Archive for April, 2010
Wax Interlude: The Radio Dept. Will Make You Happy
Posted by Nav in Music, Wax Interlude on April 30, 2010
It’s true that I already put this on Twitter. And it’s also true, as you point out, that “Nav this isn’t your fucking Tumblr”. But I couldn’t help but share a song that not only opens with an exhortation to KRUSH KAPITALISM, but is just so full of so much joy.
“Heaven’s on Fire” – The Radio Dept.
The Post-Ironic in Practice: Die Antwoord
Posted by Nav in Cultural Theory, Music on April 22, 2010
So, for a couple of years now, I’ve been yapping about something I call post-irony. It’s likely that, simply out of ignorance, I am mistaken, and it’s just old-fashioned irony or Jamesonian pastiche or something else. But whatever I’ve called it, the thing that has intrigued me so much is the indeterminacy of contemporary culture – of the impossibility of deciding whether something is sincere or ironic without first Googling something.
My two key examples so far have R. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet and Heidi Montag’s music career – so take it with a grain of salt (as if you don’t already).
Still, watch this Die Antwoord video and tell me: without knowing anything about them, could you tell whether its parody or sincere expression? Performance art or… well, something else? Is the chorus a feminist critique? Or its opposite?
‘Cause dudes? I have no fucking idea what to think about anything anymore.
By the way, get to the end. ‘Cause that’s when it gets extra-awesome.
Edit: It occurs to me that the cultural distance works to either further or exacerbate the indeterminacy – i.e. is this normal for ‘them’? Are they aware of ‘our’ culture and are playing with it? Which seems more than just North American narcissism – part of Buzzfeed’s whole shtick is that it uses non-American as fodder for entertainment. This feels like another of those things that is very ‘contemporary’ – in the face of so much access to difference, is the response to reinscribe the cultural hierarchies that we supposedly moved beyond?
Wax Interlude: New Caribou Album
Posted by Nav in Music, Wax Interlude on April 22, 2010
Swim by Caribou – the follow-up to Polaris-winning Andorra – is out now. Odessa is the first track. Pitchfork review here, and the video is below.
On the History of Cha
Posted by Nav in Immigration and Diaspora on April 21, 2010
Cha (in Panjabi) or Chai (in Hindi) = Tea*
Courtesy of Flickr user this lyre lark under a CC license.
When you grow up as an immigrant family in Thatcherite England, you develop certain myths about the past in order to reclaim your sense of self. One that my father always told me was that, upon arriving in India, the English would boil tea leaves, throw out the water and eat the leaves.
It turned out to be totally false.
The English actually drank tea before they arrived in India. The only reason tea became so massively popular in India is that the Raj started cultivating the plant so they wouldn’t have to rely on China for their morning cuppa. But it is now an almost fundamental part of Indian life, one of the few things you could say is shared across the massive cultural divides of the country (though coffee, I hear, is just as popular in the South).
Anyway – this is all to point you to a lovely history of tea in India that outlines how cha became woven into the fabric of India. It also has some great pics of early tea ads – some of which are a little eyebrow-raising.
*White people, you know I love you – but every time I hear you say ‘chai tea’, a small part of me wants to smack you. Yes, you’re right, it’s grossly unfair and even a little condescending. Still. I just wanted you to know.
P.S. Oh – what has come to be known as chai tea in the west is sometimes called masala chai in India (masala = a mix of spices)
The End of Ends
Posted by Nav in Cultural Theory on April 21, 2010
Kazys Varnelis, the Director of the Network Architecture Lab at the Columbia, writes on atemporality in the era after postmodernism, making the bold claim – which I think is also spot on – that postmodernism, even in “mocking modernism’s teleological goals”, still relied on a linear notion of history and ‘the thing that came after the rupture’:
But there is no rupture with postmodernism today, nor are there many claims that our time is somehow different. It’s as if the end of history really did come. If any observation defines our time, science fiction novelist Bruce Sterling’s conclusion that network culture produces a form of historical consciousness marked by atemporality. By this, Sterling means that having obtained near-total instant access to information, our desire and ability to situate ourselves within any kind of broader historical structure have dissipated. The temporal compression caused by globalization and networking technologies, together with an accelerating capitalism, has intensified the ahistorical qualities of modernism and postmodernism, producing the atemporality endemic to network culture. [via @ballardian]
Why am I linking to this? Well, the thing that I’ve been roughly thinking about is the connection between the individual semiotic act and its hermeneutic context. Some friends and I were chatting the other day about how, to our students, everything is surface – there is no sense of a socio-historical grounding for either events or ideas. So temporality – or the notion of historicity itself – is starting to become alien.
There are many many questions – big ones like “what is politics now?” – but for now, Imma shut up and let this sit.
The Academic Dilemma, Summarised in Cartoon Form
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on April 19, 2010
This is for my grad school nerds.
[h/t: M]
Roger Ebert: Video Games Can Never Be Art
Posted by Nav in Gaming Theory on April 17, 2010
So, this again.
Ebert essentially argues that art should either be engaged in representing something well – whether through a commitment to realism or metaphor – or that it should produce a particular sort of emotional or experiential reaction. So, basically: Aristotle or Kant, take your pick.
I’d rather not try and produce a drawn-out argument as to why I think he’s wrong – particularly in the ‘never‘ part of the argument – but I will repeat that mimesis or imitation operates according to particular principles that have been enmeshed in culture for thousands of years, and we respond to them as such. Games operate partly by representation, but their primary mode is the interactive nature of simulation – or, as I like to call it, ‘re-simulation’: the production of a virtual arena that operates according to particular rules and references ‘texts of reality’ not in order to reproduce them but to use their systems as the basis for a game structure.
Put another way: imitation in the form of drawing or acting is central to human existence. And so is play. In much the same way the the technologies of print and film allowed the mimesis of literature and theatre respectively to become objects of mass culture, computers allow the same thing for play.
All that said: when Ebert says that no game has the same sort of cultural or intellectual impact as film or literature or painting etc., he’s spot on. I can only speak anecdotally here, but no game has even come close to having the kind of impact that a Lahiri short story or Thomas McCarthy film has. It will be some time before games as a form become culturally significant for reasons beyond their enormous impact on economics or leisure time.
And there a number of things that need to change for that to happen, not the least of which is the demographic expansion of those making and writing about games.
To end, though: I don’t know what Flower is exactly. But it’s something. It produces something. And the strange act of identifying with the camera – with the implied gaze – in a game in which you are, in some sense, ‘the wind’… well, it may not be an Amitav Ghosh novel. But it is a sign of how the form may do incredible things in the future.
For the time being though, I’m playing Gears of War 2 – and for reasons quite different than I’ve outlined here – I’m fucking loving it.
Richard Nash: “Novels Break Algorithms”
Posted by Nav in eBooks, Electronic Reading, Writing and Prose on April 17, 2010
As Richard Nash points out on his blog, this is “the speech Chris Anderson of Wired says is the best he’s ever seen on book publishing…”
Nash, who was kind enough to once leave a couple of comments here, spends about half-an-hour talking about the future of book publishing at an event at Toronto’s Mars Centre.
It’s interesting for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it rather forcefully argues that people will be reading more and not less, so much so, that supply is no longer the problem in the publishing world – it’s demand.
It also contains the strangely reassuring phrase “novels break algorithms”, an idea I think appeals to our sense that there is something ‘beyond’ about art that exists somehow above or separately from both pop culture and technology.
It really is excellent, and if you’re interested in what will happen to ‘the book’, it’s well worth the time. The video itself is just Richard standing at a podium speaking , so you can just put it on and listen to while doing something else.
(Sorta’ related: for reasons I can’t quite figure out, this post I wrote a couple of days ago on the economics of scarcity vs. the economics of abundance got a lot traction).
Zizek on Avatar
Posted by Nav in Cultural Theory on April 16, 2010
Everyone’s favourite psychoanalytic philosopher on the most successful film evah. Which, by the way, he hasn’t actually seen. Yessir! And it’s still spot on and totally worth reading. *sigh* A choice bit:
This is why it is interesting to imagine a sequel to Avatar in which, after a couple of years (or, rather, months) of bliss, the hero starts to feel a weird discontent and to miss the corrupted human universe. The source of this discontent is not only that every reality, no matter how perfect it is, sooner or later disappoints us. Such a perfect fantasy disappoints us precisely because of its perfection: what this perfection signals is that it holds no place for us, the subjects who imagine it.
And another:
Cameron’s superficial Hollywood Marxism (his crude privileging of the lower classes and caricatural depiction of the cruel egotism of the rich) should not deceive us. Beneath this sympathy for the poor lies a reactionary myth, first fully deployed by Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous. It concerns a young rich person in crisis who gets his (or her) vitality estored through brief intimate contact with the full-blooded life of the poor. What lurks behind the compassion for the poor is their vampiric exploitation.
Love him or hate him, motherfucker is worth listening to.
