Entries Tagged 'cultural studies' ↓

If Amy Alexander, writing in The Nation, can admit to it, I suspect that soon enough other women will follow:

Even though I detest her politics, as I watched Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s much-anticipated interview with ABC News’s Charles Gibson, God help me, I had to admire her steeliness. …

[T]here are probably more than a few of us who drift off, from time to time, on the delicious fantasy of what it would feel like to draw down with shotgun on the misbehaving men in our lives. We don’t know if Palin has ever done such a thing, but it appears she sure as hell could. I have to own up to the part of me that admires that. After watching her with Gibson, it’s safe to say that it took a spine of titanium to stay upright in that chair as “Charlie” scowled at her over the top of his reading glasses …

[B]y over-intellectualizing this steeliness factor, and by underestimating its power to sway voters, we are not being true to our cultural history. …

Progressives and feminists who sneer at women unwilling to separate that stimulus-response “I heart ballsy women!” from the business at hand–”Does she have the intellect and experience to be vice president?”–are spinning their wheels. They also conveniently overlook the possibility that Palin’s raw ambition is very close to the self-confidence we want to encourage in our daughters. Sarah Palin is a strong woman, and that is good. Her politics, and what they may lead her to create for our democracy… not so much. [e.a.]

I was encouraged to be self-confident and outspoken by my parents, and I have certainly encouraged my daughter to be self-confident and outspoken.

Judging from the softened attitude I saw this morning from Katty Kay on the Chris Matthews Show and from her pal and fellow op-ed writer Claire Shipman on This Week with George S [transcripts are not yet available at either site], the high-powered women of the MSM have gotten the message to think before they pop off their mouths, and to learn to accommodate other women’s choices—including those who don’t have the luxury of opting out of “prestige” jobs and those whose ambitions include helping to guide the United States of America toward a better course.

Fed up with 50- and 60-hour weeks and a career ladder we didn’t build and don’t want to climb, women are looking for jobs that demand fewer and freer hours. We want to work but we also want quantity time, as well as quality time, with our children. Most of us no longer buy the onwards-and-upwards drive to the corner office (or in Mrs. Palin’s case, the West Wing) at the cost of a fragmented family life. More and more, women are choosing a tapestry of family and work in which we define our own success in reasonable terms — even if we sacrifice some “prestige.”

I find it very interesting that these two women, who beg for time to be with their families, who are supposedly remaking their lives, both find the time to be front and center on the Sunday talk shows (and one of them appears on air with her husband. So excuse me if I feel it necessary to ask Ms. Shipman and Mr. Carney: Who, exactly, is minding your kids while you earnestly debate John McCain’s disappointingly political campaign for president and while you pass judgment on Sarah Palin?)

or, Still Life with Rotting Food

(via Andrew Sullivan)

Learning-through-art bonus:

Here are the laws and rules governing what you are and are not allowed to bring into the United States. A quick scan of the list indicates it’s not altogether different from what you can bring into New Zealand.

Both countries ban the import of diamonds from Sierra Leone and Liberia, for example. Interesting!
Here are some others prohibited items from the NZ site:

prohibition: Dehumidifiers, refrigerators, freezers, air conditioners, supermarket display cases, heat pumps, and water coolers that contain any CFCs

purpose: Protect the Earth’s ozone layer

legislation: Ozone Layer Protection Act 1996

———

prohibition: Dogs and their semen and embryos.

purpose: Community protection

legislation: Dog Control Act 1996

I’ve been re-reading Daniel Boorstin’s classic 1961 work of social criticism The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (which is extraordinarily fresh and insightful for a 45-year-old book, by the way, but that’s a topic for another day).

Underlying Boorstin’s thesis of a mid-twentieth-century American populace transfixed by images is his notion that advertising—or any kind of marketing—succeeds by holding up a mirror to potential customers and offering them an enticing, image of themselves (more on this another day, but let’s just say for now that advertising is about fantasy-fulfillment).

Now, along comes the NYT’s Elisabetta Povoledo to tell us that Italians are transfixed by a six-part TV biopic, “The Boss of Bosses,” because the mirror it holds up to its audience shows a somewhat less than flattering image of itself [e.a.]:

“Italy has always been fascinated by the Mafia, by its personification of evil,” [a reporter] said in a phone interview.

Another possible explanation for the popularity of “Il Capo dei Capi” may be that it goes beyond mere storytelling and puts Italy in front of an unflattering — if engrossing — mirror of itself. It suggests that if Mr. Riina became the most formidable and feared mobster in Italian history, it was thanks to the collusion of political and economic forces at various levels of Italian society.

“It’s not fiction — it’s a real story that tells 50 years of Italian history, and it names names,” said Pietro Valsecchi, who produced the series. “It tells us just what sort of country we have been living in, it shows us the complicity of the state, it puts the Mafia in our face.”

There’s some evidence for the notion that its roots in reality drive the popularity of the series:

“The Sopranos,” the HBO drama about Italian-American bad guys, never caught on here.

The producer gets the last word [e.a.]:

Fictionalizing reality may be the best way to educate Italy’s distracted audience, Mr. Valsecchi said. “Italians don’t read newspapers — they barely glance at headlines. But here they’re getting the full story, with all its implications.”

Well, he gets the next-to-last word. I get the last word, which is a minor amendment to Mr. Valsecchi’s proposition: Fictionalizing reality is a way to infotain an audience—that is, to capture its attention. But let’s not get carried away. That is different from educating the audience.

The NYT’s Virginia Heffernan once came close to understanding (though she didn’t use these words) that one category of infotainment—in this case, celebrity photography—isn’t all bad.

Jennifer Aniston looking pensive occasioned a headline on her misery since her divorce from Brad Pitt. The caption drew me to Ms. Aniston’s eyes. Interesting: those part-Greek eyes, darkened by experience. What was Ms. Aniston thinking, now that she’d been left for Mr. Pitt’s costar in an action movie, the tattooed siren Angelina Jolie? So human, her hurt and expression. And so recent, I thought. I bought the magazine. …

Nevertheless, Heffernan proclaimed her guilt about indulging in what she considered a lowly pastime: gawking at celebrities.

Weakly I have hoped reading portraits in this way might strengthen some evolutionary skill, the way gossiping is said to make you better at forging allegiances.

I wouldn’t want to get all meta or postmodernist on her, but in fact Heffernan is strengthening certain skills. Media savviness may be the quintessential skill of our era. The people enjoying its advantages, if indeed they are advantages, are those who learn to manipulate the media the better to please audiences. Surely this cannot come as a surprise to Heffernan.

I also find it curious that Heffernan continues to flog her own guilt over her terminal lowbrow-ness while Perez Hilton, “the reigning online gossip maven,” one of Heffernan’s interview subjects, explains exactly how, as a practitioner, he ensnares her in the guilt trap [e.a.]:

“I took several art history classes in school, and photography,” he said in a telephone interview. “When you pay attention, you see some things that somebody else might miss, so it behooves you to try and find that special thing in an image. Then your intepretation will stand out more.”

He recognizes too that analyzing a photograph also often means embellishing it: “When I look at a picture, I go through the same process as when I look at a news story. How can I process this image to make this as entertaining as possible to my readers? I’m looking at it, cropping it, resizing it, drawing on it, making it my own.”

Despite even this acknowledgment that the photographs are shrewdly manipulated in order tap into exactly that place where Heffernan responds to the endeavor as deep play, Heffernan continues to feel guilty about her secret—until she meets another high-minded person like herself slumming at a certain online site:

[L]ast summer … I spoke to a lawyer I met on a “Lonelygirl15” message board. He and I were both obsessed with figuring out whether she was an actress or an ordinary girl.

“What do you do with your time when you’re not studying Web images?” I asked him in an e-mail message.

“I usually stick to stuff like Rathergate or the doctored Reuters photographs,” he wrote back, …“But this is fascinating.”

And that’s when it occurred to me: there is an undeniable pleasure in inferring stories from pieces of data, whether the story is trivial — “Lonelygirl15” — or substantial, like the military service of the president. Isn’t the discovery of that pleasure, in some sense, what drives science and all manner of detective work? We’re all on the Web, weighing various kinds of data we get — eBay listings, blog posts, Craigslist solicitations — and trying to read between some pixels, and connect others.

Sure, I don’t expect we’ll break any big news reading PerezHilton.com. But maybe we’re not entirely wasting our time; we’re practicing interpreting images from the new close-range, high-def magazines and Web sites. [e.a.]

Yes indeedy, we are.

Also, Heffernan should get a clue: there’s an entire area of cultural studies populated by “aca-fans,” like the MIT professor Henry Jenkins, who’s apparently being referred to as the Marshall McLuhan of the 21st century.

You can check out the confessions of other aca-fans Deborah Kaplan and Alan McKee on Jenkins’s blog, beginning here:

[Kaplan]: I consume vast amounts of highly denigrated popular culture: children’s and young adult literature, fan fiction, science fiction and fantasy, chick lit, science fiction television, romance novels, comics. Really, aside from the fact that I don’t watch reality television, my consumption patterns are (like many people’s) heavily lowbrow. With the exception of a few authors, I don’t read highbrow literature for pleasure, and even those highbrow authors I do read are often denigrated by the establishment for writing women’s literature, or are slotted carefully into the multicultural space available on a reading list (Jeanette Winterson, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ishmael Reed, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Kazuo Ishiguro). When I was a child I watched PBS and A&E with my parents; now I’m fond of PBS pretty much only as the network that brought me Doctor Who throughout my childhood. I don’t listen to NPR; I listen to folk or classic rock or pop stations.

And yet I am constantly being told my tastes are too highbrow.