Filed under: Benjamin, commodities, music, sam | Tags: commodities, music, Walter Benjamin
In light of Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, I got to thinking about hardcore punk 7” records, specifically something I read recently about a 7” put out by a Canadian hardcore band called Fucked Up. Fucked Up have something of a tradition of releasing their music sporadically in 7” singles of two songs, and just before Christmas they announced their latest release, David Christmas, which was limited to 1000 copies (ordinarily quite a high print-run for a hardcore band, although Fucked Up are currently receiving quite widespread and borderline mainstream attention), ordered online and shipped in specially designed Fucked Up gift wrap (the commodity double-whammy).
Filed under: aristea, media everyday media, print, semiology | Tags: christian, design, flyer, semiology
Sussex university campus has been full of them in the last week. 
You could see them on the pavement, on library desks, in the hands of happy distributers at Library square, at the Falmer bus stop benches, it was really hard to miss them. The ‘revolution’ flyers and the ‘revolution’ web site of the Sussex University Christian union (more…)
Filed under: aristea, representation | Tags: british cinema, dirk bogarde, Dyer, homosexuality, representation, victim
This article discusses my reading of ‘Victim’ (1961) directed by Dierden and Relph and writen by Janet Green but in relation to Richard Dyer’s essay ‘Victim: hegemonic project’ in Dyer, R. (1993) The Matter of Images, Routledge. Though the film is part of a tradition in British cinema between 1956-1963 that deals with social problems, it is the very first movie where male homosexuality and the law that criminalized it are explicitly addressed.
Filed under: sam, space and everyday life | Tags: baudrillard, cinema, space
(This is a modified section from one of my term papers, called ‘Authentic Appearances: Patrick Keiller and the Promotional Aesthetic’. I’m writing about space and place and its invasion by ‘promotional imperatives’, particularly in relation to the pseudo-documentary films of Patrick Keiller. Here, I am trying to defend notions of space from excessive post-modernisation, so to speak, and retain the primacy of material reality.)
Filed under: media everyday media
Just another comment: came back from a public lecture today. On my way back, listening to my daily portion of classical music, I thought of our many discussions about class and taste. And I realised, I hadn’t listened to pop music in I don’t know how many weeks. Still, I have been talking about popular culture all the way long. This is not to say that popular culture = popular music, however, this seems to be part of what many frown upon. Those Justin Timberlakes, Rihannas, Sporty Spices, Princes and Queens.
So I decided tonight to start listening to some pure mainstream pop music again – on BBC radio.
.meandomedar
Filed under: my favourite structuralists
I am different. I am an individual. I am not normal. I live outside society’s conventions. I am creative, funky, a trendsetter. I wish I were.
I am a product of this world, a product of Western civilisation, a product of this country, of this language, of this university, of this peer group. There is no “me” outside and beyond this civil body, I am tied into the world of words, signs, Bourdieu’s habitus. My habitus. I cannot escape it. I cannot free myself and become something that is not right here. Whenever I look outside and inside of me, I see layers and layers of my social, cultural, emotional and whatever else background. I am not me, I am a jigsaw puzzle assembled by culture.
And know what? We’re all in this together and as much as I think I determine what I see, feel, hear I can only see, feel and hear within this system of semiotics, culture, this society. In fact it is not me expressing myself, it is everything that has been given to me ever since I was born.
I am a member. I am one of many. I am a product. Just like everyone else.
.meandomedar
Filed under: Uncategorized
OK, so everyone will need to register on wordpress with a username, then one of the current administrators (at the moment aristea and I and now elif and lulu) can make you an administrator on this blog.
Then we can decide how to jazz it up a bit and get posting, I guess.
aristea: i went on and changed the terrible initial design, I put this neutral one temporarily, till we are all online.
