Procrast-Nation

I’ve been watching a lot of Dr Who recently, and I noticed the current writers have a knack for adding cheesy characters you would expect from a 60s or 70s sci-fi show. One of the more prominent ones is the Face of Boe, who is repeatedly called a traveler. So, I decided to chronicle some of his adventures, particularly the last 24 years of his life.

Taking Seratoninronin’s apt criticisms to heart on my first post in this series, I took a break in order to both catch up on my collegiate studies (still lagging pretty far behind, damn you Japanese I) and to rethink my approach in regard to it. I take his silence in the comments section as a victory; there was nothing so obviously off there as to prompt an attack. So I’m returning to the series.

In the meantime I read a good number of pieces from the John Hanhardt edited reader Video Culture: A Critical Investigation. While the reader is a quite handy and thorough collection of pieces on the topic, from “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” onward. McLuhan is wrongly represented in essay after essay as the herald of some sort of electronic utopia, which makes me wonder how deeply any of the various essayists researched their topics before pontificating. While some good points were made and interesting concepts brought up in each essay, the vast majority tended to fall into Marxist analysis. The further from the source each Marxist critique got, the more the essays started sounding like Rand worshipping objectivist critiques. “This person’s idea doesn’t work because Marx/Rand said so. Utopia will be achieved once class equality/completely unrestricted markets are instated.” It got to the point of being like eating sand, and I imagine several of the writers here would’ve been thoroughly annoying in conversation.
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Another banjo composition for all the legions of fans who delighted at the previous one, “The Great British Petroleum Oil Slick.”

coffin-shaped-crave-case

Going over a stack of books from my college library regarding the history of television and communications theory has turned up, one or two very useful books, and a couple books of completely misguided or worthless nonsense. Communication studies, or media theory as its sometimes referred to, is a strange field in that it doesn’t really have any single parent discipline, or any single discipline which it would claim its predominantly a subset of (like psychology, which I would argue is as much related to literary/social criticism as it is to any scientific tradition.) It borrows freely from literary criticism, anthropology, sociology, architectural criticism, and science history (especially Thomas Kuhn) in equal doses. As such, the usefulness of any work done within the field is mostly a measure of the imaginative and perceptive qualities of the writer. I’m going to throw in a quick overview of one of these books with each of these short probes.

Hal Himmelstein’s 1981 survey of television/video criticism On the Small Screen was of limited use-he points out the basic problems of establishing a body of television criticism similar to the current body of literary criticism-television mostly ignores boundaries of careful aesthetic construction, and its voluminous output makes surveying it in its entirety or anything close nearly impossible. Issues of artistic worth are mostly besides the point in television, so a new critical language less based on evaluation of merit and more based on reading into motifs and distribution (the form of the medium as opposed to its content) must be established. Himmelstein goes over all of this in his introduction and then goes over a number of middling critics. McLuhan could and did say what Himmelstein says here in the space of a paragraph. Himmelstein also spends far too much time on the high-low culture debate, something which ceased to be useful with the advent of mass media besides as a way to keep young students from wasting all their time on post-modernist wallowing. This book was of limited use to say the least.

For today’s mass media product, I’m going to look at the front page of the popular news aggregation website Reddit. Read the rest of this entry »

Having finished a particularly fruitful rereading of Marshall McLuhan’s first published work, The Mechanical Bride, I felt compelled to test out some of the ideas he put forward in this work. For those unfamiliar, the book is a compendium of short one or two page essays based on print advertisements and comic strips from the early 1950s. The essays are acidic, caustic commentaries, and reading even one of them would dispell the absurd notion that McLuhan was heralding some electronic utopia; his notion of the “global village” wasn’t one of utopian togetherness but of the rolling back of individual identity and critical thought/sophistication in the era of mass communications. In order to ‘retribalize’ as McLuhan frequently called it, a certain amount of civilization must be rolled back and diminished. In an age of absolute media saturation such as the one in which we are currently entrenched, full sober awareness of the implications and roots of all cultural products we’re confronted with is simply an impossibility, and isn’t especially appealing-the most comfortable position in the retribalized culture is one of a shared and simplified opinions. We go from cliche to archetype. Art vacillates between two extremes; the art of the extremely personal and almost confessional in nature, which gives us a portrait of the artist, and the art of the purposely depersonalized which instead gives an abstract portrait of its intended audience. It is this latter type of art which I hope to explore here.

So in the spirit of Mechanical Bride, I’m going to try to do a critical dissection of a different piece of mass produced culture from recent times each day for the next month, in hopes of eventually coming to some more full understanding of what America consists of.

For my first mass media art object I chose to observe the music video for the song “OMG” by Usher, video directed by Anthony Mandler. Read the rest of this entry »

I did a post earlier about this collaborative fictional story project I have been working on for a long time.  To learn more about it, follow this link:

http://procrast-nation.com/?p=129

Anyway, the following is a brief travelers guide to help navigate this monstrosity.

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A picture say it all:

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This is a paper I wrote for a class I was taking on Nietzsche. I’m essentially arguing that Nietzsche was even more Christian than he himself was aware of, sort of that he was a secret, closeted Christian. More papers to come. I have one on Borges, one on Kierkegaard, one on Sartre, one on infinite regress and belief justification and one on methodological individualism vs. holism in the social sciences (along with random old other ones). Let me know what y’all are interested in reading. Enjoy. Read the rest of this entry »

I took some of the requested objects and created a representation of them on MS Paint, as promised.  Sometimes it didn’t come out exactly as I planned.  Like my image for “martyr” really worked better as “crusade” so I just did crusade instead.  More will come, but here are the first 10.

Moondog

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