Filed under: aristea | Tags: ma blog, non-communication, statistics, utilitarianism
I am not sure of the day exactly but it was around the 19th, 20th of January that the blog was set up, so this is a six-month birthday and I want to give a few statistics. This blog came after the meeting of five people, including me. So far post are 41. This makes a frequency of 6.8 posts per month. The blog was announced in the MOO, emails were sent to the convenors of the 2 other MA’s of the film&media department so that more people come over from othar MA’s. Continue reading
Filed under: anne, sensuality, space and everyday life, spirituality | Tags: blogging, private, public, virtual diary
This post might be yet a bit more lyrical than analytical; however, as I have been pondering about it, this post shall become part of what I aim to think of today.
Filed under: aristea, cinema, gender | Tags: gender, katharina blum, media, new german cinema, paternalistic state, terrorism, whore virgin dualism
I am here referring to the Volker Schloendorff and Margarehthe von Trotta film and not the 1974 novelle by Heinrich Böll. Katharina, a woman that leads a quiet life, meets an anarchist -evidently linked to the Red Army Faction- and takes him to her house where they make love. After he escapes, her life is completely destroyed by the journalists and the police investigations.
Part of the New German Cinema of the 1960s, the film is the work of German filmmakers from the left who “challenged the Establishment history of the terrorist movement” (Hoerschelmann, 2001 : 86). I will not go into the theme of the imagined terrorism and the hysterical reaction of the state. I am more interested in the dualism ‘virgin-whore’ as that is represented in the film and the ideas of gender in general.
Filed under: anne, media everyday media, theory | Tags: body, discourse, foucault, health
This question seems to become increasingly important within everyday life, not only as a polite way of starting a conversation, but even more so for media and public bodies to check on the nation’s health. TV shows on public and private broadcasting showing the daily diet of a 150 kg man chewed up in a see-through tube or the likely development of an overweight child in a more than disturbing computer simulation have become daily family programme.
Discourses surrounding a person’s body and how to stay fit and healthy have not only swamped tv, but also pretty much any other medium I can think of. One recent, rather funny element of the whole health frenzy, I think, is Nintendo’s wii console where people can exercise playing virtual golf or doing a boxing exercise. The pinnacle, however, is the new wii balance board, enabling people to do pushups in their living room on this board while keeping the balance and, at the end of the exercise, measure their weight “more accurately than with a typical bathroom scale.” You can ski on the board, too. What once was a game console for people / teenies and 20/30 somethings has evolved into a DIY fitness studio.
Filed under: aristea, human rights, media everyday media | Tags: bloggers unite, disability, human rights, waterboarding
Today is the day of blogging for human rights and apart from reminding people that women are humans, I would like to urge people towards a campaign. It is the Amnesty International Campaign called Unsubscribe-me: Unite against Human Rights Abuse in the war of terror and
Right now all unsubscriber eyes are on the practice of waterboarding. President Bush says it is an acceptable ‘enhanced interrogation technique’
So far 32639 people have un-subscribed. Another issue is
The bill to extend pre-charge detention to 42 days will shortly go to a vote in the UK Parliament. Please make a difference by dropping your MP a line.
And in a very different tone, the 37th edition of the disability blog carnival. Enjoy!
On Friday (9th May) I went to see Control at the Duke of York’s cinema in Brighton. I went with a keen movie-going friend of mine. My interest in the film was piqued by the fact that I’ve been impressed with some photography I’ve seen by the director Anton Corbijn. I’ve also seen one video by Anton Corbijn which I really liked. This was not a music video but rather an artistic video build around an interview with the alternative pop/rock icon Captain Beefheart. Anyway this was Anton Corbijn’s first feature film and is focussed on the short life of Ian Curtis, lead singer with the late seventies group Joy Division. Continue reading
Filed under: aristea, media everyday media, space and everyday life | Tags: brighton festival, genre, multi-sensory experience, promenade performance, the bell
I went to the Wild Park at Moulsecomb last night and had a multi-sensory experience with the ‘Periplum with the World famous The Bell‘, which, for those who missed it, is repeated tonight. There is no way one person or small party of people, can have the same experience as another in this kind of event. Begginning with the way you reach the place the event takes place:
Filed under: aristea, culture, media everyday media | Tags: animal rights, fingerprint, kfc, murder, PETA, squid, stupidity, Te Papa, vegeterianism
Two signs of immense stupidity for today, one is the “world’s largest eye” and the other is the “finger lickin’ campaign”.
The later is apparently coming back, not that I noticed the first time, but this time I just could not ignore the huge poster ads on bus stops. while cycling by. That is from Falmer to Brighton and you can see there the impression of a chicken leg in a bloody backround. KFC, who did the ad, has a history of unethical treatment of animals and of cruelty when the Kentucky Fried Cruelty campaign launched some years ago, with Pamela Anderson as their animal rights activist and some lettuce over her bosom. I have difficulty in grasping the meaning of ethical in farming little birds who are captured and can’t fly, fed to death and then slaughtered and dismembered, their limbs sunk into pulp and fried. I really can’t locate where the ‘ethical’ could be placed in this chain of events, cause it seems to me that the problem in this process is not if the bird was happy during its life but the fact that you murder it.
Filed under: anne, commodities, space and everyday life | Tags: face recognition system, foucault, panopticon, surveillance, technologies
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/apr/25/theairlineindustry.transport
I am already wondering what this is going to look like when I fly home for a couple of weeks and aim to write more about this in a short while.
I will also skim the German news to see what their next measures towards a safer nation are.
Sleep well.
in media res 