Rogueish

Veep: Season One | TV Review | Slant Magazine

Sat, 12 May 2012 15:54:00 -0700

Veep: Season One | TV Review | Slant Magazine:

Veep feels weirdly outdated, tired, and tiring. Politicians are lecherous, incompetent, irascible, and vain. Laws are filled with cheap, self-negating compromises. Leaders put on a politically correct face in public, but—get this—it’s only an act! Veep chugs along powered by such an elaborate, rapid-fire complex of clichés, received ideas, and commonplaces that even the most obvious of these shared secrets soon begin to feel false.

Although I disagree that Veep isn’t funny, I think this criticism of its reliance on cynical clichés rather than specific satire is interesting (particularly as I hate the trite pseudo-cynicism of a lot of current TV shows, from Glee to Archer). It’s particularly interesting in comparison with the British show on which Veep is based, The Thick of It, which is one of the most precise pieces of satire I’ve ever seen. The Thick of It has some nice little details about the UK government (which I particularly appreciated as I was working for the civil service when the show first aired), but more importantly it is satirical in its form. The obsession with language, the rapid-fire banter as form of positioning and control over message works very specifically as a criticism of New Labour, and the spin-off film In the Loop makes really clear the murderous consequences of this obsession with spin. I’m trying to think what an analogous formal satire of US politics would look like, and whether Veep embodies it. Arguably, the pathology of the Obama administration isn’t spin but wonkishness, a kind of half-smart political science student belief in the superiority of policy over politics, and we really don’t see that in Veep.

Was wowed by this on Popjustice a few weeks ago but forgot to...

Fri, 11 May 2012 21:52:00 -0700

Was wowed by this on Popjustice a few weeks ago but forgot to write about it; it’s a really, really well put together song. The relentlessness of the accompaniment, combined with the fragility of the vocal and the tentativeness of the chord progression, which continually makes you expect a modulation into something more optimistic, all comes together to make the track beautifully bittersweet.

Been listening to this a lot in part because it’s great...

Fri, 11 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Been listening to this a lot in part because it’s great but also because I keep trying to figure out who it reminds me of. I mean obviously there’s a bunch of people (Princess Superstar and Skeelo come to mind), but there’s someone else I’ve heard more recently who has a very similar bored teenager flow, and I can’t remember who it is.

Mad Men, Girls and Englishmen | Back to the World

Thu, 10 May 2012 12:24:05 -0700

Mad Men, Girls and Englishmen | Back to the World:

It’s what I hope Mad Men could use its time exploring rather than running down the clock with swingin’ Sixties cliches – the other side of the Sixties myth: the pain of adjusting, the melancholy of being left behind, the Zen of giving up on being cool, the possible benefits of getting very confused, the rehearsal for mortality that is falling out of touch.

tomewing: I think the Brits on the thread went in pretty hard...

Thu, 10 May 2012 00:54:14 -0700

tomewing:

I think the Brits on the thread went in pretty hard on the idea of laundry rooms but this may have been vengeance for the drubbing they’d got on the tipping thread.

Wait what how did the UK people lose on the tipping thread? The ubiquity of tipping, a.k.a. not paying people proper wages, is one of the stupider things about the US, certainly worse than having laundry rooms (which exist in the UK, too, they’re just called “utility rooms”).

DEATH KNOWS MY NAME: Žižek the Authoritarian

Tue, 08 May 2012 14:01:47 -0700

DEATH KNOWS MY NAME: Žižek the Authoritarian:

propagandaduende:

kohenari:

In a post last week, I quoted Johann Hari on the myriad problems with Slavoj Žižek. Not surprisingly, fans of Žižek were quick to write to me about why Hari is wrong. The blogger at Interruptions, in fact, pointed me to an interesting piece by Graham Harman that serves…

This is an amazing article on the implicit authoritarianism in Zizek’s work, I would urge everyone to take a look.

ahaha what

Žižek: “Here’s an extended argument developed over the course of a number of books against the liberal criticism of Leninism as authoritarian.”

Liberal critic of Žižek: “OMG ŽIŽEK IS A LENINIST WHAT A TERRIBLE AUTHORITARIAN HE IS.”

It’s bizarre; this supposed criticism of Žižek literally fails to engage with anything he has written ever.

"If there is one student attitude that most all faculty bemoan, it is instrumentalism. This is the..."

Fri, 04 May 2012 13:36:15 -0700

“If there is one student attitude that most all faculty bemoan, it is instrumentalism. This is the view that you go to college to get a degree to get a job to make money to be happy. Similarly, you take this course to meet this requirement, and you do coursework and read the material to pass the course to graduate to get the degree. Everything is a means to an end. Nothing is an end in itself. There is no higher purpose. When we tell students to study for the exam or, more to the point, to study so that they can do well on the exam, we powerfully reinforce that way of thinking. While faculty consistently complain about instrumentalism, our behavior and the entire system encourages and facilitates it.”

-
Stop Telling Students to Study for Exams (via world-shaker)

Martin Covington at Berkeley is doing great work on this, including (and this is perhaps an especially important task) teaching a regular class to graduate students about how they can avoid promoting this kind of instrumentalism in their own teaching.

Oh yeah, also in last week’s Gossip Girl Blair wore this...

Thu, 03 May 2012 12:08:35 -0700

Oh yeah, also in last week’s Gossip Girl Blair wore this rather nice dress and this excellent coat, which I include here in animated GIF form to show off it’s full swirly brilliance.

Last week on Gossip Girl, Nate Archibald, crusading journalist,...

Thu, 03 May 2012 00:13:16 -0700

[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]

Last week on Gossip Girl, Nate Archibald, crusading journalist, broke into Liz Hurley’s hotel room to steal some documents, then when she found him there he had sex with her until she forgot to ask why he was in her hotel room (it’s a legitimate journalistic method, OK? He learnt it at Columbia J-School). This week, he discovered that the documents were in code, so he called in Blair Waldorf, expert cryptanalyst. I was LOLing at this point, but it turns out that, in third grade, Blair was worried her mum was reading her diary so she undertook an in depth study of cryptography which is actually totally in character so fair enough. Serena was supposed to be working with Liz Hurley but, IDK, she got distracted by Blair’s cleavage or something and switched sides. Then they all went to a high class brothel and tried to blackmail Liz Hurley but she wasn’t having any of it. They tried to get revenge by leaking the information to Gossip Girl but she wouldn’t publish it and then Nate’s girlfriend was like, “wait, don’t you own a newspaper?” and then Chuck’s dad came back from the dead and in conclusion it was a pretty good episode.

negationparty: “beyond god the father” Hardstyle feminist...

Wed, 02 May 2012 20:57:31 -0700

negationparty:

“beyond god the father”

Hardstyle feminist theology.

OIC, when the Alameda Sheriffs were throwing people to the...

Wed, 02 May 2012 11:01:54 -0700

OIC, when the Alameda Sheriffs were throwing people to the ground and beating my friends with sticks, they’d just mistaken us for participants in their government-funded Half-Life 2 LARP.

Friends With Benefits The Kids Are All Right = Friends With Kids « Bully Bloggers

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 21:34:03 -0700

Friends With Benefits The Kids Are All Right = Friends With Kids « Bully Bloggers:

Ok, so in a perfect world, where I had a sabbatical, time to spare, no deadlines, I would pen the perfect masterpieces: The Friends Are All Right and Kids With Benefits. In the first, a queer culture of friendship replaces domestic marriage and nuclear families and new experiments in social world-making pop up everywhere. Friends share space, homes, kids, resources, health care access and probably sex…And in the second, kids cease to be the precious and pampered pets that this society demands and produces and they fight for their independence from families!

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 18:50:37 -0700

danascullyjudgesthings: Dana Scully judges that tie. OMG a...

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 19:29:39 -0700

danascullyjudgesthings:

Dana Scully judges that tie.

OMG a whole tumblr of Dana Scully disapproving of things.

"At the heart of Ranciere’s long polemic with Bourdieu is an assumption that knowledge is..."

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 19:02:07 -0700

“At the heart of Ranciere’s long polemic with Bourdieu is an assumption that knowledge is simply there for the taking, on the model of primary language learning. “As far as human societies are concerned;” Ranciere/Jacotot maintain, “it’s always a matter of learning a language” or using a familiar tool; on this basis, most of the problems of access, empowerment, and validation that Bourdieu explores in his analysis of the configuration of various fields (artistic, scientific, educational) can be more or less dismissed in advance.”

- Peter Hallward, “Staging Equality,” in Rockhill and Watts, eds., Jacques Ranciere: History, Politics, Aesthetics, 156

what is a zizek? a miserable little manifestation of gorbachev's guilty id

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 22:00:23 -0700

propagandaduende:

it knows it done wrong - it wanders the planet repenting, seeking redemption forgiveness and mercy-love in stalinism, and also doing id things like coke speed and undergrads. also he eat from he foot

Wow, Armageddon is a hella #dads movie. The fact that the dad...

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 15:08:23 -0700

[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]

Wow, Armageddon is a hella #dads movie. The fact that the dad dying at the end makes it more, not less, dads, might say something interesting about the relationship between dialectic and #nodads (tentatively: Bruce Willis fulfills his role as a dad, and so the negation that is his death maintains his place in the restricted dad economy; if there is a #nodads dialectic, it would have to be of the sort discussed by Derrida in “From a Restricted to a General Economy”). Also, what’s with the repeated trope in the film in which one character orders another to say certain words? Some kind of insistence on the nom du père over the non du père? Anyway, watching Armageddon yesterday reminded me of the episode of Wizards of Waverly Place based on the movie, in which Selena Gomez plays the role of Bruce Willis.

Conspiracy theories usually dramatize one of the problems of...

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 21:26:06 -0700

[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]

Conspiracy theories usually dramatize one of the problems of right-wing anti-statism, which is that the government is simultaneously held to be incompetent and menacingly competent. The Lone Gunmen here demonstrate the usual response to this, which is to split the government into two so that the incompatible critiques can be applied to the different elements (although this doesn’t actually solve the problem - if a shadow government was capable of conspiratorial rule, surely such a shadow government could also, in principle, run a universal healthcare system). The X-Files, though, puts an interestingly neoliberal twist on conspiracy theories. As becomes apparent, the shadow government is not all powerful, quite the opposite; the Syndicate is constantly on the defensive attempting to manage an alien conspiracy that spins wildly out of its control. In the last couple of seasons, the Syndicate is destroyed, and the villains instead become a decentralized body of conspirators whose purposes are completely opaque.

Mandated multiplicity, dissolved identity, mix-and-match all the way down—these might, moreover,...

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 12:51:08 -0700

Mandated multiplicity, dissolved identity, mix-and-match all the way down—these might, moreover, not make everyone feel good. Any leftist with a serious heterosexual fetish for the erotic connection between masculine men and feminine women is going to discover in Sedgwick’s list a certain limit: its ambitions to infinitude, and her relegation of that desire, that personhood even, to “and so on…,” might make such a person feel…a bit forlorn, left out of the party. (Janet Halley, Split Decisions, 206).

I love Halley’s phrase “serious heterosexual fetish” here. It make me think of someone raising their eyebrows, peering over their glasses, and saying “You’re…heterosexual. My goodness, how recherché.” It’s an interesting theoretical exercise to imagine what the world would have to be like to make such a statement possible.

worsement: [this was the first google books search hit for “the x-files + queer theory”] [images...

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 12:08:00 -0700

worsement:

[this was the first google books search hit for “the x-files + queer theory”]

[images via here and here]

“In comparison, my research found that a number of interviewees were influenced by and through queer theory and designated a queer positionality. They referred to being ‘queer’, ‘trans’ or ‘genderqueer’, and had broken heteronormative meanings by applying queer theory to their everyday practices. For example, Maya commented how she assumed ‘everyone’ found men and women attractive because that was how she approached her queer world. Rather than locating this within a framework of pathology and thereby designating her desires to one gender, she acknowledges these feelings and in doing so, despite the interruption of traditional social mores, is free to unpack their meanings in relation to gender identification:

I found men and women attractive. And then I think in my late teens two things …The X-Files where I thought it’s not Mulder or Scully it’s Mulder and Scully so that dates me as well and secondly when my boyfriend at 6th form, I remember we were chatting in bed about stuff and he was like ‘Oh, so which girls would you fancy at school.’ And I was like ‘Oh brilliant question’ so I told him. And so ‘Which boys at school do you fancy then?’ and at that point he recoiled slightly and [at] that point I was like, ‘Oh, right okay. It’s not equal.’

—from Counselling Ideologies: Queer Challenges to Heternormativity, by Lyndsey Moon

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This reminded me that I was watching some X Files episodes recently, and it occurred to me that, AFAICT, there’s no textual evidence that Scully is heterosexual until some time late in the seventh season.

(I also totally thought Assistant Director Skinner was gay, but Wikipedia says he has a wife, so I guess not?)