Scrawled in Wax

Wax Scrawls is, depending on your perspective, either a recurring ‘link post’ feature here on Scrawled in Wax, or a glaring symbol that I have no idea what the hell the point of this blog is any more. Enjoy!

Good ole’ Zizek – he’s always yapping about something contemporary. This time round, he suggests the ideologies of both Kung Fu Panda and The Dark Knight are insidious and dangerous in that they both valorize lying. I’m no Zizek, but to me it seems more pertinent to ask why both of these films like to posit their own ideologies as somehow ‘fictional’ and ‘existing in the story’ when ‘real-world’ ideology functions in a remarkably similar way (i.e. if you think of Kung-Fu Panda’s dismissive representation of Buddhism or the Dark Knight’s prioritising of ‘those in the know’ over the populous, it’s pretty darn ‘accurate’, particularly if one thinks of how ‘stories’ are used to propagate ideology). Anyway, I’m also really glad Slavoj said this about video games: “Grand Theft Auto explores the social ambiguity of violence … I don’t buy the theory that, ‘You think you are playing, but you are generating violence.’ I don’t think there is a clear connection between that kind of violence and real violence. This eternal fear of liberals who claim if you play video games, you’ll think reality is like this and you’ll go out and beat someone. It’s a much more complex system”. I’ve been saying this for years. But then, I’m not Zizek. (Also, here’s a Globe piece that suggests the answer to the question ‘When will video games grow up?‘ is ‘They already did.’).

Slate have written on the ‘prescient politics of the Big Lebowski‘. Um, ok. This sounds a bit like a drunken brainwave one reluctantly continues working on the next day – but I always feel compelled to link to Lebowski stuff.

Toronto Star reporter Diana Zlomislic gets herself professionally dressed, styled and made-up and proceeds to crash a TIFF party. It’s hardly revelatory, but it’s nice to see an example of both how celebrity is manufactured but also how we ‘common people’ react to it – watch the video in which passers-by snap photographs of Zlomislic simply because they assume she’s famous.

N8R TXT is an art project which, when you text them where you are, sends you location-specific haikus (in Ontario anyway). As in: ““Summer morning, Toronto Island Park, Toronto” — boats knock their moorng / a squadron of mallrd ducks / on mud-slick footpaths“. This is sorta’ neat and the kind of thing that ‘de-alienates’ technology. They’re on Twitter too.

Finally, here’s the future of paper, the newspaper and books: it’s adaptable, plastic ‘paper’ that changes before your eyes, like a Kindle or Sony Reader but with a more amorphous function. I’ll (probably) write a full post on this later; if my life has been immersed in tech for a couple of years, the pendulum has swung back the other way towards literature and it’s changing how I’m thinking about all this ‘technostuff’.