “Maidenform”
3.8 “Souvenir”
4.9 “The Beautiful Girls”

Week 10-12 – Political Change and Social Change / Re-telling the American Story in the Early 1960s

Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, Todd Gitlin, chapters 1-7
Port Huron Statement
Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963, Taylor Branch

Mad Men Episodes:
1.12 “Nixon vs. Kennedy”
2.13 “Meditations in an Emergency”
3.3 “My Old Kentucky Home”
3.12 “The Grown-Ups”
4.13 “Tomorrowland”

Indie Promotion

2011-04-07T07:33:00.003-06:00

The Columbia University Press website has published some of my work online, and I just wanted to alert those of you not following my every thought and link on twitter to these two items:

1. Indie's introduction has been posted for all to see. It begins:

Like so many cultural categories, indie cinema is slippery. The same term refers not only to a diverse body of films spanning more than two decades, from Stranger Than Paradise (1984) to Synecdoche, New York (2008) and beyond, but also a cultural network that sustains them. This book is about American indie cinema as a film culture that comprises not only movies but also institutions—distributors, exhibitors, festivals, and critical media—within which movies are circulated and experienced, and wherein an indie community shares expectations about their forms and meanings.

To read the rest, click on over.

2. The CUP blog has posted an interview with me. It starts off like this:

Question: Why “indie” rather than “independent”?

Michael Newman: At some point, maybe in the 1990s, indie became a kind of catch-all for describing edgy, youthful, subcultural, or alternative culture...

The rest is on the CUP blog.

Indie: An American Film Culture

2011-03-22T19:17:00.003-06:00

My book has been published! Woo hoo! It was on the table of the book room at the recent Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in New Orleans, where at least eight people got to take a copy home. I'm told the date retailers can sell the thing is April 12, though they are taking orders. If you want to buy it directly from CUP, follow the link above and use the promo code INDNE for a 30% discount.

Columbia UP's publicist emailed me to see if I can help promote the book by posting to listservs, alerting my social networks, etc. Yes I can do that!

This post is going to take you BEHIND THE SCENES of the thrilling production process of an ACADEMIC MONOGRAPH!!! I have been saving some of these tidbits for years, carefully guarding them until this day.

-The idea for the book was suggested to me circa 2002 by my graduate school advisor, David Bordwell at a restaurant in Madison called The Saz that no longer exists. I wanted to write a dissertation about narrative theory and in particular about character, and he thought independent cinema would offer a good body of work within which to explore my ideas. These things take time. The dissertation was completed in 2005, and in the meantime I had a child and found my interests expanding into television and new media and taste and cultural studies. I have found that parenthood is a great motivator. I waste much less time when someone else is looking after my kid while I'm supposed to be working. People think having a baby around must kill your productivity, and maybe it's my male privilege speaking, but I have found it to be the opposite.

-The title changed a few times. When I proposed the book to CUP it was to be called Indiewood: Storytelling in American Independent Cinema. I changed it when I saw storytelling becoming only one aspect of the work rather than a singular central focus. I also didn't want the book to have the same title as Geoff King's Indiewood, USA, and I saw "Indiewood" as too specific a term, leaving out what some see as the "true" indies. My wife, Elana, suggested the title Indie. I'm pretty sure the An American Film Culture part was mine. At one point I wanted to rename the book Home is Where the Art Is, which is the title of a chapter about film festivals and art house theaters and a headline from a NYT article about independent cinema from 1989. My editor at the press thought it was a bad idea, and I think she was right.

-As in any long-simmering project, this book is the product of an abiding personal interest and a connection with many events in my life. In some ways this is the ultimate expression of my youthful cinephilia, which in most ways I have outgrown. When I was in my late teens and early twenties I was eager to be initiated into the world of serious film passion. The first film I ever saw at a film festival was Jarmusch's Mystery Train, at the 1989 Toronto festival with the director and Screamin' Jay Hawkins in attendance. I worked managing the candy counter of the Carleton Cinema around that time, where Do the Right Thing and sex, lies, and videotape were playing (along with Jesus of Montreal, 36 Filette, The Little Thief, as well as some more popular titles like When Harry Met Sally...). After moving to New York in 1994 I became a pretty passionate follower of independent film, regularly spending weekend afternoons at the Angelika. In some ways the book is an effort to make sense of one kind of cinema that was part of what made me want to become a film -- later media -- scholar. I have never thought of myself as a fan of independent films per se, and I have probably been a bigger fan of studio-era Hollywood and some foreign cinema (at times, Godard, Bergman, Antonioni, Ozu, Kiarostami, 1980s Hong Kong action films). But having seen so many of the canonical indie films, the ones like sex, lies and Pulp Fiction, at an impressionable age, the centrality of this form of cinema to my conception of artistic film practice was pretty important. Later I would see this in a context of a film culture producing distinction for its elite audience, but having a critical perspective on indie's social functions hardly diminishes my feeling for some of these films.

-Maybe some processes are quicker and easier, but my revision process was slow and painful. Between proposal and proofs stages, there were at least four readers who wrote reports. The shape of the project shifted as my interests developed toward more of a concern with social issues and less with narrative. I like how it turned out, but it took a long time to get there. One thing I'm especially pleased with is how Indie balances two senses of culture: as works to be analyzed, and as social ways of knowing and experiencing. A film culture functions in both of these senses, and I try to combine an analysis of indie's value as a cultural category, and its coherence as a body of films calling on a coherent set of expectations about form and meaning. When I say film culture, I always mean both of these things.

-I am pretty pleased by the cover. I suggested images from Lost in Translation and Juno, and for various reasons the press preferred Juno. One reason I like seeing her on the cover is that Juno is both a film I liked a lot, and a great example of the contentiousness of indie as a cultural category. As I discuss in the final chapter, Juno is an example of a movie that some members of the indie community sought to de-authenticate, to remove from consideration as indie because of its heavy marketing by Fox Searchlight, its mainstream appeal, its lack of indie bona fides. One of my central claims about indie cinema is that it's a slippery, contested category, and that it can only be understood as it is used within indie film culture. I would not exclude it because it is so widely thought to belong, but the efforts of some critics and bloggers to distance themselves from Juno (and of many people I have talked to personally) reveals much about the values sustaining independent cinema. I suggested handwritten for the type but the designer did it better than that, and gave it more of a DIY scissors cut-out look.

This is the Lost in Translation image I had suggested. Pretty but not really fun. Related: I use the term bokeh in the chapter where I discuss Lost in Translation to describe the effect of out-of-focus abstract shapes of lights like we see in this image. That's one of my favorite words in the book, just cuz.

-Some people have asked how it feels to have a book published. It's kind of like asking how it feels to be 39 years old. I knew it was coming for a long time, and it's not that different from before. But publish means to make public, so now I have this sense that what I have done is out there and outside of my control, and I like that. It means my work is done. It belongs to you now.

Free TV? Television File-Sharing, Media Convergence and Cultural Status

2011-03-14T15:57:00.011-06:00

Update November 2, 2011: The longer and peer-reviewed version of this essay has been published online in Television & New Media, DOI 10.1177/1527476411421350. If you want to quote or cite this, I recommend the TV&NM publication.

I gave this paper on Saturday at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in New Orleans. It's an elaboration of some ideas I wrote awhile back in Flow. I have been researching this topic for a couple of years and the 2011 conference gave me the opportunity to turn it into something more substantial; there's a longer version soon to be submitted to a journal. This is work in progress, and your comments are welcome.

Television has always been free, and the cultural status of television—despite shifts in recent years—endures as a product of the over-the-air model. Free TV is of course commercial, and we pay indirectly, but in the digital age a new kind of free TV has emerged which is removed from the commercial circuit. Television shared as files among peers using BitTorrent and other online means, making TV freer, in some ways, than it ever was. P2P TV is one of many developments in our era of convergence prompting a renewal of television’s place in the popular imagination. Thus my title is meant in two ways. P2P TV is free to the consumer, but it also promises to free television from its identity, from old modes of viewing rooted in earlier technologies. By considering its conflicted cultural implications, my aim today is to understand TV file-sharing as one term in the negotiation of television’s value during the era of digital convergence.

Much has been written about file-sharing over the past decade. [For starters I recommend Lessig, Vaidhyanathan, Gillespie, Litman, Strangelove, and Green & Jenkins in Holt & Perren.] By and large, however, this work has focused especially on music and movies, the two forms of media that appear to be most threatened economically by the disruptions posed by file-sharing. Much of this writing is premised on media industries selling to the consumer. Record labels and movie studios can claim lost revenue if sales of CDs or DVDs are replaced by free P2P circulation. Television shows, unlike recordings and films, are not most often sold directly to the audience. Despite the widespread file-sharing of television content, then, and despite an evidently high degree of concern in the TV industry, the place of TV in analyses of piracy has been marginal.

I see three ways in which file-sharing challenges conceptions of television, rooted in the era of network broadcasting.

First, file-sharing is part of the legitimation of television. In its traditional identity rooted in the network era, television’s cultural status was as feminized mass culture, as a threat to intellectual culture, childhood development, and social cohesion. In some ways the introduction of television into P2P networks, alongside other technological developments, bespeaks the high value of some forms of TV to media consumers eager to locate and select episodes and to devote time and resources to their acquisition and experience. The availability of TV series alongside movies and music is a factor in the rising legitimacy of TV, now seen as equivalent to other media at least in the context of some forms of convergent distribution. The kinds of television shared in P2P networks tends to be the aestheticized, scripted prime time comedies and dramas. Users of P2P networks might come in all shapes and sizes, but the practice is typically linked to youth, masculinity, class, and technological sophistication. One seldom finds the less legitimate and more ephemeral forms of television, feminized and devalued genres such as daytime talk shows and local news, circulating in P2P networks.

File-sharing is further legitimating by transforming the audience for television from supposedly passive viewers into active users. The ability of users to program their own viewing rather than being “slaves to the schedule,” and the possibility of watching television shows purged of commercials, function to legitimate television. Sharing files of episodes is one means of the viewer becoming an advertising-avoiding television programmer. Thus the P2P distribution of television is one among a cluster of technologies of agency, making TV more culturally respectable by masculinizing it, articulating TV with activity and discernment rather than the more feminized and passive characteristics that earlier defined it.

[Aside: TV's legitimation during the era of convergence is the topic of the book I wrote with Elana Levine, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status. It should be in print from Routledge by the end of the year.]

Second, file-sharing is located in a space of transition from television’s status as a public good to a private good. The culture of file-sharing associates television content with the broadcasting model of distribution, wherein the television text has no price. In some ways file-sharing confirms the value of television as ephemeral and disposable even as it arrests “flow” to make possible sharing TV shows as files. One contradiction of television circulating for free among P2P networks is that this form of distribution at once denies and affirms the value of the text. On one hand, like broadcasts, the shared text is a public good which no one buys or sells. On the other hand, the television industry sees this form of circulation as a potential crisis of lost revenue. The use of P2P networks for television file-sharing reveals an instability in the valuation of TV as it shifts from being a public good, freely available to anyone as it was during the network era, to a private good, available only to audiences who actively choose to enter into terms of commercial exchange.

A third way in which file-sharing complicates traditional conceptions of TV is by extracting the circulation of television content from local or national communities. Media corporations are still defined by national intellectual property and regulatory regimes. The availability of shows from one country in another was once a matter of licensing agreements between firms. Now viewers interested in seeing series from abroad have fast and easy access, and online fandoms congregate as global communities. This new availability has awakened and attuned audiences to the temporality of transnational media flows. Discourses of P2P TV communities reveal a sense of entitlement to television and a frustration with structures that slow or forbid transmission of American shows to viewers in other countries. The transition from local/national to global distribution of TV requires new conceptions of television’s value, thinking of it now as a cosmopolitan transnational culture.

I want to consider these tensions of value between low and high, public and private, and national and global by looking at practices of P2P TV consumption as represented in the online discourses of TV file-sharing communities such as message boards, which frequently make arguments in favor of file-sharing in self-consciously value-laden and often ethical terms. The practical ethical theories of P2P users offer evidence of ways of thinking about television and its cultural status as convergent technologies introduce problems and possibilities never before faced by television consumers.

P2P users might reason that it is ethical to download content not otherwise or legally available. Many believe downloading is justified when one has paid for the content in another format. Some rationales might justify TV, music, and movies alike. But users also establish specific norms for television. In a nightly.net forum, a commenter explains, “I personally don’t hold a lot of guilt for using BitTorrent to download shows. Everything I’ve downloaded…is something I’ve technically paid for in my satellite bill.” Sharers also insist that DVR recordings and downloads ethically equivalent. The difference between recording a show oneself using a VCR or DVR and skipping commercials and downloading a commercial-free file via BitTorrent is regarded as ethically insignificant. In the same comments thread, a user responds, “If you pay for cable and have DVR, then downloading a cable show is no different from recording and skipping through the commercials.” The nature of broadcast television’s business model makes sharing different from music or movies, especially when considering network programming. As one Digg user explains, “The networks BROADCAST their shows, sending them out FOR FREE into the air all over the country. How can they claim that I am stealing if they are giving it away for free?”

Avoiding the cost of cable or satellite subscription or even of owning a television might be paramount. There might also be value found in having a way to watch TV without some of the traditional cultural associations constructing television as degraded and feminized. A reddit discussion on the question “How many redditors don’t watch TV?” inspired a number of telling confessions from community members. The legitimation of the convergence era has opened up new opportunities for television appreciation while distancing a new conception of TV from its old cultural construction. Consider these statements:

-I don’t watch TV but I do download some TV shows.

-I watch a few TV shows but I mostly download them so you could say I watch Laptop.

-My TV is called Pirate’s Bay.

-I was going to ask if torrents of TV shows counted.
No waiting for the local station to pick up a program
No loud annoying commercials
You can download an entire season at a time.

The television reflected in these comments is clearly a residual conception rooted in the technologies of an earlier period. The superiority of new technologies is given as self-evident and as distinguishing a youthful, masculine, and technologically adept community from the mainstream. Many qualify that if they watch TV shows it is not really watching TV. By this logic, file-sharing ameliorates some of television’s basic problems. Within the community of file-sharers, overcoming these issues is good, indeed, doing so has the potential to recuperate television from its low status and make watching TV more legitimate.

Even with DVRs and other legally legitimate technologies, there are obstacles standing in the way of some consumers accessing TV content on their own terms. Shows are not released in all countries simultaneously, and in many countries some content is not available at all. Legal downloads are encrusted in DRM, inhibiting portability and archival value. Media companies release their content in “windows;” DVD content is offered at a later window than transmission on broadcast, cable, or satellite. Webisodes and streaming video are routinely geo-blocked: some sites will work only in some territories. Users abroad trying to access Hulu are greeted with a “not available in your region” message.

File-sharing is thus especially prevalent in countries where access to American shows is limited by windowing and geo-blocking, especially in English-speaking countries such as Canada and Australia. Canadian television viewers have been motivated to start Facebook groups like “TV Fans Against Hulu’s Geo-Blocking Policy” and blogs like “I Hate Hulu.” A reddit thread inspired one Canadian commenter to exclaim, “Fuck Hulu! Bittorrent lives!”

The rationales for geo-blocking may not be evident to users who feel deserving of access to popular culture. A Hulu vice-president claims that “Canadians consider it their ‘birthright’ to have access to Hulu." Geo-blocking is one among many forms of Canadians’ deprivation of popular culture, and whether in the name of IP agreements or cultural protectionism, the experience of Canadians can be characterized by frustration and resentment over the inability to share a common culture with those beyond their borders.* File-sharing ameliorates this sense of being wronged by cultural institutions. Insofar as it finds ways around the legally legitimate obstacles to access, then, P2P file-sharing in Canada and elsewhere is constructed as ethically legitimate because of a sense of justified entitlement to popular culture, as well as a sense of the illegitimacy of this access’s denial. This returns us to a sometimes lost sense of popular culture as culture belonging to the people rather than the corporations who produce and disseminate it. Preserving the people’s access to their culture in the face of corporate and state interference might be a more ethical gesture than preserving intellectual property rights in the name of profits and national sovereignty. By framing TV as popular culture in this sense, rather than as disposable trash or commodified mass culture, the communities of TV fans downloading their shows express a valuation of television.

Because of Australia’s geographical distance from the Anglophone countries, pre-Internet, Australians waited many months or even longer for foreign shows to be seen there, and many series or seasons are still not available Thus one Australian commenter on a tv.com forum asserts, “If your local TV stations don't want to keep up with the latest episodes of whatever it is then shows deserve to be downloaded."

Thanks to file-sharing, Australian fans of shows like Battlestar Galactica are able to participate in fan communities as episodes air in the U.S. This has allowed Australians to overcome some of the distance previously felt from foreign cultures. But when official BSG webisodes are geo-blocked, viewers feel the same frustration as the Canadians. This is especially troubling to viewers avoiding spoilers. The global circulation of media makes simultaneity more imperative to passionate audiences, and this too drives P2P sharing as an ethical imperative. Because spoiler-avoidance functions as an ethic of fan communities, distribution infrastructures denying global simultaneity are effectively spoiling not only the plot, but also an ethical contract among media companies and fans. This helps explain why Australia has more P2P TV sharing per capita than any other nation. (For more on the Australian example, see Tama Leaver, "Watching Battlestar Galactica in Australia and the Tyranny of Digital Distance".)

This consideration of TV file-sharing reveals a number of new positive valuations of television in the context of digital convergence: as more culturally legitimate than it had been, and as a form of global popular culture which finds a hospitable site of community cohesion on the Internet. At the same time, however, the residual reputation of TV as a form of low culture, and the efforts of media corporations to extract revenue from every experience of media, also inform the valuation of television evident in the case of file-sharing.

Because television, unlike movies and music, has long been an example of a public good, because—iTunes aside—the TV consumer is not in the habit of paying per show, the online sharing of television also is marked by distinctions of value which are less flattering to TV, and which in some ways are inconsistent or contradictory with those more positive formulations just considered. The best illustration of this is the sense among file-sharing participants that TV sharing is more ethical than movie or music sharing. In other words, the value of movies and music is constructed in distinction to the value of TV, but in this instance value is monetary rather than cultural or communal. Nevertheless, cultural hierarchy is evident in such judgments.

The gadget blog Gizmodo offers one clear formulation of this relative valuation as a “Pirate’s Code of Conduct” for file-sharing, prescribing formal ethical norms for its technologically sophisticated, masculinized readership. (As a “Pirate’s” code, it is crafted in a stylized lingo.)

"TV is to be downloaded, movies are to be attended when a man returns to shore. If ye aren't a Neilsen family, what you watch doesn't matter for ratings anyway. Since advertisers pay by rating, it's a theft-less crime. Movies, on the other hand, do see profits of gold and jewels. So support independent/foreign film in the theaters, and save the action flicks with high production values and many beautiful explosions for the big screen, too. Hollywood romantic comedies? They are for plundering (in secret)."

The gendered and classed conception of media makes for a set of downloading distinctions keyed not only to ideas about media economics, but also about the relative value of genres and formats depending on placement on the cultural hierarchy. It also strategically ignores the profits sought by TV studios and networks from DVD sales among other ancillary windows, as well as cable subscriptions.

A nightly.net commenter claims to feel no guilt from downloading TV shows, as he skips commercials while watching using his DVR. But movies are different: he will only download them “in the rare case it’s not playing in any theaters in my location.”

Similarly, a Don't Make Me Steal manifesto circulating lately sets clear values for television and movies. The point of this online petition is to encourage practices for media corporations to follow to make legitimate alternatives preferable to file-sharing. Among these is reasonable pricing of media products: making a television series cost 1/3 the price of a film, insisting that content be advertising-free. As we have seen, the conception of TV as free of charge has a strong effect on the ethical calculation involved in P2P sharing of television. Users find it hard to accept downloading of TV shows as free-riding or stealing, and often view advertising-avoidance in positive rather than negative moral terms.

I have argued today that television in this new context of media convergence is contradictory and unstable, caught between its traditional and emergent identities. The network era might have given way to convergence, but the medium is understood in the popular imagination according to terms drawing from both periods. Old ways of knowing cannot be cast aside as quickly as old technologies and industrial practices. The file-sharing of TV content is thus a practice and discourse wherein television’s cultural value can be contested and reassessed as the medium’s identity is renewed.

*My discussion of Canadians' experiences of geo-blocking draws from Ira Wagman and Peter Urquhart, “This Content is Not Available in Your Region: Geo-Blocking Culture in Canada,” in Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creative Canadian Culture Online, ed. Rosemary Coombe, Darren Wershler-Henry, and Martin Zelinger (Toronto: U of Toronto P, forthcoming).

Faves, 2010

2010-12-31T07:32:00.000-06:00

My year has been defined more than anything by being a parent of a very young child, a baby boy born in late November 2009. I saw many of my favorite movies of 2009 on video in early 2010 (A Serious Man and Inglourious Basterds were among them but The Hurt Locker was a disappointment, and none of what I have seen of the '09 vintage impresses me more than Up), and very few of what I expect to be my favorite movies of 2010. I also played a lot of video games, but few of the year's releases. This is in such contrast to earlier times in my life, when I had no television or gaming console, and would see several films a week, and not infrequently more than one a day in the theater. Over the years I have become just as interested in television as an object of study as cinema, and have been spending more home time with TV than movies for several years. With two kids and busy semester business for much of the year, in addition to a number of active research projects, this has left barely an hour a day of audiovisual media consumption in the evenings, which is enough to keep up with a big handful of shows but not a very satisfying condition for consuming motion picture features. I'd like to seem a bit ashamed of how much I have given up watching movies, but I have a hard time seeing greater value in them than I find in television shows.

And more than any other form of media, it's the internet that got the largest share of my attention in 2010. If I had to say what was my favorite thing of all, it would probably be the web in all its various forms and in the many ways I have accessed it -- MacBook Pro, iPod touch, iPad, computer terminals in public places. I was reluctant to become one of those new gadget enthusiasts, the bleeding-edge tech geeks so ridiculously enamored of mere devices. But I often feel excessively for the iPad, which I got late in the summer. It's my best toy since the Wii. It's a portable TV for showing YouTube videos to the baby, an easy way of checking in on email and Twitter from the couch of away from home, and a great format for reading many kinds of prose. I still use an iPod touch all the time too, for reading in bed and carrying in my pocket, and for music much more than the iPad. I would want to give either one of them up.

Of course much of my time this year was spent with culture of the past, and I'm keeping this list 2010 only. As in previous installments, what follows is in no particular order.

***

Definitely Twitter, certainly not Facebook. Amanda Klein recently wrote a very nice appreciation of why Twitter is so appealing and so useful. Someone said Facebook is for the people you used to know, Twitter is for the people you want to know. Twitter is amusing, informative, and sometimes outrageous. I sometimes go to it for advice and conversation, but more than that I find it offers a continual connection with a cluster of overlapping public communities of shared interest. I stay with Facebook because I care about many of the people I keep in touch with there, but I always wish there were a better way to keep us connected.

Terriers was my favorite new show of the season, and I wasn't surprised or even really devastated by its cancellation, which seemed inevitable. I admired its crackling dialog and subtle characterizations, and it eventually made me forget that Donal Logue was the title character in The Tao of Steve. The theme song by Robert Duncan made us dance on the couch once a week. We'll miss you.

Devour is a web video aggregator, a sort of curated best-of-YouTube site where there is always something worth watching. It has an appealing layout, with blurred thumbnails on which simple titles are superimposed. I follow it in an RSS reader, but increasingly RSS reader interfaces are losing their appeal as new forms of aggregation do what they do better. Devour is a good example, as the visual experience of a grid of selected videos beats the listed headlines or river of news you find in feedreaders.

I'm really fascinated by user-generated movie posters, which John August blogged about as "unsheets" (a play on "onesheets"). These are especially intriguing when they are especially minimalist and geometric, or just graphically simple and spare. They often call on your familiarity with a text, but they are also often highly suggestive and appetizing, making the viewer eager to know more. See also minimal movie posters and minimal TV series posters. I guess part of what makes these so arresting is that they're so different from the official posters issued by publicity departments. They might not effectively sell films and television shows to the most desirable audiences, but they allow us to imagine how visual culture might be different if it approached audiences differently.

Girl Talk, All Day. Girl Talk is all about the culture clashes inherent in popular music, making white music more dangerous and black music more palatable to white people. I find it totally audacious and inspiring, and I don't tire of listening even long after the most original and shocking moments have become familiar.

That Rube Goldberg OK Go video, "This Too Shall Pass" (see this interview for more).

30 Rock, which still makes me laugh every time. Honorable mention, among the sitcoms, to Modern Family. I have tried watching Community and Parks & Rec, and I know you probably think I'm lame for saying this but, they irritate me and I don't find them all that funny.

Mad Men, whose fourth season was as insanely watchable and engrossing as the first three. I'm eager to rewatch on DVD to pay more attention to Megan and Faye, and to appreciate the delicacy with which the story of Don's return to middle-class family life was unfolded. The scene of Don's return to Anna Draper's house, when he tells his kids that Dick refers to him, was especially memorable. Zosia Mamet as Joyce, Peggy's friend in the photo dept at Life magazine, was always fascinating, even more so given that the same actress also had quite different roles on United States of Tara and Parenthood.

Mallory’s Clothes, a compendium of screencaps from episodes of Family Ties. I'm fascinated by the use of screencaps in a kind of vernacular media criticism and appreciation, extending the apparatus of scholarly analysis to ordinary folks. The appreciation of the visuals of this 1980s sitcom strikes me as deeply loving and real.

Nicholson Baker on video games in the New Yorker.

The meta ending of The Hills, a gesture of real fakery in an increasingly unsuccessful representation of fake reality.

In Treatment's third season, especially the genius casting of Amy Ryan as Paul's new shrink Adele who's so hard to read, and Irrfan Khan as Sunil, a patient from Calcutta who wins Paul's admiration and affection but to his own selfish ends.

Parenthood is one of the few network dramas I ever look forward to these days, except I don’t like the whole show, just parts and things it could be -- I like Dax Shepard as a comical leading man type (Crosby) and Sarah Ramos in the Angela Chase role (Haddie) much more than Peter Krause and Lauren Graham, both of them too familiar from earlier roles (I wonder if Nate or Lorelai would have any patience for these two), love classic cute kid Jabbar of course, don’t buy Craig T. Nelson as a Berkeley type, hate the overuse of communal happy endings and little victories you know the network execs love and the writers find tiresome. I think what I really like is that it reminds me of the Zwick and Herskovitz dramas like thirtysomething, My So-Called Life, and Once & Again that I wish were still on the air.

I liked the stoner roommate on Accidentally on Purpose and the curly-haired Jewish kid on Huge, two shows I enjoyed watching occasionally and without paying that much attention.

Pants on the Ground. Best thing about a fairly terrible season of Idol.

Survivor All-Stars was good entertainment, and was especially enjoyable through the filter of snarky Twitter fans like @fymaxwell. Twitter has put "appointment television" back on the agenda, though it seems many of the shows people like to watch all at once come in for some considerable mockery (I'm thinking of The Oscars as well as other awards shows and reality competitions). I generally avoid this stuff not just because I usually really like the shows I watch, but also because we aren't giving up time-shifting so quickly.

The Olympics, especially curling, held my attention last winter. I wish there were more curling on TV at other times. The World Cup was equally consuming. I seem to focus my attention on the aesthetics of sports as much as the play, and with the World Cup I get fascinated by the difference between sports style at home and abroad. For instance, check out the typography on the Italian kit. I was delighted by the vuvuzelas and all the bourgeois consternation they caused. It's always interesting to encounter differing gender norms, as when seeing men like Sergio Ramos in headbands, or the Cameroonian Samuel Eto’o's form-fitting jersey.

Belle & Sebastian, Write about Love. The same catchy melodic lines and melancholy lyrics, the same vocal harmonies and inventive instrumentations familiar from earlier recordings, but now with indelible guest vocals by Norah Jones and Carey Mulligan. I like how the band has moved toward more female vocals but without changing much of what makes Stuart Murdoch's songs so original and catchy.

Movies in Frames, a tumblr blog to which people submit four frames stacked one on top of the other from a film. Sometimes these remind me of a movie I liked by recalling some of the most memorable or arresting images. But just as often they give the impression of having seen an interesting film I probably won't ever see. And they appreciate the qualities of movies as a pictorial art.

The Perfect Getaway

O Cheiro do Ralo (Drained)

Moonstruck

A Woman is a Woman

Molly Young on immersive retail in The Believer, about the aesthetics of stores like Hollister.

Lone Star, a great pilot, really wish it had the chance to become a great show. And thanks for the Mumford & Sons.

The Lady Gaga profile in New York by Vanessa Grigoriadis. I've been listening to Lady Gaga all year. My kids like her too. I still find her videos pretty fascinating and her Larry King interview was amusing, but I find that underneath the pastiche of Madonna and the performance of celebrity is a quality of classic songcraft and vocal performance missing from much of today's pop. When a Twitter friend asked who people thought we'd still be listening to in 25 from among today's artists, I didn't think long before naming Lady Gaga. I already feel like Bad Romance has been stuck in my head for 20 years.

Damages, Martin Short and Campbell Scott in particular as morally compromised men embroiled in scandal.

The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest and its two predecesors, which I read on an iPod touch in a pretty brief period of time. Great character, impressive plotting, sometimes preposterous, unimpressive prose style. I like reading on the iPod because the screen is so small you can turn pages frequently and it feels like perpetual progress.

xkcd, the only comic strip I never miss.

Treme, which started slow and seemed populated by an unnecessary number of obnoxious male characters, but worked its way up to a pretty poignant ending celebrating the human spirit and the vitality of New Orleans culture. The most memorable sequence for me was the montage in the finale set to "My Indian Red."

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, visually exuberant, and very Torontonian.

The Imperfectionists, a network narrative about the news biz.

Arcade Fire's video "The Wilderness Downtown." I like the album but not as much as the hype made me want to, and as rock music meditations on suburbia go, I still like Billy Joel's Captain Jack.

I don't think I've seen her work in person, but I was glad to read anything about Marina Abramovic at MoMA, like the writeup by Arthur Danto in the NYT.

The Social Network didn't seem like it could have been the best film of the year, but it's images and narrative have stuck with me, and I saw so few films in the theater that I guess it's a fave. I mean, I liked it much more than Eat Pray Love or The Kids are Alright. I still wonder if it would have made any impression at all if it weren't about Facebook -- if the company in the movie were something no one has heard of. I think it would be really boring, but maybe Facebook represents something interesting enough that making a fairly pedestrian movie about it can tap into something vital.

I like the Facebook like button. I wish the whole world were covered in those thumbs you could click on to indicate your approval. Ever since the like button appeared, I find myself in situations in which it would be nice to have the option to just like, and engage no further. People often gripe that there ought to be a dislike button, but I appreciate any effort to keep the internet and the world for that matter civil. (I do not like the things the Facebook like button represents re Facebook's business model, its notion of community, its eagerness to sell my data to advertisers, etc.)

I have a bunch of favorite iPad apps and I'm not that eager to go on about them, but I'll mention a few: Flipboard, Note Taker HD, GoodReader, and Reeder. All are ways of reading certain kinds of things -- Flipboard and Reeder for news, blog, and social network content, NoteTaker and GoodReader for PDF documents. One of my most important uses of the iPad is to read (and annotate) PDFs.

Finally, some favorite blogs or blog-like sites, God bless you all, and here's to oodles of good pictures and words in 2011:
The Awl, News for TV Majors, Antenna, Flow, Ludic Despair, Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style, This Recording, Kottke, Marginal Revolution, Torontoist, Waxy, Boing Boing, By Ken Levine, Seriocity, Observations on Film Art, Just TV, The Film Doctor, flickr blog, The Big Picture, Language Log, Uni Watch, Abstract City, James Fallows, Wordyard, Collision Detection, HRO, Film Studies for Free, Girish, Judgmental Observer, Cultural Learnings, The Gurgling Cod, Torrent Freak,The Extratextuals, Press Start to Drink, longreads, The Browser, and a few more fun tumblrs for good measure: this isn't happiness, Unhappy Hipsters, and Selleck Waterfall Sandwich. Clicking that last link is one recommended way to ring in a new year with a smile and a good feeling about what's possible when just about anyone can put just about anything in public.

See you next year!

"The Attention-Span Myth"

2010-11-22T06:47:00.005-06:00

Virginia Heffernan contacted me a couple of weeks ago abouth a piece she was writing on attention spans. She asked if I would answer some emailed questions and I said sure. Yesterday her column appeared in the New York Times Magazine, "The Attention-Span Myth," with a citation of my article in Media Culture & Society, "New Media, Young Audiences, and Discourses of Attention: From Sesame Street to 'Snack Culture.'" My article isn't freely available to read online, but if you email me (mznewman37 at gmail) I'll be glad to send you a copy.

I spent a couple of hours corresponding with VH and she didn't quote me at all, which is a bit disappointing but not surprising. I was aware that sources often wonder why so little of what they tell reporters makes it into print, and I was really only hoping for a phrase or two. But I spent more than a few minutes on this so I figure it might as well be published here on the blog. I wrote most it trying to sound like a quote from a media scholar in a NYT article, but not the kind in an article on spaghetti tacos.

The following is pasted from three separate emails I wrote. This isn't everything I wrote, and I'm not reproducing the messages these respond to, so this might have some of the qualities of an overheard half of a phone conversation.

from my email #1, which I sent with my article attached:

My thoughts, in brief, are that we blame media for harming our attention without having very compelling evidence that this is so, and that this fits within a larger pattern of ascribing harmful effects to media, especially those aimed at young audiences, like children's television and music videos. But I guess you're supposed to ask me questions? Looking forward!

from my email #2 in response to a message containing a number of questions about attention spans:

Part of what I have to say I have already written about. We used to use "attention span" mainly to refer to children's abilities relative to adults. Everyone knows children are worse than adults at paying attention to some things. Thus the problems with sitting still in church/school, and the praise of kids who are good at doing this for being smart or well brought up. In my research I found that after Sesame Street had been on the air for a few years, the term migrated from mainly educational and child-related contexts to broader ones. The popular press circulated the technique of shaping media to suit children's habits of attention (which was how Sesame Street's "magazine" format was discussed), and this got turned around by experts and media feeding off of them. Now the idea was that television harms children's attention, or the whole of society's attention.

I should say I'm a media scholar and not a psychologist, and I am not the most competent person to discuss attention/attention span as a psychological or cognitive concept. I study the social circulation of ideas about media. But from what I have read, "attention span" is a term with no technical meaning. It could be a good example of a lay theory -- a widely held idea that may have little basis in science.

from my email #3 answering some of the initial questions I didn't respond to in #2, and follwing VH's encouragement to keep writing:

We are mistaken if we think that attention is a virtue and distraction is a vice. Sometimes it's intensely pleasurable and productive to be absorbed totally in an activity like reading, watching a movie or TV show, or playing New Super Mario Bros. Wii. When I'm writing I like to eliminate distraction as much as possible. But some forms of media (and life) call on a different mode of experience. I have always loved The Price is Right but these days usually when I get to watch it I'm looking after my kids. If the baby cries I pick him up and take him away to be fed or changed. A lot of radio and TV is made to be experienced with our attention divided, and the pleasures are often casual and repetitive, short bursts over a long term. A contestant wins a car and is overcome with exuberance, and Drew Carey breaks into a huge grin. You can appreciate one great moment of something and it's sufficient and beautiful. Thirty seconds of SportsCenter is all you need sometimes. I look up from the book I'm reading while working out at the gym and see a couple of miraculous or even merely lively highlights. Sustained attention wouldn't improve the experience (hearing the sound from the TV might diminish it). Then the moment is over and I go back to reading intensively.

Distraction has often been seen as an essentially modern condition. Writing in 1936, Walter Benjamin described a "mode of perception" typical of modernity, which he connected to the arts and culture of his pre-war European experience: Cubism and Dada and especially cinema with its montage aesthetics. So much of what seemed new about modern experience was understood as disruptive or fragmentary or fast-paced, like the bustling city with flashing lights and traffic moving in every direction. Dziga Vertov's constructivist film The Man With a Movie Camera captures this sense of modernity's energy and vitality in all of its revolutionary character. Benjamin describes modernity as shocking. The contemporary ideas circulating about the internet making us stupid pick up on a long line of thought about technology shaping our habits of thought, though to Benjamin distraction was supposed to improve our critical faculties rather than diminish them. (Film puts the public "in the position of the critic.") Of course "modernity" itself is the idea that our world is marked off from that of the past, that there is a historical break, a radical discontinuity.

I think you're right that much of the cultural concern with diminishing attention spans over the past few decades requires a nostalgic projection of how our minds used to work before modern technologies came along and corrupted us. There is a dystopian rhetoric that runs through much of the thinking about advanced media technologies and their social effects. If only we could get back to that idealized past before the invention of the transformative machines. This is fantasy of unattainable authentic experience. Buying into it might help us manage our anxiety over the changes that accompany the introduction of new media technologies.

My research on attention spans is trying to get at a specific history of thinking about one aspect of this big topic of media having powerful social effects. In particular I look at how the popular press promotes ideas about media effects. The Times, among other sources, helped popularize the idea that Sesame Street was not really helping children learn, as was its intention and as many people believed, as much as it was harming kids by shrinking their attention spans. Popular press discourses have power in influencing the popular imagination about media and their effects, helping shape our lay theories of how things work, which may or may not align with the theories of experts. Society under threat by the new, good-seeming thing is a familiar, but powerful, trope of reporting about issues like this one. So these ideas about attention come from many places, and satisfy many needs and desires, but one way they achieve their status as a kind of common sense is by circulating so widely and repetitively in the press.

Book Time

2010-11-12T12:43:00.005-06:00

This week I received the page proofs of Indie: An American Film Culture, my book to be published early in 2011 by Columbia University Press. Now finally it looks like a book rather than just a folder of Word documents and image files that I work with on my computer. It has a title page and a copyright page, and section titles and page numbers at the top of each page in interesting typefaces. I've been writing this book for ages so I'm pretty excited for it to be ready for you to read it. A chapter about film festivals and art houses incorporates some research and a few paragraphs from a paper I wrote for a historiography seminar I took in graduate school ten years ago. Much of the conceptual frame was developed for my PhD dissertation, which I defended almost six years ago. So the culmination of this project feels big considering how much of my life it has consumed.

I decided a few years ago not to blog much about this book as a work in progress. Partly it was because I didn't see the topic being particularly timely (indie cinema is still a going concern, but to save myself the angst of seeing the topic as a moving target I have been thinking of it as historical). Partly it was because I was interested in exploring other topics on the blog, as a break from my focus on independent cinema. More so it's been to save the ideas for the published final product, to hold off until it's done.

Blog and book as textual forms can both be thought of as publishing, but each has its own distinctive qualities, expectations we bring to the experience. Each has its own time. As we migrate our reading experience to networks and screens, the book (along with the magazine, journal, newspaper...) is defamiliarized. Now we consider the benefits and detriments of reading paper-and-ink rather than pixels or e-ink, and the old ways seem less natural and more contingent. Maybe now we can appreciate book time as we could not before, can think of how we might want book time to be integral to the experience of reading using our new technologies and interfaces and communities of knowledge. I think of book time as slow and careful time, as time for patient and immersive, even contemplative experience. I don't mean to essentialize too much, and I often use books as reference works, I read only the two pages I need, I skim, I photocopy one chapter, etc. But a book has the potential to have a certain temporal feel if you use it the way I'm thinking of.

My thoughts about book time and blog time are part of a larger fascination with temporality. Lately I've been strangely conscious of the temporal disunity and variability of my life, and in particular of the various forms of media creation and consumption that fill so much of it. I wrote about this last spring at Antenna, when I described the Wii as a time machine taking me back to a nostalgic ideal of my youth in which I have Nintendo games to play. I get a similar feeling watching TV with my kids. Noah, who is almost one, now pretty avidly watches Teletubbies. Seeing him become animated and giggly at the sight of the baby in the sun takes me back to the days when Leo, now six, used to watch it. Leo has reached an age that is familiar to me from my own memories of childhood, and taking him to school and soccer games and piano lessons inspires constant wistful reveries. Watching commercials with him for products he wants to have reminds me of my own lifetime of consumer desires and frustrations.

When I was writing Indie, I would sometimes imagine it as a finished product. At first I only imagined it as a printed monograph with a cover and paper pages pasted together, with my name on the spine, shelved in the N's in part of the library beginning PN199something (LoC). In the past couple of years I have begun to think of it more often as a product for sale at Amazon.com with the "click to look inside" feature. More recently I have started to imagine it as a searchable volume in Google Books, and as a downloadable e-book to be read on a tablet or e-reader. I have begun to think of phrases I use and names and titles that I reference that might come up in a web search. (Are books being search engine optimized yet? They should be.) I wonder if it will be published for the Kindle, and if so what might be the most highlighted passages?

All of this is of course forward-looking, anticipatory excitement. But much of my experience of writing and publishing a book is also marked by time lag. By early next year when Indie is out I will (God willing!) have submitted the manuscript of a second book, which I have been co-writing for the past couple of years with Elana Levine, called Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status. I imagine my feelings about Indie are similar to those of actors who have to go on talk shows to promote a film they shot a year ago, when their more recent work is more fresh in mind. I have to pretend that Indie is fresh as of 2011 when most of it was written at least two years ago, and some parts are from the early oughts. Compared with the instant gratification I have gotten from years of blogging -- you can read my thoughts moments after I write them, they can get a comment or link and it's all NOW -- the patience required by academic publishing is considerable. I have to perform my past self to greet the publication of this new product, and it's not that I'm lacking enthusiasm for the new thing but, well, it's not new to me, not at all. Having a book with my name on it is what's new, but the words and ideas are in the past.

Despite the frustration that comes from feeling this lag, I'm pretty pleased to have been patient. I like the form and expectations of the slow-paced book. I like its unique temporality. A book has its advantages in relation to an article or blog (and not just in its prestige/tenure functions), and even in its new digital formats a book should still maintain many of the things I like about it.

In particular what I have in mind is the argument for books offered by Susan Wallace Boehmer, Editor-in-Chief of Harvard UP in this blog post called "Standing by the Book"

I will restrain myself from quoting the whole thing, but here are some good parts. What is it about books that Boehmer likes?

I like their length. I prefer ideas and opinions and narratives that are just too complicated, too nuanced, to fit into a New Yorker article, or a Wikipedia entry, or a series of public lectures. But at the same time, I like the boundedness of books—the sense you get at the end of 300 or 400 pages that you really have a good firm grip on the subject.

She also likes the book's

division into chapters. Chapters are not like essays. Essays—in a magazine, let’s say—relate to one another sort of the way out-of-town first cousins relate at a family reunion. They have polite conversations, and maybe you’ll notice a little family resemblance, but mostly they come together briefly and then they go away to live their separate lives. Chapters in a book relate to one another the way siblings do: every one of them is looking around at every other one, all the time, sizing them up and figuring out when to play together and when to get out of the way. A book with chapters is a tight-knit little family: there’s tension in every relationship, but they’re still all in it together.

(You really should go read the whole thing. There's a part about how a table of contents ought to be a poem, what a beautiful idea.)

I also like the book's long-term temporality. There are books on my shelf that I have had for most of my life: a dictionary and a Bible that I used in grade school, an atlas I got when I was 13, children's books that my parents read to me as a little boy. I'm not very confident that the Kindle books I bought to read on my portable device will be accessible to me five or ten years down the road. E-books seem ephemeral to me, and old-fashioned paper books seem durable. But whether digital or not, a book is a pretty good way to make ideas last.

Photos, from top to bottom, are by flickr users ginnerobot, paper.clip, sapheron, simiant,, sapheron, gadl, and .michael.newman., used under creative commons licenses.

I would get her so pregnant

2010-08-16T14:53:00.013-06:00

Pete Campbell: I’m going to be a father.
His father-in-law: Can you believe it?
Mad Men viewers: uh, yeah!

Irony is one of Mad Men's most indispensible storytelling strategies. Irony is at home in many kinds of storytelling, but Quality TV benefits from one of the most essential effects of ironic narration: it requires that we "get it." It exploits the audience's special knowledge and competence, which the text flatters us for having.

Mad Men's irony comes in several varieties. This historical setting provides frequent “we know better now” bits, as in season one’s scene at Sally Draper’s birthday party when a man slaps a boy in the face--not his own child--for running in the house. Pregnant women smoke and drink, babies ride in cars unrestrained, middle-class picnickers litter conspicuously and without hesitation. Sexist and anti-semitic attitudes are simply there, unremarkable, and though Don seems to find Roger Sterling's blackface number in "My Old Kentucky Home" to be rather unpleasant, no one calls Roger out as racist or even seems to find such a display to want in taste. Our superior knowledge gives these bits much of their dramatic weight, allowing us to see the past as a more innocent but also less advanced era and anticipating the changes that made our world. Even our foreknowledge of historical events, like Kennedy's triumph over Nixon in the 1960 election, functions to give us the kind of insider knowledge that is the essence of ironic discourse.

Another form of ironic storytelling similarly depends on the superior knowledge of the audience, but depends on the familiarity of viewers with characters and storylines stretching back through the previous seasons. This is what high school English teachers tell us is "dramatic irony" of the sort we often find in Shakespeare, in which the hierarchies of knowledge set up by the narration invite the audience to view situations from multiple perspectives. It arises frequently in this week's episode in situations in which characters' speech unwittingly comments on their situation, but only to the extent that the audience knows more than the characters.

Ken Cosgrove, to Pete: Look how lucky we are. Another Campbell, that’s just what the world needs.

In this episode, focused especially on Pete Campbell and Peggy Olson, the most devastating ironies are those referencing the ongoing storyline in which Pete impregnates Peggy and she gives the baby up for adoption. Pete remains unaware of this development until late in season 2, when he confesses his feelings for Peggy and she tells him what really happened.

In "The Rejected" (my favorite episode of this season so far) we learn that Trudy Campbell, who we had thought might be infertile, is expecting a baby. This gives the writers all kinds of opportunities to subtly refer back to the Pete and Peggy storyline.

Pete: It feels much different from what I expected.
Trudy: How would you know what this feels like?

Eventually they get around to setting up the interaction we are most eager to see: Peggy addressing Pete having heard this news. But first a series of other scenes in which we observe characters who do not know of Pete's earlier paternity respond to the news. Invariably the developments have meaning that resonate with the central thematic preoccupations of the show, those with the power imbalances of gender and class distinctions. Peggy could not have borne Pete's baby openly and also pursued her career. It would have ended her working life, at least for many years. The product of Pete's legitimate parental expectancy, however, is a new $6 million account. He who has so much advantage gains more.

This disparity is made clear in the late scene of Pete and Peggy each going off on their own lunch outing, Pete with his male colleagues and his father-in-law and his business associate from Vick's, the new account, and Peggy with her new hipster friends from Life magazine. This distinction between corporate and creative power is a fine illustration of Bourdieu's distinction between economic and cultural capital, and of the ultimate inevitable subsurvience of the latter to the former.

The storyline around the research for Pond's reinforces the themes of the Pete/Peggy situation. Allison's public breakdown over Don's inattention following their post-Christmas-party tryst gives Peggy the opportunity to deny that her sexuality ever might have gotten in the way of her job prospects, and she berates Allison for assuming that Peggy would sleep with her boss and then find herself unable to get over him. Of course the situation with Pete was quite similar in the first season, and the ultimate repercussions much worse than what we suspect will be the case here. If season 1 Peggy had only had the courage Allison shows in telling Don that he's not a good person!

Peggy, to Allison: Your problem is not my problem. And honestly? You should get over it.

This plot also reintroduces Faye, the married professional market researcher, another model of femininity against which to judge Peggy. Faye's performance in the focus group scene, changing attire to blend in with the secretaries and removing her ring (which Don catches Peggy trying on, delicious moment), shows her adapting her feminine appearance to her situation with great confidence and effectiveness. By contrast, Peggy seems to struggle with the negotiation of gender norms in the workplace.

In relation to the two-way mirror scene of season one, much is now different. In the test group using Belle Jolie lipsticks, Peggy stands out as the one who doesn't want to be one of a hundred lipsticks in a box, and she impresses Freddie Rumsen with her observation that the trash bin containing the spent blotted lipstick tissues is a "basket of kisses." (He likens this turn of events, in which a secretary says something worth using in a sales pitch, to seeing a dog play the piano.) Now Peggy and Joan are on the other side of the glass and in positions of more power and authority, and Freddie complains that he has no office in which they can meet. Of course Peggy, Freddie's protege in earlier days, does have her own office (from which to peek at Don's in the best visual humor of the season so far).

The introduction of Joyce, the hipster lesbian photo editor at Life, offers Peggy an entree into a world antithetical to the corporate milieu of SCDP and Pete's in-laws. The line about Peggy's boyfriend renting her vagina recalls the prostitution trope of "Christmas Comes But Once a Year" and raises the idea of male control over female sexuality and reproduction. Had Peggy shamed Pete into leaving Trudy for her and raising their baby together, this experience would have been totally unavailable to her.

Peggy: Trudy’s pregnant?
Joey: I can’t believe that guy’s married to her. I would get her so pregnant.

Peggy and Pete are fated to be paired up for as long as Mad Men tells its story. In "The Rejected," many are rejected -- Joyce's photog friend, Allison, Clearasil, Joyce, Faye (I'm sure there are more). We can't forget as well that Peggy rejected Pete for her career and independence. The parallelism of these characters is reinforced by the two scenes of beating the head, first Pete's against the wall after learning of the Clearasil account, then Peggy's against the desk after learning of Trudy's pregnancy.

Peggy, to Pete: I just wanted to let you know how happy I am for you both.

And in the end they exchange these meaningful glances, which those of us who have been watching all along fill in with all of our accumulated Mad Men knowledge. We see these characters acknowledge one another, wordlessly recognizing all that has gone on between them, showing that they are in on the ironies we have been catching throughout. It's like the show is congratulating us for getting it, but with such subtlety that the forceful emotional impact of this resolution to the episode narrative is totally undiminished.

Mad Men tells its story very slowly and carefully. There are so many more ironic situations pregnant with potential for emotionally charged storytelling. Pete among others still knows about Don's identity, and Don and Pete know about Peggy's pregnancy. In a good serial narrative, the past is never dead or even past.

Update 8/17: cryptoxin appreciates MM's ironic mode too in a response to Jason Mittell's negative take on the show.

Who is Dick Whitman?

2010-08-10T13:28:00.012-06:00

Sometimes this season I try to imagine myself watching Mad Men as some people I know are doing it, without having seen seasons 1-3. This week’s episode, “The Good News,” might be among the less comprehensible in the whole series, but there would certainly be funny and poignant moments. Don’s man-date with Lane has its outrageous bit of comedy. Joan’s firing of Lane’s secretary for failing to take responsibility for the flowers fuckup is deliciously dramatic. I would gladly watch Don Draper drive a red convertible along the Pacific coast for an hour or two each week. The scene in which Greg stitches up Joan’s finger while telling his hillbilly joke is one of the most arresting in the episode whether or not you know the backstory of these two, though it packs much more of an emotional wallop if you know [SPOILER ALERT!] that (1) he raped her, and (2) he has no brains in his fingers, which has led to (3): he joins the army and is soon shipping off to Vietnam, where he will die.

I said as the scene ended, “I really don’t want to like that guy” and well, that scene made me LOVE him, which is just wrong. Of course I don’t know that he’s going to die. The M.D.s are less likely to die in a war than the G.I.s, but given that these scenes were paired with the ones of Dick finding out about Anna’s terminal illness, death is a theme.

This show makes me want to fish for thematic parallels and obscure allusions, and bear with me. One of the movies Don and Lane consider seeing on New Year’s Eve is The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (IMO, the greatest film ever made) and in that movie, the protagonist played by Catherine Deneuve becomes pregnant with a child just before her lover departs for the war. When he returns he finds her having set up a family in his absence with another man. In “The Good News” Joan is looking to get pregnant at the same time that her husband is shipping off to Vietnam. Uh huh. Another thing this episode makes me think about is harm to people’s legs and feet. First in Season 3 Guy McKendrick is run over by the John Deere driven by Lois, his career ending in that awful bloody moment; then the Ad Age reporter sent to interview Don in “Public Relations” is missing a leg (lost in the war, of course, the same one in which Dick became Don), and now Anna Draper, who already limped from polio, has her leg in a walking cast. I’ll get back to you about the ultimate significance of the deep symbolic meanings involved here but they sure suggest mortality and pain.

We learn a lot in this episode, which I found to be among the most amusing, surreal, and inconsequential of the series so far. Joan has had two abortions, one of them performed under questionable and undoubtedly dangerous circumstances. This threatens her ability to have a child with Greg, though the gyno (he calls her Jojo and she calls him Walter -- interesting!) seems confident enough.

I would predict that Joan can’t have kids, though perhaps an even better storyline for her would follow the Umbrellas situation -- pregnant with an absent husband, or maybe Greg returns from the war with a bum foot? Let’s keep going: Anna Draper is dying and everyone is keeping it a secret from her. This is one of the show's "period" ironies -- in those days, that's how things were done. Can you believe that? As well, Lane, like Don, is divorced. (Remember the scene in “Love Among the Ruins” when the Pryces an Drapers go out for dinner together?) The students at Berkeley are staging sit-ins. A whore cost $25 in mid-1960s NYC. Don Draper will indeed put the moves on every young, attractive woman he comes across. And so on.

If you haven’t watched every episode leading up to this one, you don’t know that scenes in an OBGYN office are always important.

Peggy goes to Joan’s doctor -- the same one we see in this episode -- for birth control in “Smoke Get in Your Eyes” only to meet with his paternalism and disapproval. (“Even in our modern times, easy women don’t find husbands,” he admonishes.) Betty sees hers in season 2 to find out about her surprise pregnancy with baby Gene. Now here we are back with Jojo’s Walter. This is so obviously a “setting things up” episode that Joan’s fertility is undoubtedly in play as S4 progresses, as is Anna Draper’s mortality. I can’t help but anticipate a connection between them.

But what seems most in play is the underlying identity of Don Draper as Dick Whitman. If Anna Draper dies, so does the experience Don/Dick has of being a true, authentic self, a pre-Don Draper innocent. We know that the season’s theme is supposed to be “Who is Don Draper?” This episode pushes us to consider the possibility that Don is no longer the assumed identity of Dick, that enough time and experience has passed that the identity of Don supersedes that of Dick. When Don signs her wall "Dick + Anna '64" it makes it seem as if Don is performing an earlier, more youthful identity rather than, as earlier in the series, as if Don is Dick's performance.

The larger significance of these observations for my ongoing MM blogging project is to see the dense interconnection of themes and motifs, along with the backstory and our memories of characters’ journeys, as essentially legitimating of shows like this one. A network serial would most often belabor the backstory with expository recapping dialogue. Characters would remind one another of their situations. For instance, Joan and Greg’s exquisite home surgery scene would find more obvious ways of reminding us that Greg’s career as a surgeon had seemed so promising, only to fall apart when he was denied the chief residency. Anna and Dick’s moments together would find more obvious ways of reminding us of that earlier episode, “The Mountain King,” when Don first pays her a visit and remembers the earlier time when they were together. The subtlety of this episode’s allusions and cues to memory works in a different register of audience address than the typical mass television fare, rewarding and flattering the completist audience for Quality TV (and especially the people like me who have seen every episode at least twice) and basically showing a lack of interest in pleasing the casual viewer who, presumably, is necessary for guaranteeing the networks their larger audiences. But who knows, maybe those casual viewers -- you know who you are -- get their own kinds of pleasure from watching casually, which I only wish I knew about. I find the show to be a kind of reverse guilty pleasure at this point, pushing me to invest in its symbols and references, its dense thematic interconnection of episodes. I almost wish I could watch it in a state of innocence, just to find out what will happen next.

PS I never thought Don was really going to make it to Acapulco in this episode, and I'm still not sure why they decided to call this one "The Good News."

(updated to add a title to the post)

I Brought You Cookies!

2010-08-02T14:02:00.010-06:00

Prostitution is a recurring presence in Mad Men, both as representation and metaphor. In the very first episode, “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes,” Peggy offers herself to Don by placing her hand on his only to be brusquely cast aside with the line, “I’m not your boyfriend.”

Is part of her paying job to be sexually available? Maybe, but Don’s not interested. It could be because she dresses too modestly for Manhattan in 1959 and seems unsure of herself -- the opposite of the office sexpot, Joan. Now in “Christmas Comes But Once A Year” with Don several secretaries past Peggy at Christmastime 1964, Allison returns Don’s lost keys and must be sexually available to him. Her recompense is a $100 Christmas bonus. He might have given her as much otherwise, we’ll never know. But the unavoidable suggestion is that she is being paid for a service more intimate than typing letters and buying birthday gifts for Sally, Bobby, and baby Gene. We know by her facial expressions when called into his office on the morning after that she is falling for Don (or has fallen for him already) and feels like his lover rather than his whore, which debases them both when it becomes clear that he intends to treat their encounter like his pre-Korea identity and Peggy’s baby -- as something that didn’t happen. (We have prostitution in mind already this season from the previous episode, in which Don sleeps with a whore who knows what he likes -- being slapped around in bed.)

Quality TV like Mad Men rewards the attention of the most serious, committed viewer who watches from the beginning and in order, who never misses an episode, who remembers and appreciates details. This is TV in its aestheticized mode encouraging attention to form and to thematic meaning, soliciting explication and interpretation (I am the victim of this appeal as much as anyone). “Christmas Comes...” works ok as a standalone episode but this kind of show has no standalone episodes. We are especially gratified by the prostitution theme considering our previous encounters with Lee Garner, Jr., the Lucky Strike heir who in the previous season ruined the career of the closeted gay illustrator, Sal, by demanding that Sal be fired after refusing a sexual advance.

In this new episode Garner again demands quid pro quo. Not only must the ad firm throw a Christmas party at which he is given the only significant gift, but Roger Sterling must don the Santa suit and pose for ridiculous photos with the SCDP men posing on his red velvet lap.

There is one more moment of quid pro quo involving sex and power in this episode, but by contrast to these more despicable representations, the story of Peggy’s relationship with Mark is more gentle and affectionate, though I foresee bad times ahead for these two. Peggy says in season one that she tries always to be honest, but she has let her boyfriend think she is a virgin and of course she is hardly that. The previously before this episode reminds us that she slept with Duck Phillips in season 3, and we committed viewers know of other lovers including Pete Campbell. Every sexual situation involving Peggy reminds us that she got pregnant at the beginning of the series and gave away her baby. Now Mark is trying to pressure her to giver herself to him, and in a humorous bit of dialogue he says, “I brought you cookies!” He doesn’t really mean that she should have sex in exchange for cookies, but as ever there are resonances from elsewhere that amplify the meaning of what might have been a throwaway line.

Earlier in the episode the market research people Bert Cooper brings in offer the SCDP folks cookies in exchange for taking a test they administer to collect data about consumers, which Don refuses to take (because it reminds him of his awful childhood and diasterous domestic situation). Later Faye, the self-assured blonde who runs the testing, explains her methods to Don and seems to have him totally figured out, which troubles him. She even infers that his cinematic Glo-Coat ad of the previous episode was a product of his childhood! Along with his neighbor Phoebe, a nurse at St. Vincent’s, Faye seems like a potential new romantic partner for Don (maybe she still is), so it surprises us at the end of the episode when he winds up with his secretary. But of course of all of these women, she is the one over whom Don holds power.

The thematic parallelism of Don’s fling with Allison and SCDP’s submissive deference to Lucky Strike, as well as the bits with the cookies, brings home a meaning familiar from earlier seasons and episodes: that business and personal affairs alike are structured around unequal relations of power. Capitalism and Patriarchy both demand supplication to authority and money. They thrive on inequality. The story of the 60s which Mad Men is so methodically telling is a story of progress toward equality in some spheres. But it’s also a story of our own times, in which consumer capitalism has grown only more rampant, and in which “post-feminism” has obscured many of the persistent and insidious inequalities between and among genders. Prostitution is a metaphor for unequal power relations, for the degradation of the weak by the powerful.

It is also a potent metaphor for the creative process, and in a commercial medium like television as in advertising, the authentic talent of artistic workers is often represented being under threat from the power of capital to pervert and exploit. The creative person whores their talent. Art like love ought to be a gift, but a both are often given with expectations of something else in return. In feminist analyses, heterosexual relations and in particular marriage are sometimes seen as variations on prostitution. Betty is often portrayed as a victim of such unequal relations between married persons before she and Don split up, and in season 2 she flirts with selling her body to the auto mechanic who stops to help her (this is a way of getting back at Don for his affair with Bobbie Barrett). Joan is likewise represented as selling herself to her husband, Greg, who asserts his ownership of her body in the season 2 scene in which he rapes her on the floor of Don’s office. The overarching metaphor of advertising as a big lie, an illusion of authentic reality, also feeds into the recurring prostitution theme. The work Don and Peggy and Sal and the others do, work that has real meaning and comes from a place of real personal inspiration, is sold to the corporations who exploit it for their profit. As I argued last week, this functions not just as a critique of advertising or capitalism, but as a metatextual commentary on the status of the television creator. Being beholden to a powerful master cuts across all the levels of meaning.

***

Peggy does sleep with Mark, but the truth about her virginity is still her secret. Don is an asshole to Allison but we'll see where things go with her. Faye and Phoebe still seem like potential romantic partners, and I doubt we have seen the last of Bethany. And the prostitution theme will undoubtedly persist. At this point, a fourth season of a show that promises to go on several more (I will be disappointed if it ends before 1969), much of the pleasure of Mad Men comes from the repetition with variation, the situations and ideas that come up again and again but tweaked each time to reveal a different shade of meaning or a new twist on a familiar character. I watched some of "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" earlier to make the framegrab above and was astounded by how much the characters have changed, especially Pete and Peggy, despite the fact that the show continues to tell much the same story.

Turning creative success into business is your work!

2010-07-26T12:13:00.002-06:00

Quality TV performs its own quality, and Mad Men does this as much as any upscale program. It is constantly, flauntingly reaffirming its own value in so many ways: by dramatizing creative struggles against commercialism; by making itself into an audiovisual history museum; by beaming progressive, liberal ideals through the contrasts it loves to draw between then and now; by investing every detail with thematic meaning, from dialogue to chairs to hairstyles and cocktails (not by accident or genre convention does our anti-hero drink Old Fashioneds). It does so in the by now traditional modernist fashion, being deftly metatextual and intertextual. Quality TV performs its own quality to reassure us that, despite our many and various misgivings about television, we who appreciate it are doing something more than watching soap opera. But what makes so much Quality TV enjoyable is precisely its appeal AS soap opera, the continuing stories of characters we get to know over time, episode by episode and season by season, their larger-than-life conflicts, their fears and dreams, their neverending cycles of relationships and breakups and makeups. Mad Men is about secret identities and hidden pregnancies, rape and infidelity, schemes and counter-schemes. It is about primitive office politics and the fetid suburban reality of self-loathing. We watch to find out what will happen next and how. We watch as communal social practice and ritual, and to have something to talk about when we’re not busy watching. Somehow the geniuses who make this show have sold the boutique cable audience on the fantasy that all of the soap opera we love is legitimated by Quality and its trappings.

Advertising in Mad Men is, among other things, a metaphor for television. Is it Art like the opera in which Bethany Van Nuys is a supernumerary, like the Rothko on Bert Cooper’s office wall, like Frank O’Hara’s Meditations on an Emergency that Dick Whitman mails to Anna Draper? Or is it just a way of selling housewives canned hams and floor cleaners? And can it be both? Keep in mind, last night’s Mad Men was chock full of branded props, like Don’s Canadian Club.

On a second-season commentary, Matt Weiner says he sees himself in both Don and Peggy, mentor and protegee. He identifies with their struggles to produce good work in the face of demanding clients and bosses. There is always the tension between art and commerce in television and advertising, and the authentic is ever the artistic rather than commercial value of “creative” work (remember Don is “head of creative”). Run-of-the-mill TV need not advertise its creative ambitions, but to rise above the status of guilty pleasure, the Mad Men type shows need protection against the inauthenticity of commercialism.

Thus the very contemporary ambition Don voices to make his Glo-Coat spot “indistinguishable from the movies” as a way of holding the audience’s attention and make them forget they are the victims of a pitch. Here we have the cinematization of television so prevalent in contemporary discourses projected backwards ~~thirty~~forty-five years.

“Public Relations” also dramatizes the tension between devotion to work and to selling the work, and in order to do so effectively, also the selling of the self as personal brand. Don Draper was taught not to talk about himself but that’s not good public relations. He wants his work to speak for itself. Hard not to see this as the TV creator’s resistance to promotional press, to interviewers asking him to explain himself. Don Draper can always be read as a stand-in for something or someone, and certainly as an ideal of spontaneous creative genius, the kind that cannot be taught. But his successes are only realized when the products he is selling really sell; genius is not its own reward. When he complains about having to do PR for himself and his firm, insisting that his work speaks for him, Bert Cooper, ever the canny businessman, retorts, “Turning creative success into business is your work!” No truer motto will ever be coined for the TV creator.

After a long time away we are dying to know what has happened and how. Season Four begins by announcing its theme in bold, italics, and underline: Who is Don Draper? The show often comments on its own meanings in this way, as season two begins “Let’s twist again like we did last summer,” referring at once to the dancing in season one and to AMC’s scheduling. Who is Don Draper? is not just the new season’s theme -- it is the whole series’, and by now we know a fair bit of the answer. But as a theme for the season this looks a little weak. I would rather, Who is Peggy Olson? More is new about Peggy than her hair. She bosses this new male creative guy Joey around (“I need it in an hour, chop chop Joey”) and drinks neat Jameson whiskey. She has become considerably more assertive and confident, and seems to have a steady boyfriend. Mad Men has always let its female characters fascinate us more than its eponymous males, and this is itself thematically significant considering its style of subtle feminism -- while seeming to be about men, it’s really about gender and its recent American history. I’m more eager to fill in Peggy’s story in the time that has passed between seasons than any other character’s.

So many questions are in my mind as I think about the episodes to come. Who will Don sleep with this season? Will things go as badly for Betty and Henry as this episode suggests? Does Kiernan Shipka’s addition to the main credits mean, as we must hope, that Sally Draper will become even more significant? Will we be seeing Paul Kinsey, Ken Cosgrove, Sal Romano, and other departed Sterling Coo characters again? Will the men stop wearing hats? And what new (or old) ways will the show find to legitimize itself?

On the History of Media and the "Attention Span"

2010-07-12T14:07:00.006-06:00

If you have an interest in cultural media history, if you like Sesame Street and music videos, or if you have found the recent discussions about whether the internet makes you stupid or smart to be worth your scarce attention, you might be interested in my newly published work: “New Media, Young Audiences, and Discourses of Attention: From Sesame Street to ‘Snack Culture’” Media Culture & Society 32.4 (July 2010), 582-596. In this essay I trace the history of the “attention span” as it pertains to media from the early days of Sesame Street to the present, charting the process whereby media crafted to suit short attention spans of the young came to be blamed for shrinking the collective attention span of whole generations and societies. The main materials I studied are popular press discourses, like discussions in the New York Times and Time magazine. I’m generally critical/skeptical of claims that media are a danger to the young and that movies, TV, and the internet do us cognitive harm, though my main concern is to analyze discourses rather than pass judgement. Ultimately I argue that concerns over media’s harmful effects reveal widely shared anxieties over new media’s social implications. If like me you don’t have free access to Sage journals and don't want to wait for your hardworking ILL people to catch up with the speed of academic publishing, please email me mznewman37/gmail and I’ll happily send you a pdf. Happy reading!

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Related: when I was working on this article two years ago, I blogged about some Sesame Street research that wasn't relevant to the argument about attention. Here's that old post, in which I discuss reception of the show in terms of racial identity.

Upgrading the Situation Comedy

2010-04-27T21:00:00.003-06:00

I presented the following at the Console-ing Passions conference at the University of Oregon in Eugene on April 24 as part of a panel called Distinguishing Television: Television Genres and Cultural Value.

Despite frequent declarations of the death of TV comedy and the absence of “Blockbuster TV” sitcoms in recent Nielsen ratings, the past decade has seen a new movement in the American sit-com that has found many champions. Comedies such as Scrubs, Arrested Development, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Office, 30 Rock, and Modern Family have explored forms of audiovisual style and storytelling rarely seen in American TV comedy before the year 2000. These are usually called single-camera shows for short to contrast them against the multiple-camera format of traditional sit-coms. Although rarely big hits, these shows win awards and accolades, appeal as Cult or Quality TV to upscale audiences, and have found some enthusiastic viewers in popular press critics like Time magazine’s James Poniewozik who admire them for being “more ambitious” than traditional comedies and television scholars who praise them for “reinvigorating the sitcom format” (Thompson, 63) or for “resurrecting” the genre through their “stylistic innovation” (Butler, 19). In discourses of television criticism both popular and scholarly, the style of these new programs is positioned as an upgrade on a lowly and exhausted formula -- as a welcome improvement to a genre often denigrated as unoriginal and inartistic.

I want to talk today about this idea of upgrading the situation comedy in terms of television historiography, and in particular in terms of our understanding of the history of television aesthetics. The upgrading I have described is part of a wider process of discursive legitimation of television which positions some forms of TV as more respectable than others, and contrasts putatively more aesthetically advanced contemporary TV against shows of the past. The idea that single-camera comedies are an improvement on the traditional sit-com rests on some questionable assumptions about television history and aesthetics, which I wish to interrogate. Most importantly, I want to insist that if TV scholars are to turn to questions of aesthetics (which I think is a really good idea!), we do so in a way that appreciates all of television history in aesthetic terms rather than just the most recent Quality TV that appeals to folks like us, and that we do so in a manner attentive to the cultural functions of aesthetic discourses.

I’m assuming this audience is pretty clear on what I mean by single-camera and multiple-camera shows, but just to be sure here’s a quick comparison. The traditional sit-com like All in the Family is shot on a three-wall set in front of an audible studio audience -- a production style Jeremy Butler calls the “multiple-camera proscenium schema,” which comedies share with soap opera, another genre with radio origins.

This format allows for the main stylistic emphasis to be placed on verbal and physical comedy, and on the comedians’ performance. Single-camera shows, by contrast, have no invisible “fourth wall” and no audible live audience (or laugh track). They use camerawork and editing much more prominently than multi-cam shows, often as sources of humor, as in punch-in flashback or fantasy shots (think “Werewolf Bar Mitzvah”). They are filmed "like a movie," allowing the camera to penetrate the space of the scene and to shoot from any angle. And as an alternative to the laugh track, many of them use music to punctuate scenes and set a comical tone, or in cases of comedy verité like The Office, awkward silences (Mills 2004, Thompson).

The contrast between multi- and single-cam styles in popular and critical discourse is often quite explicitly framed in terms of value and aesthetics: the newer style is positioned as an advance, and as a marker of television’s newfound artistic and cultural legitimacy. The old style is figured as primitive and unchanging, a relic of an earlier era of TV as mass medium but not as art. Specific characteristics of the old style like verbal setup-punchline/one-liner humor, dramatic entrances and exits, comedic performance style regarded as excessive, and the laugh track now might come off as corny or passé, good today mainly as something to laugh or sneer at – as an example of this attitude, consider the critical reception of The Return of Jezebel James (Newman). Advanced taste has shifted away from traditional forms of TV comedy. Thus the valuation of single-cam style depends on a historical progress narrative, a way of seeing TV history as leading up toward a more perfect present against which we can judge the failures of the past. This is often how histories of the arts proceed especially in the modern era, by figuring the new as a reaction to and improvement on the old. But TV scholars especially must be wary of hastily recognizing present-day Quality TV as the medium’s height of achievement without considering how aesthetic judgment and valuation function culturally to reaffirm social distinctions, especially those of class. The multi-cam shows with their historical mass appeal are the negative example against which the new single-cam shows with their upscale niche audiences are understood. Additionally, we must be wary of assuming that we can understand the historical significance of the present. Often the celebration of recent and contemporary TV aesthetics risks promoting the current shows, their audiences, and the industry’s strategies of marketing to them, rather than advancing a serious historical understanding of the medium and its forms and functions.

This presentist discourse of the newfound sophistication of television comedy ignores the place of the sit-com in the history of Quality TV. Today the paradigm of Quality is heavily serialized drama shot in a style often called “cinematic.” The single-camera comedy has arisen to its place of high status in the context of this reigning paradigm, and it is no coincidence that single-cam comedies share many traits with the legitimated dramas – not only production norms but also storytelling practices, as comedies also have become more serialized. But we must not forget that in earlier periods of TV history, the traditional multi-camera sitcom was central to conceptions of Quality. In the 1970s, when MTM and Tandem were the production studios most closely identified with programming of high cultural value, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and All in the Family were among the medium’s most respectable programs. In the 1980s and 90s and early 2000s, NBC’s must-see TV lineup combined serialized dramas like Hill Street Blues and ER with traditional sit-coms like Cheers, The Cosby Show and Friends. Praise for the stylistic innovations of the single-camera sit-com often implicitly – or even explicitly – slights the value of the multi-cam show as such without regard to the aesthetic achievements – and cultural significance – of these earlier shows. In celebrations of the new sit-com, the style of old multi-cam shows is sometimes described as an impoverished antistyle (Caldwell), but the positive aesthetic appeals of these shows are generally ignored.

The discourse of the sit-com's reinvention presents a “before” and “after” of TV comedy, and I argue that the “before” is figured as a primitive form. In art history, primitivism is often identified as naïve, unsophisticated, and lacking tradition or stylistic development; the artistic movements that come after primitive stages are generally seen as bringing welcome innovation and advance, i.e., progress (Errington). In the case of TV comedy, the primitive multi-cam style is not only figured as banal and artless, but as having no significant stylistic history. This meshes with the idea that network-era television can be characterized as “least objectionable programming,” essentially unremarkable and aesthetically degraded, a characterization attributed to TV network executives from decades ago which some contemporary TV scholars still find acceptable (e.g., Lotz). The multi-cam shows are seen in the discourse of aesthetic progress as more or less homogeneous, the better to distinguish the new single-cam style. But this presentist celebration overlooks the diversity of the history of American television comedy and paints all sitcoms in the “old style” with a single brush to emphasize their uniformity.

Consider the variety among these shows, all of which are sitcoms predating the rise of the single-cam: The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, The Andy Griffith Show, All in the Family, Bewitched, The Dick Van Dyke Show, M*A*S*H, Soap, Cheers, The Wonder Years, and Friends. Andy Griffith and Dick Van Dyke are black and white, but later shows are in color. Many of these shows were shot on film to give a polished look of high production values, while others such as All in the Family were videotaped to produce an effect of immediacy and liveness. Not all were shot in front of a live studio audience; some, like Bewitched, relied on special effects that could not be accomplished with typical live studio audience setups. Not all have laugh tracks; Dobie Gillis and The Wonder Years have voice-over narration. Not all are shot with the “three-headed monster” originated by Karl Freund for I Love Lucy; Andy Griffith and M*A*S*H were shot single-cam, and M*A*S*H aired without a laugh track in some countries. Not all multi-cam shows were shot with three cameras; Cheers and most multi-cam shows since the early 80s have been shot with four, an innovation of James Burrows beginning with Taxi which allows for larger ensembles, more expansive sets, and arguably more fluid editing. The traditional sit-com’s storytelling is quintessentially episodic, with every episode beginning as though the narrative has been fully reset and characters having no memory of previous events. But some traditional multi-cam sitcoms do have some serial aspects to their storytelling, like the relationship arcs on Friends. Of today’s multi-cam shows, not all are uniform in style either. As Christine Becker has written, How I Met Your Mother is shot with multiple cameras on a three-wall set, but without a live audience, a choice she argues makes for a more restrained performance style in contrast to shows that film before an audience. The point is that multi-cam shows are hardly uniform and static in style, but themselves have a stylistic history continuing through the present time.

I want now to go into more detail in considering the way that scholarly discussion of the new sit-com frames the new style in relation to the old style, and the implications of the terms this scholarship adopts for addressing TV style. In particular I’m talking about Jeremy Butler’s Television Style, which relies extensively on two sources for ideas about visual representation: David Bordwell’s work on film form and style, and John Caldwell’s Televisuality.

Much of Butler’s book is concerned with understanding how TV style in recent years has been become more prominent and aggressive, similar to the style of contemporary Hollywood movies that Bordwell calls intensified continuity, which is characterized by fast and aggressive editing, incessant camera movement, and shooting with very long and very short lenses. In some respects, this use of prominent visuals meshes with John Caldwell’s concept of televisuality to describe TV since the 1980s, which Caldwell terms “excessive” and “exhibitionistic.” Butler also borrows a term of Caldwell’s to describe the style of pre-televisuality/intensified continuity movies and TV: “zero-degree” style. Zero-degree denotes a lack of style – Caldwell defines it using the words “empty” and “meager” – or at least a style that isn’t noticeable or interesting. Critics of classical Hollywood cinema often describe its visual style as invisible or transparent, the better to focus the audience on the realism of the diegesis. (In Bordwell’s terms, “zero-degree” is roughly the same as “classical continuity,” though in The Classical Hollywood Cinema he rejects the term “zero-degree.”) In Butler’s argument, the multi-cam sit-com is the zero-degree sit-com, and the single-cam sit-com is the televisual sit-com. Butler celebrates the televisuality of the contemporary single-cam sitcom and even confesses that it brings him “pure aesthetic pleasure.” (216) “In the televisual schema, style is aggressive, roughened, and opaque, not smooth and transparent. It carries meaning. It makes jokes. It might call attention to itself.” (197) Butler discusses many aspects of Scrubs to offer evidence of this, including the show’s staging, shooting, editing, and use of sound.

I see two shortcomings here in the discussion of the style of the multi-cam sit-com in particular, as well as several additional issues of concern. First, both Caldwell and Butler adopt a Bordwellian, film-centered conception of style. They take for granted that style means those things that film or video can do that are unique to -- or at least distinctive of -- them as a medium. In Bordwell’s terms, these include editing, mise en scene, cinematography, and sound, though in the history of film criticism camerawork and editing have often been especially privileged as they are in Caldwell and Butler. This idea of audiovisual style has origins in classical film theory (writers like Arnheim, Bazin, and the Soviets of the revolutionary period), which was often concerned above all with defending the status of cinema as an art form and, thus, with finding those aspects of cinema that are essentially cinematic. Literary or theatrical techniques to be found in cinema, such as dialogue, are hard to defend as “cinematic” style, and have little place in the history of film theory and stylistics. So this idea of what “television style” consists of essentially takes the prevailing conception of film style, which is a product of cinematic medium essentialism, and imposes it on TV.

Second, those who promote the single-cam shows at the expense of the multi-cam shows fail to recognize the positive style of a theatrical genre like the traditional sit-com. While the camerawork, editing, and lighting of a multi-cam show might be unremarkable, they serve effectively to support the elements of style that are emphasized: writing and performance. As Brett Mills argues, the sit-com is among the TV genres most identified with live performance on the stage (Mills 2005). Instead of regarding this as “lacking style,” we can see it rather as having a theatrical rather than cinematic style (without intending these terms to essentialize either cinema or theater -- I mean that their styles share some significant elements with prominent uses of cinema and theater). The contemporary ideal of Quality TV is thoroughly cinematized – good television is supposed to look and feel like a contemporary Hollywood movie, or even to surpass it. An ideal of television art that makes theater values more significant than cinema values seems today hopelessly out of date. And yet an aesthetic appreciation of television that is not ahistorical should be sensitive to the significance of shifting tastes over time. An All in the Family episode was meant to come off like a one-act play, and was staged and performed as such. The idea of television recording a performance, rather than using camerawork or editing as performance, is not naturally stylistically impoverished as Caldwell and Butler suggest. Rather, it follows from a different conception of style and its uses.

This scene from season 2, episode 15 of Cheers ("Father Knows Last," orig. aired January 20, 1983) is typical of the power of the traditional sit-com's style. It begins as so many traditional sit-coms of its period did with the reminder that the show was filmed before a live audience, marking its style as theatrical. Camerawork and editing are fluid and emphasize reactions, as well as contrast between the confidence of the women and the cowardice of the men. In terms of cinematography and editing, there is little difference between this kind of style and that of numerous Hollywood films of the studio era. But we might say the dominant stylistic features are in the script and the actors' performances. The editing and camera styles serve to support the verbal humor, such as Cliff's reference to women as "petunias" and his remark that they are "hot for" him and Norm, and the bit about talking out of the side of your mouth. The comical value of the scene comes from the actors' styles of dialogue delivery and movement, as when Cliff and Norm saunter over to the end of the bar and back trying to appear nonchalant, and especially in the comical high point of the scene as they stand helpless in the face of the invitation to go out with the women, unable even to utter a word as Cliff vocalizes his terror. I confess to my own aesthetic pleasure when I watch shows like this, which delight me easily as much as the best single-cam shows. The images and sounds in a show like Cheers are not best considered as an antistyle or impoverished style. They may not be “televisuality” or intensified continuity or comedy verité, yet they are part of a robust and enduring tradition of comedy on television.

References

Becker, Christine. “Acting for the Cameras: Performance in the Multi-Camera Sitcom” Mediascape (Spring 2008).
Bordwell, David. The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (California, 2006).

Butler, Jeremy. Television Style (Routledge, 2009).

Caldwell, John Thornton. Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television (Rutgers UP, 1995).

Errington, Shelly. The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress. (California, 1998).

Lotz, Amanda. The Television Will Be Revolutionized (NYU, 2007)/

Mills, Brett. “Comedy verite: contemporary sitcom form” Screen 45:1 (Spring 2004), 63-78.

_____. Television Sitcom (BFI, 2005).

Newman, Michael Z. “The Return of Jezebel James,” The Velvet Light Trap 64 (Fall 2009), 77-78.

Thompson, Ethan. “Comedy Verité? The Observational Documentary Meets the Televisual Sitcom” The Velvet Light Trap 60 (Fall 2007), 63-72.

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Previously: 30 Rock, My Boys, and the New Sit-Com, Hating on Jezebel James: The Laugh Track as Bad Object, and Tween Comedies and the Evolution of a Genre.

Twitter @ Console-ing Passions 2010

2010-04-26T06:16:00.008-06:00

As Amanda, Annie, and Melissa have blogged, there was a robust twitter "backchannel" at this year's CP conference on TV, feminism, etc., and this produced some beneficial and some not so beneficial effects. I composed most of these thoughts, some in my head and some on "paper," before reading their intelligent remarks, and those in their comments too. But I wanted to share this anyway because I do think some of my ideas are fresh even if others are a bit redundant with what's already being said. I feel strongly that twitter is adding greatly to academic discourse, and that this has been a pretty egalitarian phenomenon. I love it that I am getting to know more people this way than I did before, and that many of them are graduate students, some of whom I was pleased to meet for the first time this weekend. I don't want to come off sounding too cranky about it, but a few aspects of conference twittering in this day and age seem like they could use improvement, which is what you would expect from any emergent phenomenon. So in reference to Annie's post in particular, I would really hate if any of the criticism of twitter were to have the effect of scaring off anyone from participating.

Of approximately 130 conference participants, maybe around two dozen posted tweets during the proceedings in Eugene (others contributed from afar), and a smaller number produced large volumes of "live-tweeting," i.e., moment-by-moment reporting from the panels. I was especially impressed with the volume and quality of live-tweeting produced by @annehelen and @l_e_s, as well as @castabile, @princesscowboy and others. The benefits of this work are apparent to anyone who has trouble being in two places at once. You can hear about panel B which you skippd in favor of panel C, and can keep up witn the conference from afar if you can't make it in person. At first when my twitterfriends started doing this it looked liked way too much unwelcome information (If I wanted to know what was going on at NCA, I would have gone to NCA godammit!), but I have come to appreciate the value of having these real-time missives from the conference. Among other things, it establishes a community of interest that's more specific than the conference community, and that extends beyond the conference to others looking in from afar. And it preserves the conference, capturing the ephemeral live presentation and archiving it online. In this last sense, the backchannel functions to keep the minutes of the conference as it happens.

Much as I like it, however, and despite some attempts, I have not found that I care to do this kind of conference twittering myself. I don't like typing on a compact device like an iPod and don't like lugging a heavy MacBook around with me if it's not necessary. Worse for me and more important, I am a terrible multitasker. If I start crafting a tweet while a presentation is underway, I will have to tune out of some of the presentation to get my thoughts straight and make sure I have spelled and phrased things correctly. (To quote a tweet by @melodyisazombie, "what is the consensus on tweeting and still remaining an active listener? i cannot do both, personally.") I suppose I could become more casual about it, but this really isn't my nature. Someone said you can think of it like taking notes, but at least I make a distinction between taking notes for myself and taking notes in public. To do the latter, I have to turn on my internal censor, and it takes too much cognitive energy to keep him satisfied. (The same is true for me, by the way, while watching TV: I can't tweet while watching without stopping watching.)

Another reason I have avoided too much conference twittering is that I like the honest, raw immediacy of response in the instant, but many of the things I am thinking during a conference presentation are admittedly snarky or crabby, and I don't want to show this side of myself to the world. I still have the mind of a graduate seminar participant, eager to poke holes in every argument. But I don't think real-time, public hole-poking online is a good way to build scholarly community. I also fixate on presentation style, like when people read papers without looking up at the audience, or show slides in a room with bright lights that make them hard to see, or mispronounce words or over-rely on cliches. I certainly don't want to read tweets that pick on these things. And I also find myself given over to the occasional wild enthusiasm. I heard one paper at the conference I liked so much I wanted to tweet, This is the best paper at this conference! It probably wasn't that good.

I also have some questions about the ethics of this practice. The backchannel is conducting a fairly robust and critical discussion as the conference panel is unfolding. It concerns me that the people giving the papers might be unaware of this. They may be unaware that people are live-tweeting the conference at all. They are also likely unaware of what is being posted in real time, as it might come off as impolite to be sitting on a panel keeping tabs on the internet (maybe this etiquette will change?). I'm concerned about the practice of giving feedback to presenters who are unable to receive it, and are probably not aware of it being given. Moreover, a significant fraction of the people in the room might be unaware of this conversation going on, and it seems possibly a bit disrespectful to them to be engaging in questioning and commentary without their knowledge. Many of them, indeed, probably think it's a odd idea for people to be using twitter during the conference. Many non-users have somewhat hostile attitudes toward these new media platforms. I agree with Amanda's proposal that the existence of the backchannel be made more evident to all conference participants.

Another ethical issue that I see is the reliability of the the twitter format for summarizing conference papers. Many tweets are admirably accurate and pithy, briefly getting to the heart of the matter. But they can also be superficial or fragmentary. If you're not physically present and you get only the twitter version, you can easily form impressions that are different from the meanings intended by speakers. This happened to me a lot as a participant from afar during SCMS, when I would read the statements tweeted from the conference and wonder how, without the context of the full paper, I could really understand assertions that sometimes struck me as off or just incomplete. (I said as much in my comment to Jason's post on his SCMS presentation.) After the first two days of massive CP tweeting, I went back and combed through my paper to try to eliminate any phrase that I thought might make me look bad if decontextualized in a tweet. It's good if being tweeted makes us speak with greater clarity and persuasiveness. But mixed with a bit of disappointment that no one tweeted from our panel was a bit of relief.

Which brings me to another matter: those doing the twittering are the ones to determine which parts of the conference are covered by twitter. Some panels were attended by many of the twitterati. This gave the false impression, for instance, that the conference was dominated by discussions of Mad Men. At the same time, there were a number of panels that were covered little or not at all by the twitterati, thus giving no sense of their contents to the world outside the conference, and no archival presence online. My own panel was on Distinguishing Television, with Elana Levine, Phillip Sewell, and Caryn Murphy. I thought it went really well but as far as the backchannel is concerned it never happened. I noticed this especially at SCMS this year -- the TV and new media scholars seemed much more interested in conference twittering, and the majority of the conference, which is devoted to film studies, was largely unrepresented. If conferences are to be documented this way, it might make sense to organize the documentation to cover the whole of the proceedings. But conference twittering is not really organized, and this is part of what is exciting and fresh about it. I'm not sure institutionalizing conference twittering will preserve the things we like about it.

I see an easy solution to some of these problems, and it's not very novel. Make it a convention of conference presentations that all work is posted to the internet in full and made accessible to anyone simultaneous with the presentation. This way the live-tweeters will be relieved of the more secretarial dimension of their work, the better to engage on the level of questions and replies. And this way the partial understandings and misunderstandings can be minimized. This shifts the model of conferencing from presenting to presenting-plus-publishing, but it could serve to promote higher quality presentations (because they have to be in a publishable written form to be presented), or even better to limit the time spent reading papers and maximize the time spent engaging in scholarly exchange, and also to better archive the contents of a conference. Many scholars already publish conference papers on sites like Scribd and on blogs. But if conferences can centralize the publishing on their web spaces this makes things easier and more logical for many participants.

Conference tweeting might be most salutary and effective in revealing a need to make all of the knowledge produced at conferences available beyond the four walls of the presentation room. Here's hoping this happens soon and in a way that expands our open access to all scholarly work.

New Media Seminar, Fall 2010

2010-03-23T15:46:00.003-06:00

In the fall 2010 semester I will be teaching a graduate seminar, and I wanted to use this space to share some of my thoughts and plans.

Some context: I get to teach graduate seminars only once every two years, which doesn't seem like all that often. I like the idea of matching the topic to my current research interests, which explains why I'm not going to repeat the seminar I taught last time on indie culture (which I thought went pretty well). I'm still interested in indie culture, but I have been looking at new areas of study. I see the opportunity to teach graduate students as an occasion to read work that I want to know better. Some of it might be material I have read before but not studied carefully, and some of it will be new to me as it will be to everyone else in the seminar.

Elana and I have been working on a project on convergence-era television and cultural status, and this research has piqued an interest in the history of media technologies. So much of what is interesting about TV in recent decades is a product, in part, of the integration of digital TV technologies. Thinking about the intersection of television's contemporary social and technological identities has made me want to know more about the history of communication technologies, and to think about new media (in the current sense of digital media) in light of this history.

I am posting this here for a few reasons. Most importantly I want prospective seminar participants to have a sense of what they are signing up for. This will be a reading-intensive course with a fair bit of time spent on the past rather than the present of new media. I also wanted to pull the curtain back a bit to reveal the process of developing a course. When I was a student I would have been happy to learn more about instructors' thinking behind teaching certain topics and shaping a syllabus. And I am also eager to invite your feedback, whether in the comments or elsewhere, to help me find the right shape for a course on a topic, New Media, that always threatens to get out of hand. I'm happy to hear from students past and future, as well as others who have taught or studied these topics. Feel free to suggest more readings, to let me know about your experiences teaching this material, or to warn me off of spending a week on Marshall McLuhan.

Some of the work I have in mind to consider in this course will fit into the typical conception of new media studies. Benkler and Lessig are clear instances of scholars engaged with questions about changes brought on by digital communications. But some of the work I want to look at is much older, and considers media which are no longer new in terms of what changes they wrought on society and culture. I'm not sure how much of the material that interests me will fit into the course. I don't know if work on oral vs written cultures will make the cut and I don't know if spending too much time on telegraphy and telephony will unduly tax the patience of media studies MA candidates who are probably more interested in today's internet than the Victorian internet. But these are all topics I want to know more about.

Below are some likely and possible readings. The ones I'm especially eager to include in the course are marked with a *. In the past one assignment I have given in a course like this is a book review, where students in groups of between three and five all read the same book. We then have one seminar meeting that's a kind of book club, where we have panel discussions of each book. The items I'm considering for this assignment are marked with a #. Of course there is much more here than one can teach in a single semester, so much of the work below won't make the cut. And because I'm interested in TV first of all, that is the medium that will likely get the most time during the semester.

Charles Acland, ed., Residual Media (Minnesota, 2007).

*Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Yale, 2007) / Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody (Penguin, 2009).

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."

*William Boddy, New Media and the Popular Imagination: Launching Radio, Television, and Digital Media in the United States (Oxford, 2004).

Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (MIT, 2000).

#Jean Burgess and Joshua Green, YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture (Polity, 2009).

James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (New York: Routledge, 1992), or possibly just Chapter 8, "Technology as Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph."

Susan J. Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922 (Johns Hopkins, 1989).

Claude Fischer, America Calling: A social history of the telephone to 1940 (California, 1994).

Robert Friedel, A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium (MIT, 2007).

Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree, New Media 1740-1915 (MIT, 2003).

Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture (MIT, 2008).

Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn, eds., Rethinking Media Change (MIT, 2004).

#Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (California, 2004).

*Derek Kompare, "Publishing Flow: DVD Box Sets and the Reconception of Television," Television & New Media 7.4 (2006), 335-360.

Lawrence Lessig, Remix Culture: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (Penguin, 2008) / Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity (Penguin, 2005).

#Amanda Lotz, The Television Will Be Revolutionized (NYU, 2007).

*The Essential McLuhan (Basic, 1996).

*Michèle Martin, "The Culture of the Telephone," in Patrick D. Hopkins (ed.), Sex/Machine: Readings in Culture, Gender and Technology (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989), 50-74.

Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1990).

Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2009).

Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2002).

*Benjamin Peters, "And lead us not into thinking the new is new: a bibliographic case for new media history" New Media & Society 11 (2009), 13-30.

#Scott Rosenberg, Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters (Crown, 2009).

*Lynn Spigel, Make Way for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago, 1992).

Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson, eds.,Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition (Duke, 2005).

Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet (New York: Berkeley, 1998).

Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003).

#Chuck Tryon, Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence (Rutgers, 2009).

Noah Wardrip-Fruin, The New Media Reader (MIT, 2004).

*Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (Routledge, 2003).

Faves, 2009

2009-12-31T10:19:00.011-06:00

A decade's end brings on excesses of listmaking and nostalgia for the present and recent past. I am not very tempted to join in this aughts-defining frenzy, which gives unnecessary weight to an arbitrary period of time (though I concede I have a hard time understanding the past without carving it up into arbitrary periods of time), assumes that the present and past can be judged together (like it makes sense that 2000 and 2009 can be evaluated comparatively right now at the end of 2009), and seems with rare exceptions to confirm present prevailing wisdom and taste rather than to challenge it. So we hear now that this was the decade of cable dramas and viral videos, Pixar and reality TV, J.J. Abrams and Beyoncé, as if we didn't know that already! And yet I have, despite my intentions to avoid them, been reading these lists pretty avidly. Some friends of the blog have been making their own, or aggregating those of others (like Jonathan, Jason, Amanda, Chris), and I admire the long view and comprehensive attention these tasks require.

I have been collecting annual faves for a few years now on this blog, and the above reservations on the occasion of the end of the decade give me a bit of pause this time. But I am going ahead partly because I've been saving up these items to share with you and don't want my effort wasted, and partly because I'm a fan of lists, both the making of and the looking at, in spite of what I see as their ideological functions. I don't propose these are the best or most important of anything, they're just the things I like the most. I didn't see very many new movies and I read hardly any new books this year, so I hope you won't think I've lost interest in these beloved old media. (Many of my favorite movies of 2008 are ones I saw in the first few months of 2009 as they made it to the theaters in my town, or were released on video, and I'm expecting something similar to happen again this time.) I also haven't been discovering much new music, and what I have liked I don't think of as my favorite of anything, though I do really admire Taylor Swift's songwriting and vocals, and Lady Gaga's videos amuse and even fascinate me. Finally, I don't offer myself as a critic who has seen everything and picked the best of it all -- I'm glad that's not my job!

As in years past, these are offered in no particular order. (Previously: faves 2007, faves 2008.)

***

Media scholar blogs: the field has developed to the
point that there are a good number of well-written and topical blogs,
and it's great to have them. These are some I read regularly and
always look forward to: Just TV, The Extratextuals, Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style, The Chutry Experiment, Judgmental Observer, Media Industries (and other stuff), Ludic Despair, News for TV Majors, Antenna, Category D, and Flim Studies for Free. Of course, Confessions of an Aca/Fan and Observations on Film Art are monumental, models for scholarly blogging in the humanities.

The White House photostream on flickr (also The Awl's annotations thereon -- for that matter, The Awl is a big fave too.) It's hard to take a photo of Obama that doesn't tell a compelling story. I especially like the casual, downtime images of the Pres as an extraordinary ordinary guy, like this shot of the Obamas and guests wearing 3D glasses while watching a commercial during the Super Bowl, and this one of the Obamas, accompanied by a Stormtrooper and a Chewbacca, greeting trick-or-treating children on the North Portico steps.

Fan Secrets, a tumblr site of fan-submitted images, à la Post Secret, confessing secret shippings and OTPs (one true pairings).

Greeting Card Emergency, a series of videos which make me appreciate the literary and visual art of the greeting card.

My Parents Were Awesome, another community-driven tumblr of snapshots of the parents of generation Y back before having children and advancing age drained them of cool. (Also see Awkward Family Photos.)

Fuck Yeah tumblr sites like Fuck Yeah Anne Hathaway, Fuck Yeah Dresses, Fuck Yeah SNL, Fuck Yeah Polar Bears, you get the idea. Kind of random.

Shit My Dad Says, the most genius use of Twitter yet. Fake AP Stylebook is a runner up.

Know Your Meme, e.g., episodes on Auto-Tune and Imma Let You Finish ("Imma Let You Finish," the phrase/meme as recycled into jokes is another fave, e.g., the tweet from @fmanjoo "Yo Barack, I'm really happy for you and imma let you finish, but Morgan Tsvangirai was one of the most peaceful dudes ever.")

Old Jews Telling Jokes, an online video series preserving a dying art. (Do you are anyone you know regularly tell jokes at parties, over dinner, etc.? Why has this essential form of conversation come to seem hokey, passé?)

This Recording, especially their Mad Men recaps. I would like to blog more like TR, with the same approach of combining images, links, brief observations in a knowledgeable and sophisticated but not pretentious tone, and music.

Of course Mad Men is still among my very favorites -- it's by far my favorite TV show of the moment -- and The Footnotes of Mad Men are pretty good too. I didn't think season 3 had any bad episodes, and I enjoy the ones that are slow-paced, where character relationships are set up for future scenes weeks or months away. I wasn't sure where the British ad agency storyline was going, but it resolved masterfully in the finale. "My Old Kentucky Home," an episode with several song or dance scenes including a devastating blackface number, was particularly brilliant, and "Guy Walks Into an Ad Agency" had the most shocking and darkly comical scene of the series so far captured in the Mad Men Animated GIF for the ages). I could list favorite moments forever, but a few more in addition to those above: Sal singing the Ann-Margaret number, the Maypole dance, the scene where Betty confronts Don about his secret, Peggy smoking pot, any scene with Sally, and anytime Don cooks or prepares drinks.

Letters of Note, a blog of old snail mail that makes me wish I wrote and received more personal correspondence the old-fashioned way, with ink and paper.

The trailer for A Serious Man, with its brilliant rhythmic soundtrack and editing. Haven't seen the movie yet, but at least I can admire the trailer. I'm confident that if I had seen it, it would be a big fave. (Honorable mentions of tantalizing trailers for movies I haven't yet seen, but really need to see very badly -- trailers that make me want to see them all the more: Inglorious Basterds, Where the Wild Things Are.)

30 Rock, a show some people seem to think has declined in quality, which I totally fail to understand. I fall over from laughing during every episode, and the cleverness of the dialogue and situations is undiminished over the seasons. The second-funniest comedy on the air.

Curb Your Enthusiasm, the funniest show on the air (very subjective, I know -- I mean the one that makes me laugh the most), which continued mining the most outrageous human foibles for comedy. What startles me most about Curb is how unlikable Larry is, and yet how much sympathy he garners. The Seinfeld reunion arc was very well executed -- it worked both as a Seinfeld revival, reminding us of how much we miss its sensibility and characters, and as an arc for Larry and Cheryl.

Glee, the most exciting new show of the year. I really hope it becomes a huge hit when it gets American Idol's lead-in in the spring. It does have some fairly well documented flaws (musical overproduction, clunky situations that take too long to play out), but I gladly overlook them because the musical comedy pleasures are so intense and rewarding. And Rachel, Mr. Schu, and Emma have fast become some of my dearest TV friends.

Modern Family, which I look forward to for its satirical take on contemporary bourgeois roles and mores, and in spite of the smug mockumentary conceit and style, which is my least favorite thing in contemporary TV comedy.

American Idol, which served up an electrifying golden-voiced gay glam rockstar god in Adam Lambert. I don't like the music on Idol very much, and to me its appeal is much more in the mishmash of variety show entertainment, criticism, and delicious schlock aesthetics, but the biggest reason to watch is to see nobodies transformed into stars by us, the audience.

Up, another enchanting Pixar masterpiece. I also liked Coraline a lot.

(500) Days of Summer, which some people seem to have disliked on account of its quirky, cute sensibility and its calculated appeal to hipsters and cool kids. Which is like hating a horror film for trying to frighten you! I thought it had a brilliant script and sweet performances by a charming, attractive cast. I even liked the parentheses and the scene where he draws on her arm. My second-favorite summer comedy was The Hangover (and we still need to see Brüno).

I Love You, Man, the best film Judd Apatow never made and the dictionary definition of bromance, a hot cultural trend.

The Beatles Rock Band, which we have not played through entirely, but which is a fascinating blend of commercial promotion, documentary narrative, game, and musical performance. I'm no connoisseur of video games, but the visual design of this one, blending animation and photography, strikes me as pretty inspired. I'm also a fan of Rock Band/Guitar Hero vids (and videos of people playing video games more generally). Individually they don't make such a big impression but when you watch an hour or two of them, the effect adds up. E.g., here is one of a guy playing the drums in "The End" by The Beatles. Such casual perfection, at once show-offy and totally ordinary.

Pre-Makes, a form of remix video culture that knows of a cinema that existed before George Lucas.

The one-sheet poster for The Girlfriend Experience with its mysterious out-of-focus and the surface play of colors and shapes suggesting both voyeurism and formalism. (I did find the film interesting, but not enough to call it a fave. I really didn't buy the premise of rich guys paying Sasha Grey to tell her about their idiotic problems.)

Hipster Runoff, a hilarious example of sociological culture criticism by Carles, a well-honed persona of fauxthenticity.

Maira Kalman's NYT blog And the Pursuit of Happiness, mixing illustration, handwritten lettering, prose, and photography in a way I have seen on no other blog -- the handmade quality is what I admire most -- and inspiring a welcome liberal patriotism. (I also like Chris Neimann's NYT blog.)

Phineas and Ferb, an animated show on Disney Channel aimed at older preschoolers and tweens, with original character design (all of the heads are based on shapes -- Candace is a circle, Phineas is a triangle, Ferb is a rectangle), outrageously convoluted, Simpsons-esque plotting and references, and brilliant original songs. In the tradition of Sesame Street, a show that tries to offer something for the parents as well as for the kids. Check out this "Squirrels in my Pants" clip, a big fave in our house (this is a bit of a cheat since the episode is from 2008).

And last but not least, my iPod touch, which was not new this year but which I learned to use in new ways, with new apps (news, games, TweetDeck, and so on) and new habits of reading and consuming many forms of media. Since having a baby on November 20th we have been up at all hours and even during daylight have been reduced to one-handed navigation of the world. Being able to read the morning news at 3:00 am without turning on a light, paging around with only a single thumb while cradling the baby in my other arm, is pretty nice. So is keeping tabs on friends by mobile Twitter and Facebook. And playing games, which Leo likes as much as anyone else in the household. I'm not generally the kind of dude to go nuts for gadgets, but this one is really, as they say, life-changing. (More on the beauty of one-handed computing and the media habits of new parents is at Kottke.org and more on the virtues of an iPod as a nighttime e-reader is at this highly recommended New Yorker article about the Kindle by Nicholson Baker, which just might be my favorite piece of prose I read all year -- I also liked everything I read in the NYer by Ariel Levy, like this Nora Ephron profile.)

Reading Myself Twittering

2009-11-06T07:02:00.002-06:00

This post by Jeff Jarvis has me thinking about the relative merits of blogging and twittering. For me and many in my internet circles, it seems some of the functions of blogging have been assumed by Twitter -- especially linking to and discussing current things as they occur. Twitter is so much easier to use than any blog application, and its rewards tend to be more immediate. Another big advantage seems to be that we are much less likely to feel that Twitter is a time suck, since no tweet takes longer than a moment to compose or read. Blog entries by comparison typically demand more time and energy. I was interested to note that some of my tweeps have said that they're not blogging until a writing project is complete, and I am basically in their boat (say what? I guess am off the boat temporarily). Interesting that we have not suspended our twittering as well, or our Facebooking for that matter. It's not like they are not also a public display of time spent doing something other than our most important business.

Maybe a shift from blogs to tweets is not entirely for the best? I can think of a few things better about blogs aside from the obvious -- many ideas cannot be expressed in brief. One big one is that Twitter has no effective archive, and exists mainly in an ephemeral present. This blog gets traffic every day from people looking for writing on television style and photos of VHS tapes. On the right-hand side are archives by date and a "greatest hits" link section of previous entries I like to think represent the work I have done here. The writing on a blog comes up in a Google search and it can be found easily by anyone who seeks it. Old tweets, by contrast, are much harder to locate and there seems to be little effort to preserve them in any useful way.

Thinking about the temporality of Twitter made me want to look through my old posts, which is not all that easy to do. You can't easily access the tweets from specific dates or look them up by keyword. You just have to keep clicking "more" at the bottom of the page to get to older and older material. So here are some of the things I have said on Twitter -- things I might have said here if it weren't for that easier but also more temporary alternative to a blog. The point is to reflect on the form, but also to save some of the statuses I like in one place.

12/22/06 I'm writing a letter. This is my first tweet. I had no followers when I posted it. My first follower was @chutry, and he was my only one for a few months.

3/22/07 why do people watch 4x3 content distorted on 16x9 screens? are some people "visually dull"? graphpaper.com.nyud.ne... I would post this again today. I still have the same thought all the time.

5/15/07 Yes, it's hard to say goodbye to Rory, Lorelai and the good citizens of Stars Hollow. We'll miss them all, a lot. It surprises me that my Twitter days overlap with Gilmore Girls. Twitter seems to be of the present, and GGs seems to be of the past.

6/20/07 So, The Good German was pretty much as I expected, a failed pastiche. But it wasn't terrible and I had fun watching it. This one freaks me out, as I have no recollection whatsoever of watching this movie. I can't picture it at all.

7/16/07 Did some major gardening today. Not my usual thing. I can see why rich people pay poor people to do it. A new homeowner tweet. Now that gardening is part of the routine I no longer reflect on it this way.

8/6/07 8:00 garage door won't close. 8:02 Google "garage door won't close" 8:04 problem solved. I do love the internet.

12/6/07 thinking I might start paying attention to the presidential races...talk me out of it! I can't believe anyone was paying attention so long before the election. Seems like a pretty stupendous waste of so many people's time. I started tweeting more about the race around now, with the primaries in clear sight.

12/27/07 holy shit, Roger Ebert is talking about me! http://tinyurl.com/2z6ezz/2... It doesn't happen every day!

1/15/08 trying to explain to Leo what I do for a living Certain topics I have tweeted about a lot, like American Idol, hold almost no interest for me now. I'm not saying they weren't interesting when I wrote them, but that their appeal is ephemeral. Every mention of the boy, though, is a precious little nugget of lost time recaptured.

1/27/08 Idea for a twitterstream: Obama campaign reporting by Rory Gilmore It could have been good!

2/14/08 McCain called to ask for my vote next week. He sounded bored and tired. He could work on his vocal variety. That was a one-percenter for people who have taught public speaking.

2/27/08 Amazon thinks I might like to buy Das Kapital. That or the Laguna Beach second season DVDs. Basically, a slice of life as a media scholar.

2/28/08 why twitter is so good: no spam or trolls? russellbeattie.com/blo.. Ha ha, no one would say so today.

4/5/08 I don't care what the snobs say, I still love iceberg lettuce Some tweets have no quality of timeliness. I don't know why I said this on April 5, 2008. I could have said it any day in the past 10 years. After a year or two of creating content on Twitter I could come up with a random tweet generator, and instead of coming up with new material every few hours I could just recycle one of these gems from the archive.

4/21/08 Heidi has Down and Dirty Pictures on her bookshelf, maybe she thinks it'll help her break in to the indie film biz I could not have imagined then that Heidi would one day be among my Twitter followers!

5/5/08 TJ's caramel yogurt is basically candy, but you look healthy when you're eating yogurt and this improves your sense of self Many of my favorite old tweets to read are about food. I often hesitate to tweet about food because it's a cliché of a boring oversharing online topic. People mock the bloggers and facebookers who broadcast every cheese sandwich and pancake breakfast for their self-absorption and inability to distinguish interesting from mundane. I internalize some of this judgment, but actually I find food and eating to be among the most interesting things people talk about online.

5/12/08 Leo sez there are only boys and girls in this world, but some children are boys AND girls. For a while, the phrase "in this world" was big in our house. E.g., "there are no monsters in this world."

5/18/08 my Milwaukee wishlist: Ikea, dim sum, Hockey Night in Canada Still true, thought I think you can get HNIC if you subscribe to one of those expensive DirecTV packages. I want it over the air, like real TV!

6/29/08 Explaining twitter to Leo (age 4) who thinks I should twitter: "Hi I love you I'll see you soon" Interesting that I would have given his age. Now I expect everyone knows, partly because more of the people reading my tweets are friends offline as well as on.

(I stopped Twittering during the summer of 2008. I felt like I wasn't getting enough in return for what I was giving. I returned after many more friends joined up, not to mention TV stars and journalists and spammers.)

4/30/09 neither Judaism nor flu panic will come between me and my pork cutlets One of the first tweets after my return. Timely.

5/10/09 Chipotle is called Barburrito here http://barburrito.co.uk/ and they should definitely use this as their jingle: youtube.com/watc... Writing from Liverpool, the point, as with travel writing in general, was to notice things that are similar but different.

5/15/09 guy next to us at this coffee shop is reading a Kindle, it's our first time seeing one, and we want to reach over his shoulder and lick it There are many varieties of tweet -- jokes, links, complaints, minute details of one's own daily routines, etc. I think my favorite is this kind, the observation of something striking or novel.

6/9/09 a typewritten letter from Costa Rica has arrived and although dated 2009 I'm pretty sure it came from the middle of the 20th century I still have to reply to it!

6/12/09 just watched the noon-hour digital transition on WTMJ, where the phones are reportedly ringing off the hook! Historians of the future will be cursed with so much evidence of our daily experiences.

7/7/09 Up is great, esp if you like dogs, children, faces, voices, aviation, sentiment, and color Not convinced yet that Twitter is a suitable medium for reviews of movies, music, etc. Maybe it could be.

8/7/09 summer 2009 is when Gen X nostalgia overtook Boomer nostalgia I think this has been my most retweeted post to Twitter. I like the idea that you could take the content of an essay or blog entry and make it just as informative in a very brief burst. It has to be the outline of an idea that the reader can fill in for him or herself pretty easily.

8/28/09 Fun times @ the Adam Lambert concert! (The 9 others were there too, Matt & Allison rocked & the hometown crowd screamed loudest for Danny) I wanted to include something to do with American Idol here, just to make this sample representative.

9/2/09 my unscientific data tell me that when you make your syllabus available online but not on paper, many fewer students read your syllabus I often resist the urge to post teaching thoughts on Twitter, because I know some students are reading it. This is an exception.

9/19/09 Uncle Fred's bowling team isn't giving high fives after strikes, etc., this year. Don't want to spread germs. Sometimes they bump elbows. This is the kind of thing I like to read when I look at Twitter. It's a 140-character story about social trends put in terms of personal experience, a citizen journalism equivalent of a "the way we live now" story. I'd like to write more tweets like this.

9/25/09 seeing "flickr from YAHOO!" is like waking up to find that Nike put a little swoosh on your Converse All-Stars I might have blogged about this two years ago. It would never occur to me to do that now. Twitter for the win.

9/29/09@d_kompare
Polanski's supporters manage to combine sexism, anti-Americanism, romantic auteurism, elitism, and disregard for rule of law, yuk Of course Twitter is a conversation. The best change since it was introduced was formalizing the @___ function so that it would link to that person's page.

11/5/09 on Miramax and "the end of the large-scale tarting-up of independent film" salon.com/ent/mo... nice quotes but I predict more tarting up The last thing I Twittered before I wrote this blog post.<

Failure! or, Jezebel James returns again

2009-09-25T13:45:00.003-06:00

The new issue of The Velvet Light Trap has the theme of Failures, Flops and False Starts and I'm pleased to have a short piece in a dossier called "Perspectives on Failure" consisting of brief articles on that theme. Other contributors include many scholars I have long admired, including some friends and blog readers. My contribution, on the short-lived Fox sit-com The Return of Jezebel James, is based on ideas I first formulated right here on this blog. I have pasted it below, with links in place of references where possible.

If you're signed into Project Muse through your institution, you also read my contribution here and the entire dossier here without bothering with any of those annoying pdf downloads. The full citation is, Michael Z. Newman, "The Return of Jezebel James," The Velvet Light Trap 64 (Fall 2009), 77-78.)

***

Admirers of Gilmore Girls (The WB/The CW, 2000-2007) were largely disappointed by Amy Sherman-Palladino's subsequent effort, The Return of Jezebel James, which ran for three episodes in early 2008 before the Fox network killed it. (As I write in early 2009, all seven completed episodes can be viewed online at Hulu or downloaded from iTunes.) Reviews were scathing and ratings were low when Jezebel James, a half-hour comedy starring Parker Posey and Lauren Ambrose, first aired on a Friday night in March. Among its most despised aspects was the sound of audible laughter from its studio audience. A critic for the New York Times compared it to peanut butter on pizza. It was the show's misfortune to have arrived at a moment in television history when most of the aesthetically advanced comedies had abandoned the audience laughter (real or fake) that had been part of the sitcom format since radio days and that Brett Mills calls "the convention which has traditionally most simply and effectively defined the genre" (38). It was the curse of Jezebel James to aim to be too classy, and its failure is in part a testament to the fickle arbitrariness of taste standards as they change over time.

While it has suffered a decline in mass popularity, the sitcom genre has enjoyed a creative renaissance in the aughts, largely a function of having cast aside many of its most enduring conventions. In addition to the laugh track, many sitcoms jettisoned the three-wall set, the live studio audience, the pattern of verbal setup/punchline humor, and theatrical entrances and exits. (The shorthand distinction between old and new styles is multi- versus single-camera, though "single-camera" shows like The Office might shoot with multiple cameras.) New sitcoms replace audible laughter with wacky music and ironic voice-over narration, as in Scrubs (NBC, 2001-08, ABC 2009-) and Arrested Development (Fox, 2003-06), or awkward pauses, as in The Office (NBC, 2005-). Many shows interpolate hyperclever, ultrabrief fantasy or flashback scenes that would be impossible to include when shooting in front of the traditional live audience. New sitcoms forgoing the three-wall stage would thus appeal as more cinematic and less theatrical. The absence of audience laughter would likewise signal a move away from a theatrical style that has been essential to the sitcom aesthetic throughout its history.

When Jezebel James debuted in 2008, the multicamera sitcom had not vanished from the scene. Indeed, the most commercially successful sitcoms on the networks, including CBS's Two and a Half Men (2003-) and The New Adventures of Old Christine (2006-), were shot in the multicam style. Hannah Montana (Disney Channel, 2006-) had recently launched an impressive tween brand using the multicamera sitcom as a base. But between the original premium cable shows like Entourage (HBO, 2004-) and Weeds (Showtime, 2005-), whose visual style is hard to distinguish from a prime-time drama, and the upscale, critics'-darling, single-camera network shows like 30 Rock, it was clear that the adult "quality TV" half-hour comedy had largely cast aside the cluster of conventions that had made mass-appeal hits of shows from I Love Lucy (CBS, 1951-57) to Friends (NBC, 1994-2004) in favor of something ostensibly more visually and narratively sophisticated.

It was Jezebel James's misfortune to attempt to fit into the old-style set of conventions that had worked so well for classics like Cheers (NBC, 1982-93), which Amy Sherman-Palladino named as an influence on the show. By 2008 these had become too familiar, especially after having seen them so effectively defamiliarized by a new generation of television comedies that eschewed theatricality. In many ways Jezebel James came across as aiming for aesthetic sophistication. It was a product of the same creators who had made the beloved screwball dramedy Gilmore Girls, renowned for its smarty-pants writing and engaging characters. Gilmore Girls had become many viewers' favorite, and expectations were thus high for its successor, which mimicked the Gilmore fast-paced, culturally literate verbal style. But as well, the casting of Lauren Ambrose, veteran of HBO's family melodrama Six Feet Under (HBO, 2001-05), and Parker Posey, identified so much with indie cinema, suggested that Jezebel James would be highbrow TV. The associations the creative team's previous work evoked would not seem to jibe with the conventions of the traditional sitcom, a genre wanting in cultural legitimacy.

With TV series, success and failure have so many dimensions. Shows start out weak in some respects and adjust over time. Audiences become familiar with characters and feel strong affection for them but rarely in the first few weeks of a show's airing. Pilots are notoriously unlike typical episodes, so we must be willing to stick with a show to figure out what it will really be like in the long run. Commercial and creative successes often are misaligned. After watching all seven episodes that will ever exist of Jezebel James, I found myself wishing there might have been more. I was just getting to like it. By the twelfth or fifteenth episode it might have been pretty good, and by then we would have become accustomed to its laugh track along with the rest of the show's quirks and mannerisms. Maybe eventually people would have felt as warmly toward it as they did eventually toward Cheers and Gilmore Girls. Not likely, but we will never know.

Work Cited:
Mills, Brett. Television Sitcom. London: BFI, 2005.

My Week Without Internet

2009-08-25T10:00:00.008-06:00

I took a vacation from the Internet, which coincided with a vacation plain and simple, from August 15 to 22. We were in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, a resort town on the Atlantic coast, with my parents, my sister, and my brother and sister-in-law. I would love to spend many more pleasant summer weeks by the ocean, but I don't think I want another long stint offline.

The week disrupted my usual media diet in numerous ways, as often happens when travelling. When we are with my parents the TV is often tuned to CNN or MSNBC, and without a DVR there is a fair bit of muting and channel changing to avoid commercials . Our usual ways of television viewing are different -- we watch almost no news, and almost nothing when it airs. Cable news generally makes me either disappointed or exasperated, especially when there is no compelling big story unfolding like a war breaking out or a tight national election race, and during our week away I did my best to ignore it when it was on, preferring to read novels (like Michael Connelly's unputdownable legal thriller, The Lincoln Lawyer). One of the few unambiguous benefits of no internet, for me, is that I spend more time reading books. When I wake up in the morning with Leo and he watches a kid show, instead of reading blogs as I would at home, I read fiction.

At home we listen to the radio every day, always our NPR member station WUWM. I hear "From NPR News in Washington, I'm--" and I know it's "Lakshmi Singh" before she has a chance to say it. There was no radio in the kitchen of the house we were renting (the kitchen is where I do most of my listening), and I never bothered to find an NPR frequency in the car.

My dad went out every morning to buy the NYT, so there was news to read. But after a few years of accessing news online, I avoid the paper paper. The ink comes off on my fingertips. I have to browse through page after page of ads that don't speak to me to find an article I want to read, and if it bores me after a few grafs there is no back button to easily navigate to something else. The paper Times is missing some of the best parts of nytimes.com, the blogs like And the Pursuit of Happiness and the most emailed articles list. Most egregious, my parents (who I love dearly!) have the unbreakable habit of abandonning sections left turned to whichever page they read last, so that you might pick up a crumpled rectangle of grey paper folded to page 9 and not know whether you're even holding Business or Arts. If you don't immediately get why this ruins the whole experience of becoming informed about the world, I'm not sure I can explain it to you.

I noticed how profoundly this disruption to my regular intake of factoids was affecting me one evening late in our stay when Elana and I were walking home from a coffee shop where she but not I was able to access the internet. (Her new MacBook's airport is better at sucking WiFi from nearby sources, in this case a Hooters blasting Kool and the Gang -- inside maybe it was all celebrate good times come on, but where I was sitting it was just another twenty minutes without internet.) She said she noticed I had been pretty quiet lately. I realized it was because I had not learned any significant new information for six days! Without the internet, I had nothing to talk about. I was hearing tidbits of current events from my father, reporting on his NYT reading. I had heard that the terrorist who bombed Pan Am Flight 103 somehow managed to return to Libya to a hero's welcome, that our governor, Jim Doyle, will not seek reelection, and that some new point-and-shoot cameras were coming out with LCD screens on the front as well as the back. Ordinarily I would have known about these things half a day before he did, as I scour news sites at night hoping to read articles that the chumps stuck reading the dead trees won't see till morning. Now I was the chump.

But the worst thing about being without the web is the inability to look things up. On our first day at the beach I took my Motorola Razr for a swim, and I had no easy way of finding out if it's possible to rescue a cellphone that has been immersed for three minutes in salt water. After returning home six days later I read online that it's a good idea not only to remove and dry the battery right away (which I had done) but to immerse the phone in fresh water to clear away the mineral content of the ocean as soon as possible. It's weird to see a phone sitting in a bowl of water, but that is where mine is right now. It's probably too late, but who knows?

On the flight to Baltimore, congestion from a cold caused my ears to suffer a worse than usual crackle and pop as the air pressure changed on ascent and descent. After landing they didn't return to normal and my hearing was impaired (still is). I didn't have an easy way of looking up this unpleasant condition, which the internet now tells me is called airplane ear, and involves a blockage of my Eustachian tubes. I tried decongestants and thought I could figure out what was really wrong when I got home. This Ask Metafilter thread is a typical mix of helpful (go for the Sudafed with pseudoephedrine, the kind they keep behind the pharmacy counter because it can be used to cook up crystal meth) and ridiculous ("NEVER EVER EVER FLY WITH A COLD"). I wished I had read it a week earlier.

I know that we had ways of finding things out before the web came along, and that they still exist. There's a public library on the main drag of Rehoboth Beach, and I could have wandered over there (probably to use the internet, mind you). But what all of this makes me wonder is, why would I think of a week away from the network as something to look forward to? Why an internet vacation, rather than, say, an internet fast? I used to go without food each year on Yom Kippur. We would have dinner around 5:00 pm one day and go without food and water until about 7:00 pm the next day. My memories of fasting on Yom Kippur include more fatigue, pain, and depression than atonement for the year's sins. A ritual fast is a test of endurance, an exercise in introspection, and a communal experience of deprivation. It's no vacation!

Upon returning to my usual Firefox tabs a few days ago, the first place I went was email. I actually did manage about five minutes of email access midweek during the fast, enough time to learn that a grad school friend had become a mom (mazel tov!), among other bits of news. That was exciting. But my overwhelming sense was that very little of importance turns up in my inbox during the third week of August. Barely a dozen messages demanded any kind of action, like a reply or an entry on my calendar. Maybe I'm just not that important a person, but it would seem like one benefit of the fast was the recognition of how much time is ordinarily wasted checking in, monitoring the horizon for new stuff.

There was no way I was going to catch up on a week of Twitter and Facebook and Google Reader, three tabs I ordinarily keep an eye on all day long. When I made it to the top of the email inbox and migrated over to these other sites I found an overwhelming glut of words and pictures. I decided to basically start fresh, to look at the most recent items and forget about the rest. There are probably controversies and memes and curious items that I will never know about, permanent gaps in my knowledge of media and technology and pop culture and politics that result from my absence from it all for those seven days in August. I guess this makes me realize that none of it is very important. I can live without it. It also makes me realize how much I thrive on the sense of being connected day by day to all of these sources of information. When I looked in on Twitter and Facebook the sheer triviality of most of what I saw there impressed me most. On the typical day, I must pay attention to way too much trivia. But of course the point of all of this isn't to be found in the significance of each bit of info, but rather in the feeling of connection with others.

I know why I liked the idea of an internet vacation. It promised to free me from all that obsessive checking in, the wondering about whether someone wants something from me, or has commented on something I posted, or discovered something I need to know about. I guess I got some respite from that. It was welcome, and I'm glad for it. But goddamit, I missed my information! After we watched the season premiere of Mad Men last Sunday I wanted so badly to go online and see what people were saying about the episode. It was pretty good, wasn't it?

Embedding with Google Books

2009-06-18T12:31:00.003-06:00

Google Books has unleashed some new features today. Among the changes: they have made it possible to embed pages of a magazine or book in a web page, much as we have been doing with YouTube clips for several years now. This post is just to give me and you a sense of what this looks like in a blog. (This article about the decline of Elaine's restaurant as Woody Allen's favorite place to eat dinner was published in New York magazine in 1987. Imagine if Gawker had been around then to mock it!)

I don't know how readable these stories are in the embed window. The type is a bit small for my eyes, and although it can be enlarged by clicking on the plus-sign magnifying glass icon it still irritates me to see text too small to read. But it's surely a good thing for the culture of print for us to be able to easily excerpt and recirculate snippets of published prose online. It could serve to introduce books more easily and fluidly into online discourse.

Google book search has been an indispensable research tool for me in the past few months. Instead of tracking a book down on one of my shelves or at the library when I know what I'm looking for, I can find quotations and page numbers so easily using book search. The next step, in terms of making my life easier, will be making possible copying portions of text to the clipboard for easy quotation.

Indie Culture

2009-05-27T12:42:00.003-06:00

New work: "Indie Culture: In Pursuit of the Authentic Autonomous Alternative" Cinema Journal 48.3 (Spring 2009), 16-34 (pdf; I gave a portion of this paper at the 2007 SCMS in Chicago). Abstract: American independent cinema since the 1980s has in common with other forms of "indie" culture its construction as an authentic, autonomous alternative to mainstream media. "Indie" is contradictory insofar as it at once serves to oppose the dominant culture but also to produce cultural capital that distinguishes its consumers.

Under the Idea Tree

2009-04-28T06:22:00.002-06:00

In which I want to avoid becoming a video-games scholar.

The biggest thing to happen in my media experience this year has been the acquisition of a video-game console, a Nintendo Wii, on February 12th. This is the first console I have ever owned. I wanted an Atari in the early 80s but my parents wouldn’t get me one. Of course, I played lots of games at the homes of friends and family, and had some handheld games as well. (Digital Derby, and a pinball game whose name I can’t remember, were two I played a lot.) In the early 80s I used to walk to a convenience store in the neighborhood with friends or with my brother to play Tron, Ms. Pac-Man, Tempest, and pinball, and later we used to go to a place on Bathurst St. near Wilson called Video Invasion for birthday parties.

I used to understand Tempest.

By the time I was university-age, I had pretty much lost interest in most gaming but I did like to play Ms. Pac and Pole Position for old time’s sake at the arcade near my Montreal apartment called the Palais d’Amusements, where my roommate Mark bought hash and played pool with a small-time dope dealer named Claudio.

I wished I could be Ricky Schroeder so that I would live in a house with arcade games.

There was that one undergrad semester when I played too much Tetris on my PC (a 286 IBM clone) and dreamed of falling shapes set to Russian music, but I deleted it from my hard drive before the full extent of academic damage could be done. If very casual games count, I guess I too have wasted a few dozen hours now and then with Windows’ Minesweeper and Solitaire and Facebook’s Scrabulous. I once played a GTA game for an hour or two at Jason’s house, and more recently I’ve played a few rounds of Guitar Hero with my brother-in-law. And this was pretty much the extent of my experience as a gamer until February 12, 2009.

Sweet emotion! (not the author, obvs)

For the past week, all I have really wanted to do is play Mario Kart Wii, a driving game featuring the most popular characters in the history of electronic gaming. Part of my interest in the Wii in general, and in Mario Kart in particular, is how well suited it is to family play. Our five year-old son, Leo, is the house champion in bowling and he is improving at Mario Kart, though to do really well he has to sit on my lap and let me help steer. Like watching football and American Idol, we get a huge value added from playing games with Leo, amused by his strong reactions and emotional investment. He dances to the songs he likes on Idol and gives his own judgments of performances before Randy et al. give theirs. Now he is building racetracks out of Hot Wheels and Thomas train gear on the living room floor to mimic the ones he sees in Mario Kart. His play is our delight.

Mario drives a Kart

But my more intense motivation is to master the game, which requires discovering all of its intricacies and possibilities. This would appear to demand patient dedication over many weeks of regular play. This is quite a personal endeavor, and while I love to play socially, I might get even more out of the solitary pursuit of advancement through the various courses and levels and characters which define the experience of Mario Kart.

Wheel by steveyb on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license

I also feel motivated to understand the game, the console, and the wider context of gaming not just as an ordinary player but also as a media scholar. I know a bit about games already from having taught video-game-related topics in various capacities as a quick-learn non-expert. I have to do this all the time in my teaching, as when I cover topics like media effects theories and the history of advertising. Much of my experience of teaching undergrads has been one of keeping a week or two ahead and hoping nobody notices the gaps in my knowledge.

But now I worry that I might want to become a scholar of games. Mario, for instance, seems like a perfect topic for in-depth research on media franchising, global flows of capital and content, game texts as narratives, and the history of game design. I think, someone ought to study that! Maybe someone has? I don’t know, but now I sort of want to.

Yeah, on a t-shirt.

Which brings me to the title of this post. Where do our ideas come from? I don’t mean just any ideas, but the ones we use in writing about film, television, video-games, websites, and whatever we study. Do they come from sitting under the idea tree and waiting for the fruit to fall? If not, then how do we select topics we want to research and know more about? In what ways is this systematic, organized, and logical, and to what extent do we simply follow our capricious trails of interests? Of course, this activity is bounded by social and scholarly conventions. I have to address topics I believe will interest the community of scholars, that will impress my colleagues and those who determine my tenure, etc. But whether I study American movies or television shows or Japanese video-games would seem to be largely up to me.

If I were a real gamer, I would know why this is funny.

My experience as a scholar until now has been marked by some shifts in my areas of interest. My PhD dissertation and the book I have been adapting from it are about American independent cinema. Since my dissertation I have written about prime-time television serials, web video series, the history of the concept of an “attention span” as it relates to American media, the cultural legitimation of television during the era of media convergence, and BitTorrent as a way of watching movies and TV. These topics were all products of specific experiences in my life. In some sense, then, my interests are dictated by my interests.

Pole Position was the last driving game I played regularly. I sucked at it.

I wanted to write about indie cinema because the films I was interested in analyzing had been important to me. I worked in an art house theater as a teenager, and after university I spent a lot of time at the Angelika and Lincoln Square theaters in NYC watching new American films. Movies like sex, lies, and videotape, Do the Right Thing, Reservoir Dogs, and Night On Earth made a big impression on me. They were a significant formative part of my life.

My interest in TV came from being married to a television scholar, but even more than that, I think, from being the parent of a young child. I was Leo’s primary caregiver during half of the working week when he very little, and I started recording shows to watch while he was playing in the living room late in the mornings when he was too young to care what was on screen. I watched the entire run of Judging Amy this way (except the final season) on cable reruns, which got me interested in studying the form of serialized television narratives. I suppose I could have been watching movies, but that regular installment of my favorite show filled that time especially well, developing into a habit. And I have always preferred to watch TV shows on TV and movies in theaters.

If we got these Tetris shelves, would my dreams of falling shapes return?

I have a story for each of my projects to explain where idea originally came from. They generally came from specific life experiences. Watching Sesame Street with Leo was part of what got me interested in the history of the attention span. The present phase of my life, being the parent of a five-year-old child, might push me in the direction of studying gaming. Part of me hopes it does not; I need to keep working on the projects I have already begun and I don’t feel like I have room for new ideas at the moment. It would take a while to read enough and play enough to feel competent to write about games. Sometimes the most exciting part of a research project is the initial enthusiasm of discovery, and this can make it appealing to launch into new areas of interest without recognizing the time commitment that will be involved. It’s dangerous under the idea tree, but the ubiquity of media makes it hard to find anyplace else to sit.

A Mario cake for your next birthday?

P2P TV, etc.

2009-04-06T10:56:00.001-06:00

I have a new column out in Flow about watching television using BitTorrent: "P2P TV: Ethical Considerations." This is my final of three columns. (Earlier ones were about the Bronze Fonz and Binge TV.) I'm working on expanding my work on the file-sharing of TV and movies into a conventional journal article, so comments are much appreciated.

Elsewhere in the tubes:

Fan Secrets has been my favorite blog for the past week or two. I'm also still loving This Recording, though I don't read every post.

NYT makes me want a Nintendo DSi.

How to make lectures go twice as fast. As someone who lectures for a living, I'm not sure whether to be frightened or delighted by this way of making my work more, I don't know, efficient?

3D movies, why they give you headaches, eyestrain, and nausea. I saw Coraline in 3D a couple of weeks ago and felt fairly uncomfortable, ocularly speaking, but I liked the movie enough not to mind much.

Alisa Perren on the end of ER. I was astonished by how moved we were by the final episode, and by how different ER now seems from the dramas we watch -- much schmaltzier, way more pathos and melodrama. I miss that.

This is CNN

2009-03-29T07:18:00.004-06:00

We were in Washington on Friday and an old friend who works as a producer at CNN's D.C. bureau, Adam Levine, gave us a tour. Photos and some thoughts are at my Flickr.

Obama's Movies, piracy, etc.

2009-03-20T06:44:00.004-06:00

Our Pres gave the British PM a gift of 25 Hollywood movies on DVD. (/film has a list and it's pretty canonical stuff.) Unfortch, the discs are region-coded so Gordon Brown can't watch them. IP's a bitch.

Related: John August on the movie studios' strategies for preventing privacy: one is to delay release in territories where cam versions often originate.

Another is releasing more 3D movies, about which many details can be found in this USA Today article. (via)

if:book on e-books and e-readers: "Bookshops are crammed with full-length books whose contents could just as well be communicated in a short essay, or even in the title alone...And yet to make economic sense they have to be padded out for publication in 'proper' book size. But to conclude from this (as many unwittingly do) that long-form books are necessarily the best, rather than just the most familiar, way of communicating ideas is mistaken; and to assume that this practice will transplant to e-readers, imagined as a kind of iPod for these long-form essays, is just wrong."

Some compare the SciFi-->Syfy rebranding to Tropicana's FAIL. But after an initial negative gut reaction, I am liking "Syfy." The image of those four curvy letters protruding from their background works for me; it pleases me to look at it. And this is what cable channels do all the time: start with one identity, then move onto another when the original concept is seen as too constraining. Thus we have numerous channels named by letters that no longer stand for what they once did (entertainment and sports programming network, music television, American movie classics, the learning channel, etc.). "Imagine Greater" is a still a loser of a tagline, though. (Perhaps I should disclose that I'm not much of a Science Fiction fan.)

Britney, etc.

2009-03-18T09:27:00.005-06:00

SFJ on Britney's Circus tour. The gender ratio in the audience is 100 to 1 and the subtext is, Britney is ok. (I would love to see Britney if she came to my town and the tickets weren't crazy expensive.)

Ars anticipates The Beatles: Rock Band, which will cost $250 when it is released next fall.

Hilton Als on Milk in the NYRB. Compares the life of Milk with the movie of the life, picks on some stereotypes, and argues that the film communicates its message better by avoiding the first forty years of the subject's life. (via I Hate The NYer)

Harper’s Island is a CBS murder mystery show to begin in April. Harper's Globe is "an online show and a social network where you can watch and participate in an exciting story and fully immerse yourself in the mystery event, Harper’s Island." From the folks who brought you lonelygirl15 (Wikipedia). If you're confused you can go to the HG page and follow the instructions. Nowadays our pop culture is so complicated we need a manual to instruct us out how to enjoy it. (via @d_kompare)

Last nite's Idol: Adam's "Ring of Fire" was my favorite song of the season so far. This year Leo (age 5) is watching, and he likes Adam too.

Sitcom map, etc.

2009-03-17T06:55:00.007-06:00

NYC Sitcom Map by Dan Meth. (via)

Christoph Niemann's "My Life With Cables" in the NYT diagnoses a pervasive info-age problem in vivid pictures.

A review of Objectified, the new film about design from Gary Hustwit, who previously made Helvetica (previously), from the SXSW fest: "...throughout the film it's tough not to keep a running inventory of the featured products: Got it, want it, want it, want it, got it...ooooh, want it!"

Rockville, CA, the new web show from Josh Schwartz, can now be seen at The WB. The first episode has a lot of Seth Cohen banter and a decent meet cute.

Stringer, etc.

2009-03-13T08:15:00.000-06:00

Idris Elba, Stringer Bell from The Wire, interviewed on Fresh Air. (To appear on The Office.)

The Watcher on the much-anticipated sixth episode of Dollhouse, which is supposed to introduce a different, more Whedonesque, tone compared to 1-5. Seems unfortunate to start with more than a month of not-so-hot episodes (actually I have liked most of them), but we all must Trust Joss.

Analysis of the Kindle as it could affect the book biz. (sez MR: best piece on the topic so far)

Suzanne Vega on the significance of melody. Includes link to the delightful video for the catchy number, "You Cant Spell Smart Without Art," performed as testimony at a New York State Senate hearing in Albany, for real.

New-to-me blog: Sociological Images, intended for classroom use. Much media-related content. (via MeFi)

Kuitman Mixes YouTube is a link I have seen in a dozen places now. It's as good as all that. Click already!

And no link here, but a quick Idol update: totally over Kara, who slows things down without bringing anything the others don't offer; sad about Jorge; rooting for local boy Danny and Adam; and loved Simon Cowell's line, "It's fine to be artistic, just not on this show."

Google, etc.

2009-03-06T09:42:00.003-06:00

Google's Marissa Mayer on Charlie Rose about where Google's ideas come from and what to expect in the future.

Maybe not news to you, but you can learn incredibly random crap from checking in now and then with Google's Hot Trends.

Why Facebook fears Twitter.

Online Fandom predicts the future of the music biz.

The Atlantic on music games and the future of rock and roll.

Reason to go to NYC: Lauren Graham on B'way in Guys and Dolls.

And I have switched to Google Reader, which means I now have Shared Items and you can share yours with me, too. My most recent ones are on the right sidebar if you're reading this at zigzigger.blogspot.com rather than in a reader.

Damages

2009-03-05T19:54:00.009-06:00

One of my favorite shows right now is Damages, on FX. It's funny that I like it because I find the plot really hard to follow. Sometimes at the end of an episode I have no idea what happened. The characters' motivations are often obscure. Characters seem totally central to the season's narrative, like the one played by William Hurt earlier on this year, only to completely disappear for weeks at a time, suggesting that the story has gone in some other direction and making us wonder what their purpose was to the larger narrative. There are frequent flashforwards to tantalizing moments two or three months away in story time, but no clues about how present and future will connect up. This pistol will fire at some point, but that's about all we can be sure of right now.

The writers like to feint and tease. For instance, we were led to believe that these FBI agents might not really be cops at all, but then they revealed that really they are FBI after all. And yet something still seems not quite right.

I love the actors, especially the ones playing lawyers and corporate types with their restrained performances and classy, professional attire. Like I said, I have trouble keeping straight what all these folks are up to, but they're still fascinating to watch. This gives the show a surrealistic appeal, like a cut-up, a bunch of scenes from a show that does make sense with some of the meaningful parts redacted. I enjoy the dramatic moments as dramatic moments without having a clear sense of what exactly makes them dramatic. For instance, Ted Danson as a white-haired scoundrel trying to mend his ways, adopting an Eastern spiritual path but still having trouble managing his anger. That's just awesome.

Tate Donovan, Jimmy Cooper from The O.C., plays a lawyer who dresses really sharp. He almost makes me want to go to law school so that one day I might wear suits like his.

The main character, Ellen, played by Rose Byrne, is a sort of empty vessel. She has suffered a lot, and harbors deep grudges, but she has few scenes where she expresses strong feelings because her subordinate and investigative roles require that she keep things inside. The actress is good at giving meaningfully neutral looks that express depths of emotion.

Two actors from The Wire, Clark Peters and John Doman, play energy company no-goodniks. It's very strange that these two are in cahoots on this show. Knowing them so well from that other show makes me invest less of my emotion in the narrative. But I appreciate them so much as actors.

Glenn Close is a powerhouse. She looks out over those glasses an awful lot, always oozing intelligence and calculating judgment. Patty Hewes scares the pants off of me.

Every once in awhile Close shows us an intense, almost horrified face. You can sense her eyes starting to water up as she is seized with despair. Which we fear might drive her to God knows what acts of rank inhumanity.

The most fearsome villain is this dirty cop with ginormous glasses played by David Costabile, another veteran of The Wire (also a goofy T-Mobile commercial). The specs and beard make the performance. In this scene he tells Wes, who under false pretenses has wormed his way into our heroine Ellen's life, earning her trust and going to bed with her, that his next task is to take her out. He's not talking about a date.

More: Ken Tucker in the NYT on the appeal of the show's acting ensemble.

16943

2009-02-26T16:05:00.003-06:00

I doubt this is really the television of the future, but it is fun to look at.

"Black picture. A crystal asymmetrical black picture put on a glass base...16943 is a technological sculpture in levitation. It fits two screen sizes: 4/3 for TV and 16/9 for cinema..."

This seems to have the potential to make you aware at every moment of the inadequacy of your television set and the arbitrariness of its shape. It denaturalizes.

From Studio FRST, a French design firm. (via Kottke)

Kindle, etc.

2009-02-25T08:00:00.002-06:00

A new, improved Kindle. At $359 this still seems still to be aimed at early adopters and rich folks. I want one that sells for $79 and lets me save books as text files that I can export to my computer so that I can Apple-F to find what I want from them efficiently while writing. Maybe they would sell more content with a more affordable and usable device, but without DRM of course some users would share rather than buy. (Update: TechCrunch's 10 reasons to buy and 10 reasons not to buy a kindle includes "7. Flight attendants will tell you to turn it off on take off and landing. You can’t explain that it’s epaper and uses no current. You just can’t. It’s like explaining heaven to bears.")

Wired on the music biz's struggles with Guitar Hero and Rock Band, over money of course.

NYT: Are the humanities a luxury?

Related: a literature scholar asks Is There Intelligent Life on Television? The intended reader is not you and I, but it's interesting to see how a rationale for studying TV might be presented by someone outside of what I think of as film and TV studies. (thx DB)

Grammar Nazis, literally. Really good, LOL.

99 Things You Should Have Already Experienced On The Internet Unless You're a Loser or Old or Something. (via)

Asked to name his guilty pleasure on the Oscar red carpet, James Franco instead recommends Carl Wilson's book Let's Talk About Love (previously).

And this link is getting stale, but if you haven't already you might like to check out Mickey Rourke's Spirit Awards acceptance speech. Better than anything on the Oscars, though the Oscars won me over. The musical numbers were tight and the way they grouped awards together worked well. Putting the audience right up against the stage looked like a good idea if for no other reason than to spare us the spectacle of ladies in heels climbing a lot of stairs.

Dollhouse

2009-02-23T06:16:00.001-06:00

Fox hopes the lad mag demo will put down the PS3 and pick up the TV remote Friday nights for Dollhouse starring Eliza Dushku armed and/or naked.

Of the TV shows that have begun since the season's debut in September, I am most excited about Dollhouse. I haven't read that many reviews for fear of excessive spoilage, but I'm puzzled by the general lack of buzz. (The one positive one I read was Troy Patterson's in Slate.)

I've only seen the first two episodes (pro critics got access to three or more), but they have established a fascinating narrative premise with lots of promising opportunities for development and payoff, not to mention eye candy of the usual televisual varieties; a number of vivid characters, with slowly unfolding backstories and plenty of mystery; and a distinctive visual style, contrasting the stylized interiors of the dollhouse with its saturated colors with a more naturalistic and conventional approach for exteriors where Echo's missions are set. Eliza Dushku doesn't have great range as an actress (that I have seen). She does sexy, ass-kicking, and vulnerable. She can do smart, though it's not her biggest strength. But like Sarah Michelle Gellar in Buffy, she combines power and femininity in a way that invites admiration and even awe.

One thing Dollhouse lacks is Joss Whedon's characteristic comic sensibility. No one will write about book about Dollhouse's use of language (see Slayer Slang, which I highly recommend) or come out with a volume of quotations from the show (like The Quotable Slayer). Joss is risking a lot adopting this different, more straightforwardly dramatic tone. It's a bit audacious. Maybe part of this shift is a function of commercial constraint: to have a show like this make it on Fox, it might have to appeal more widely than any show did on on a 1990s netlet. Good for him if he can make it work.

All of these images are from episode 2, "The Target."

This groovy tilt-shift shot from the title sequence offers a view of human beings as miniatures. There's no context for this shot, so it seems to be going for symbolism. All of these strangers off in the distance are leading their ordinary lives not knowing that some of us are like Echo, a slate wiped clean and then imprinted, by a geeky Frankenstein, with customized personality.

Where the dolls sleep. Grand overhead angle, with its geometric abstraction, to emphasize the interchangeability of persons and the machine-like efficiency with which human beings are routinely transformed. Busby Berkeley gone sci-fi and post-human.

Yoga keeps dolls in shape. The second story offers a view for the staff to keep an eye on their charges. Lots of bright, warm colors in here. It looks a bit unreal, and uncomfortably comfortable.

Lots of flesh on display, especially compared with Buffy. It's 2009 now, it's a different kind of story, and it's a Fox show with a target audience of young adult males, not a WB show with a target audience of teenage girls.

Soon this weapon will be turned on her but for now she's in charge.

That's our heroine in the crosshairs. The most interesting thing about the show thematically is that it presents a woman as object in many senses, and then starts to complicate things. We know enough about Joss to trust that there will be a feminist undercurrent. But unlike Buffy, Echo has no special powers, so presumably we will fear for her more, and it will be more of a challenge to have her assert her agency.

A girl and a gun. You knew the long sleeves would have to come off.

Joss does better act-outs than anyone. This one at the close of Act I is a jaw-dropper, as we realize along with Echo what's at stake in this episode: she is to be hunted.

You see Echo's shoulders as often as possible in Dollhouse. This frighteningly thin physique is your basic hot chick look in American pop culture today. In Echo it might work to convey her vulnerability, but mostly it just makes me think the actress needs a sandwich.

Reed Diamond will forever be Kellerman from Homicide to me. He plays good nasty. His close-set eyes are always up to something.

An airborne arrow is a nice bit of over-the-top action. Dollhouse is Genre to the core.

Wallpaper courtesy of the Dollhouse on Fox site (which might just as well be called Fox on Dollhouse).

Pop/art, etc.

2009-02-20T13:26:00.005-06:00

Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker on Shepard Fairey, who apparently "embraces a trend in what the critic Dave Hickey has called 'pop masquerading as art, as opposed to art masquerading as pop'" (i.e., pop art). I have to think about that one.

The pleasures of Academic Earth, the web video site of university lectures. No film, TV, etc., there yet. It feels voyeuristic to me, watching someone else give a lecture to that unseen audience of undergrads.

Tyler Cowen on Spin magazine's switch from 5 to 10 stars: "This signals that they wish to start exaggerating the quality of the product." I didn't realize that Spin still exists.

My favorite celebrity blogger is David Byrne. Here is his report from Hong Kong, the world's worst cycling city.

Salon on sexting. If the people are going to make their own media, some of it will be filthy. Clearly the new media moral panic of early '09. (Cyberbullying is out; oversharing is 5 minutes ago.)

Project Runway Season 6 Fashion Week threads. We might never get to see them on TV. (More deets in the WaPo.)

Hulu, etc.

2009-02-19T12:32:00.001-06:00

Let's see if I understand the Hulu/Boxee story: the TV networks don't want you to watch TV on the internet on your TV? I don't know how that's going to work out for them long-term.

Design Observer Part I and Part II of a conversation about cinema. The conversation part doesn't interest me all that much, but the scans of covers of old movie magazines, journals, and books are fantastic. They even have one of The Velvet Light Trap, which many friends of the blog and I used to edit.

More on Pirate Bay: the pirates come off as fools, maybe on purpose.

Way more on Facebook's ToS.

Obit of Ben Blank, innovator in TV news graphics. I found the obit to be richly informative about the history of television graphics.

Defamer's 'In Memoriam' Oscar Montage Pool. I pick Paul Newman to end the montage.

Finally, for your Oscar Nite celebrations, may I recommend Champagne cocktails: a cube of sugar in the bottom of a flute glass, a few drops of Angostura bitters, and fill with Champagne (or an affordable substitute like Cava). You'll want to have a few of those in your belly so that you won't care so much when Slumdog wins its 10th award.

Pirates

2009-02-17T19:43:00.006-06:00

Pirates drive this bus around Sweden

More on the Pirate Bay trial in Sweden, which the American mainstream news media are not covering (perhaps fearful of giving the pirates too much publicity? esp given that they are in the IP business themselves?):

Last week, Gizmodo predicted doom and gloom for BitTorrent sharing if the Pirate Bay is shut down.

On the second day of the trial, half the charges were dropped. Now PB stands accused only of making copyrighted works available rather than also of producing such works.

TorrentFreak has details of goings-on inside and outside the courthouse. They seemed especially delighted in reporting the prosecuting attorney's inability to get his PowerPoint to work in the courtroom. PP failure is always a sign of something.

Wired sez the trial has a rock-star quality, whatever that means. The writer had to pay a scalper $60 to get inside the courthouse. My fave part of the report: "Your correspondent was served homemade 'Creative Commons' cookies by teenage girls in fantasy genre garb. They said they wanted to support the good forces of the world and convert bad ones to their cause." Don't we all.

The Twitter search term #spectrial is the place for many Twittered links and responses. (The PB site trial.piratebay.com has been down for days.)

Wikipedia has many details missing in other places.

This LAT article from 2007 gives the MSM two-sides take on PB and piracy as a threat to the major media companies. But it's not just pushing the MPAA's propaganda, which I guess is nice.

A Trial Edition of Steal This Film is available for download. (The first two installments, Steal This Film Part 1 and 2, are streaming on Google Video.) Short version: Information wants to be free.

Oscar predix, etc.

2009-02-16T14:31:00.003-06:00

Nate Silver's Oscar predictions. I would like to know how his computations would have predicted earlier years' awards. (Btw, I predicted Milk would win best pic when I saw it a month ago. Today I'm not predicting.)

Jill Krementz's photos of John Updike. I love him jumping rope and standing over his PC.

Law & Order art from Brandon Bird.

The basics on the Pirate Bay trial in Sweden, the so-called internet piracy trial of the decade.

Facebook owns you. Ok, information about you. Forever. (Compare FB's terms with other social networks, via my delicious friends.)

30 Rock, etc.

2009-02-15T13:27:00.000-06:00

Videogum textual analysis of 30 Rock with hidden secret meanings.

Jezebel: TatianaTheAnonymousModel explains the SI swimsuit issue from the perspective of a flat-chested but knowledgeable fashion model. (Side note for pedants: anonymous and pseudonymous are often synonymous).

NYT article skimmer, a good idea.

American TV history according to Wikipedia: Friday night death slot. (via)

The people of Wisconsin financed a Hollywood gangster picture (Michael Mann's July 2009 release Public Enemies) to the tune of $4.6 million, reports my hometown daily. Just to have a studio movie made here, it seems.

Cavett on Cheever and Updike on Cavett, with video.

New Simpsons title sequence in HD.

Planned Obsolescence sez "media texts aren’t just the frosting on the literary cake."