Filed under: culture, media everyday media, sam | Tags: baudrillard, newspaper, simulacra, tabloids, the sun
media technologies and sense perception… baudrillard and the precession of simulacra… ethnic cleansing vs frontpage aesthetics… representation of difference… where to begin?!
Filed under: culture, sam | Tags: emos, general butt naked, goths, mods, punks, rockers, subcultures, tupac army
For the most part, I’m not personally interested in studies of subcultures or alternative factions of people within society. I tend to side with the argument that critical deconstruction primarily weakens these types of identities, de-mythologises them and leaves them mundane and phoney. I’m referring to the sort of studies by Richard Hoggart and Dick Hebdige, then right through to endless productions either indie or mainstream that approach cultural movements that are generally music-based, white, predominantly middle-class and invariably of American original.
That said, with this post I don’t want to provide a critique or a commentary as such, but just share a small collection of moments when forms of cultural movements seem to escalate beyond simple consumption or teenage self-identification. Here are a few examples of various ‘urban tribes’ in real, physical conflict; situations which seem like sci-fi films coming to life. I’m not necessarily saying that each of these scenarios is based on similar dynamics, but I do suspect that cultural sectarianism is something that will become increasingly prevalent in ever greater spheres of life, and increasingly important in the functioning of postmodern consumer capitalism.
Filed under: commodities, culture, media everyday media, sam, space and everyday life, theory
model living: experiencing the ideal home from the great exhibition to ikea (culture, experience and history)
- this one traces a cultural history of exhibited model interiors, finding that the home exhibition has, in the late C20th, moved beyond the exhibition hall, informing a specific type of commerce and providing images that have become ingrained in the consumer’s imagination.
limitless postponements: the changing presence of control (media theory and research II)
- this one offers an addendum to the foucault-deleuze discourse on control and discipline, arguing that the contemporary regime of control is pre-emptive and encourages living for tomorrow over living for today.
anyone else want to offer up their term papers?
Filed under: commodities, culture, sam, space and everyday life | Tags: Daily Mail Ideal Home Show, IKEA, model living
For anyone interested, over on boredom… I’ve posted up a few notes on this year’s Daily Mail Ideal Home exhibition. Its related to a paper I’m writing called “Model Living: Experiencing the Ideal Home from the Great Exhibition to IKEA” which I’ll post up here after hand-in if thats what we’re going to do.
I agree with Mr Lynch on this one, but I really don’t think it’s a case of ‘getting real’. That implies that there is a correct way to watch a film, a correct location and method of screening. Throughout cinema’s short history it has already seen a range of different ways of experiencing films, from the mutoscope to the multiplex, and the technological changes have affected both how films are made and, thereafter, our internalised sensory perception.
Filed under: media everyday media, sam, theory | Tags: geertz culture definitions
So, we (those of us on the media and cultural studies MA) are about five months in now, and I have a question: what is culture, anyway?
I appreciate that this question is probably unanswerable – probably best unanswered, even – but I was wondering if anyone else could find a succinct definition for what they take ‘culture’ to mean?
My current favourite comes from Clifford Geertz (1973):
“The concept of culture I espouse… is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of a law but an interpretative one in search of meaning.”
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: 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.)
