On Conspiracies: PC Viruses

I admit, I am prone to conspiracy theories. I think I inherited this from my grandmother.

There's been quite the string of viruses running the email circuit at my university; they come up from someone you know, with your name and a message similar to the following: (I messed with the url just in case any of you are silly enough to actually click on it.)

Othervictorian,

I'm not sure whether you have seen it?

http://297.225.219.xxx/redundancy_payment.zip

Panda de Tueur

But I seriously sometimes wonder if there are Mac enthusiasts (extremists?) sitting around coming up with these things to get people to just give up and become a switcher. Seriously.

Coffee Art. Not the Frothy Kind.

Check out this great article in the NY Times today. It's about a graphic artist named Christoph Niemann, and his latest series, a collection of "napkin art" (for lack of a better word). The art is stains on a napkin (presumably using coffee?), creating images that accompany a brief story just below the napkin. They all have to do with coffee culture and personal anecdotes about experiences with coffee. 

As an addict myself, here's one of my favorites. Click on it to enlarge.

Along with the accompanying text/story:

Here’s a chart that shows my coffee bias over the years.

For good measure I have added my bagel preferences over the same period. (1) Drip coffee, (2) Starbucks, (3) blueberry bagels, (4) sesame bagels, (5) poppy-seed bagels, (6) everything bagels

Please don’t hold my brief affair with blueberry bagels against me. I cured myself of this aberration.

Love it. :D

New Lows in Political Discourse

I hesitate to bring this up, just because it's so explosive and ridiculous. But I think it clearly illustrates the depths to which people can sink to smear others, politicians or otherwise.

I think the video betrays its true intent with the last second - "NoHussein.org." This isn't about abortion or children - it's about simple, cynical, any means necessary politics. It uses children as a political tool, rather than actually trying to defend them through constructive activism.

Obama's made it clear many times that his position on this has been grossly misconstrued. Infanticide is beyond cruel and inhumane, and I should hope we all have the sense to realize that NO ONE, regardless of party, religion, or even opinion on abortion, would support something like this.

Furthermore, who's to believe that the nurses and medical staff would actually take part in such a thing? I know many nurses, close friends and family, and they'd sooner break the law and/or be fired than do any such thing. No one would do that, and I'm surprised the woman in the video apparently did.

Who's Being Sexist? Right, Palin's Fans.

Gov. Palin and Sen. McCain's campaign have spent so much time lately arguing about the sexist coverage and criticism of Sarah Palin that one can't help but wonder if all this is just stalling for time while she learns enough about foreign policy to be able to actually engage reporters and the public.

But if the campaign is going to complain about the supposedly rampant sexist coverage of Palin, then they should also work to undermine the sexism rampant in their own base. Although these people might be among the biggest supporters of Palin's bid for the VP, they do more to sexualize and discriminate against her based on her sex than does the media any day of the week.  I think these pictures can say more than I can for proof. Enjoy.

This one is my personal favorite. Female fans of Palin dressing themselves up in toy red lips, thus accentuating her most important quality (or qualification?).



But let's not forget the bumper stickers being put out by some fans... "Vice President I'd Like to..." well, you know. And since Hillary got a nutcracker doll made of her, why shouldn't Sarah Palin enjoy some schoolgirl action?

Yeah, try again about who's actually perpetuating the sexist coverage of your candidate.

Guilty Pleasures - or - Songs I Should Hate but Don't

As some of you may or may not know, the Pussycat Dolls (of "Don't Ya" fame) have released a new single called "When I Grow Up".

They can't sing, the beats are typical, the lyrics are horrendous, and yet, I find myself listening to it over and over again.

In all regards I should hate the song, I mean it's like Barbie in music form - a song that tells girls to worry only about fame and their appearance ("When I grow up I wanna have boobies." That sounds more like something a transsexual would say, but I digress...). It promotes a materialistic view of life that is just simply outrageous and unacceptable.

So why do I like it? I can't understand my love of crappy pop music sometimes, it's like a wound I keep picking at. I guess you need something to dance like a whore too...

Sorry this post sucks, and I haven't been posting really at all lately. I have been very busy and very tired.

Brick - New Noir

Brick, a 2006 film written and directed by Rian Johnson, is worth seeing for its versatility and re-imaging of old school film noir. Much the same way Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet juxtaposed the language of classical Shakespeare with modern imagery and culture, Johnson places the lingo of 1940s and '50s private detectives in the setting of modern drug rings and high school drama.

I mean seriously, check out this dialogue:

"Throw one at me if you want, hash head. I've got all five senses and I slept last night, that puts me six up on the lot of you."

..."Ask any dope rat where their junk sprang and they'll say they scraped it from that who scored it from this who bought it off so and after four or five connections the list always ends with the Pin. But I bet you got every rat in town together and said 'show your hands' if any of them've actually seen the Pin, you'd get a crowd of full pockets."

For a film geek like me, this is just awesome.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, whom you may remember from 10 Things I Hate About You, plays the lead guy who tries to uncover the happenings that led to the murder of his ex-girlfriend. He seems to channel a strange but compelling combination of Humphrey Bogart in Maltese Falcon and Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain - the semi-silent but determined outcast with an instinct for digging for answers in the right places, motivated by a still broken heart and lingering sentiment for the past love in question.

Emelie de Ravin, who is now fabulous on ABC's Lost as Claire, makes only a few appearances in the film but is beautiful nonetheless. She plays the ex-girlfriend, an elusive and frightened character that begs for sympathy without saying much at all. 

The cinematography is great, and the use of non-linear time (typically via flashback) is one of the traditional markers of classic film noir. The character Laura fulfills the role of the femme fatale of unknown allegiance, another noir marker that was first made famous by the eternally amazing Marlene Dietrich as the genre came of age (in America) in the 1940s. Nearly all the performances are spot-on, and the setting of this story against high school seniors (rather than midlife detectives and criminals) makes for a backburner commentary on the kind of reality that kids grow up with today.  

Overall, the film is an excellent resurfacing of this under appreciated genre, and is a refreshing change of pace from the usual Hollywood attempts at something different.

Wall-E: Imitation and Replication

(This is also posted on my other blog, linked on the side of this page!)

So I think it's time for me to chime in on Wall-E. I've seen the film twice now in theaters, much to the dismay of my grad student wallet. I loved it from the moment "Put On Your Sunday Clothes" from Hello, Dolly echoed through the digitized streets of a desolate version of New York City. The recognition of the skyscrapers as no more than buildings made of compressed garbage and cultural remnants began a long series of stunning visual commentaries on our seeming direction. And, speaking from a geek's perspective, the allusions to 2001: A Space Odyssey only made the movie that much better in the canon of sci-fi flicks.

But if I may, I'd like to explore the more subtle suggestions of the film when it comes to gender.

I should first say that I very much appreciate the creation of Wall-E and Eve as, for the most part, androgynous characters. Granted, Wall-E is noticeably mechanical and angular - traditionally masculine associations - while Eve is smooth and curvy. Also, Wall-E's electronic "voice" operates at a lower frequency than Eve's. Nonetheless, after carefully watching the film, the robots never use any gendered pronouns or language toward one another. The robots not only remain androgynous, but they also defy traditional gender stereotypes at various points. As The Pop Perspective points out, Eve was the one to carry a weapon and exhibit violence, while Wall-E was the (literally) starry-eyed dreamer and lover. In fact, we only read them as male or female because that is the first categorization our minds make upon encountering a new individual. We look for anything, any small attribute (like the ones I listed above) to give us a hint of sex. But these robots are without sex - we have assigned them an arbitrary sex in our minds. A queer couple, to say the least.

However, my favorite part about this film may in fact be that, in numerous ways, the actions of Wall-E and other characters only serve to confirm Judith Butler's suggestions that gender, and all the acts of coupling, friendship, and the very ways we relate interpersonally on any level, are imitative. The film presents us with a world devoid of humans, where Wall-E is the last remaining garbage compacting robot. Although he is without human companionship, he is not without human ritual. As the action progresses, we watch Wall-E discover the intricacies of humanity through various cultural remnants like Hello, Dolly. It is here, in societal representations of love stories and relationships, that Wall-E learns about holding hands, about companionship, about how "it only takes a moment to be loved your whole life long." When Eve comes along, Wall-E has a chance to imitate these devices. One wonders how Wall-E would have interacted with Eve had he not discovered these cultural productions that taught him, like all the rest of us, how men and women relate to each other and view the world.

Furthermore, Wall-E shows us that these imitative rituals are indeed perpetuated through society and media. This, of course, is not surprising. Most people (I hope) are aware of the power of media to simultaneously reflect and reproduce cultural values, thus creating the classic question, "Does life imitate art, or does art imitate life?" Wall-E inherits these romantic rituals through Hello, Dolly, just as the captain of the ship later learns how to live on Earth from pictures and writings stored in the ship's database. Our society and its values are continually replicated and passed down through these rituals and cultural productions.

This movie, when considering these points, leaves me wondering how we would recreate ourselves if given a blank slate. If we'd been in Wall-E's position, except without the Barbara Streisand and Michael Crawford, what brave new world could we invent?