well I have really really been non productive lately, which is too bad because I would like to be a more writerly person overall…

What’s new? not much! I have finally gotten really into Mad Men, after two seasons of consciously avoiding it. Here are some bullet points on what I think:

1) I love the pace of the show and how slow it is, and how it will start a plotline and then drop it for a couple of episodes and then start up again, or sometimes plots that go nowhere and aren’t resolved. I think the JJ Abrams shows created a viewer that is willing to pay attention to every little thing and is eventually rewarded with a pat resolution, so it’s nice to see a show that moves away from that format and towards something more difficult (and ‘realistic,’ although that is a word I am pretty reluctant to use when talking about any kind of television) I like reading message boards about mad men and watching viewers either flip out or like speculate pat endings for the different mad men plotlines

2) On that note, the show is very, very slow and is basically designed to watch on DVD as opposed to as weekly episodes. I wonder if this is true of most television shows? I would love to see the business numbers on that, whether programs are being developed for syndication or dvd sales as opposed to broadcast and how that reflects in commercial breaks, story arcs, other aspects of writing…

3) And here’s the part I will have the most to say about, which is the show’s relationship or engagement with the 60s, both as a historical decade and as an aesthetic familiar to popular culture. I wish that I could make a chart of all of the “60s’” things that mad men buys into and all of the things that it doesn’t. This is what it would look like

buys into: clothes and cocktails as markers of the decade, lurching towards kennedy assassination as focal point of early 60s, 60s personas like the betty friedan housewife and the helen gurley brown single career girl, the sexy secretary, the village beatnik, the organization man,

does not buy into (this is more complicated and will need clarification): 60s as ‘clean’ or repressed (this is the thomas frank touch), family structure as central to either this decade or the medium of television itself (don’s family is secondary, and doesn’t operate as a family, the televisual family is a weird spectral reference for the audience, almost) 60s as the age of liberalization (all of the mad men are republicans, which is a wonderful touch! )

4) related to 3: I am also fasicnated by mad men’s treatment of race– so far, people of color have only been seen in service positions as extras but there have been a couple of storylines hinting at civil rights–kinsey goes down to the freedom rides, and betty has a dream about medgar evers. the draper’s housekeeper, carla, has been developed a little bit, but not much. I am really interested to see where this goes and what it ends up saying

5) finally, i was thinking about this in a pedagogical situation and that I would like to teach the entire season, or better, the entire program. I so far mostly teach just episodes, which is kind of unbelievable, especially since television is getting smarter and smarter. I think the next course I propose will be about entire programs, or at least big chunks of them!

wow

I have really had nothing to say lately–also, it is amazing but I have been keeping up with this (sort of) for almost a year…

I wonder why I have been so intellectually sluggish lately? I hope I come out of it soon…

I saw the new Pixar movie Up today, in 3d–I am not sure if the 3d added anything, but I had never seen anything in 3d before. I cried throughout the entire movie, which is sort of hilarious. Its interesting how preoccupied Pixar/Disney are with 50s nostalgia, I mean it makes sense and everything…

ugh ending now..

some totally unrelated stuff

today’s post comes in three underdeveloped parts:

1) so instead of working on my dissertation I did something really, really nerdy this weekend which is that I read the Lord of the Rings books and then watched the movies. It is worth mentioning that I don’t really like fantasy, this is in fact the only fantasy book that I have read, but I really like it and the entire universe that Tolkien painstakingly created.

One of the most interesting things about lotr for me is that it seems to follow an anti-modern path, as time progresses, they lose technologies, abilities,’bloodlines’, etc. It seems that the denizens of the series are de-evolving, which is especially interesting considering that it was written shortly after WWI- on one hand, it makes sense that Tolkien is thinking this way, but on the other, in terms of technological advances, infrastructure etc, the world was rapidly advancing.

Thinking about the movie is interesting too because it shows the villain Saruman as industrializing–building structures, new battle technology, etc. It’s a smart choice, I think.

Lest you think I totally wasted my weekend one of the reasons I did this was because my laptop broke (its fixed now)!

2)I just saw a  video some younger graduate students in my department made presumably in lieu of a paper–I am familiar with the course material and while I think I understood what broad themes they were getting at it, either I didn’t get the other parts, or it was really sloppily made. Both of these are problems–I think because we as a culture (and especially in the academy where this sort of ’scholarly’ filmmaking is a small trend in digital humanities) are not especially visually literate, its easy to either make sloppy videos because even in the act of making it you are praised for doing something different (i guess the backlash against text that started with poststructuralism), or there isn’t a way of making symbols and themes readily understood. How to solve this problem? I guess I am not sure but I think I should start thinking about it…

3) I was thinking about the New Deal today which is outside my area of expertise but I wonder if anyone has written about New Deal ideology as being a precursor for Post-WWII dominance? Like, because the U.S. tried out a state that was invested in welfare and infrastructure and general betterment (economic and cultural) it tacked it onto an already existing imperialist ideology? Probably not, but whatever…

uh yeah so it’s been a while… summer is coming and I haven’t been able to work to my satisfaction lately, but I also haven’t been doing anything else of consequence, or at any rate, anything that would merit reflection. But at some point, I will.

ugh this is going to be a lame whiny pity post but whatever, I need to get it out…

So I didn’t get the one fellowship I applied for this year, a fellowship that I guess I thought I stood a good chance at getting. It’s more of an ego blow than anything else, the truth is that I like the town that I live in now and what this means is that I get to live here a semester longer and also not break my lease, which is cool. Also, despite the fact that I didn’t get the fellowship, applying was a good experience which clarified a bunch of stuff about my project and once I get feedback about it I can apply again for the next year or the year after that and probably stand a better chance of getting it.

I guess the ego blow thing is the biggest thing and it comes at a bad time because I have been thinking lately about how my project isn’t especially at the cutting edge of my field and might be kind of uninteresting compared to the other things that people in my position are doing. So this kind of confirms that, haha. I presented my prospectus the other week and wasn’t totally happy with how I did it although that reflects my lack of faith in my presentation skills more than anything else… But the conviction still remains that I am kind of a mediocre grad student…

The other thing is that I kind of felt like I was supposed to get this grant–so many of my friends and peers get them, it kind of feels like we are expected to get that more than we are expected not to (even though my advisors told me that I might be too early in my project, I  guess I didn’t believe them). The thing is, people probably don’t get grants all the time, they just don’t talk about it.  Here are my two thoughts: a) I wish people talked about not getting grants more, and not just hypothetically and b) the lesson learned is that I need to apply to more grants so that I can not get more and talk about it and maybe get one or two…

Finally, this is my last bit of self-appraisal before I move on, I am beginning to realize that it might not be the best tactic to push myself to finish in five years.  I have been saying it for a while but I think I need to slow down and set six years as my new goal (the sixth possibly trying for this grant again). Honestly, this is a pretty sweet life and a lot sweeter than being an adjunct at like six community colleges or like an SAT tutor will be, or even best, absolute best case a harried tenure track assistant prof at possibly some remote third tier SLAC with like a 4/4 courseload. So the point is, that I should slow the fuck down and not try to rush through this dissertation–which is hard because rushing is what I do best.  More time means better project and perhaps better job market? I know I can get sweet funding to the fifth year and most likely (unless policy changes) through the sixth and seventh. I need to embrace that and stop trying to be some speedy wonder.

Okay, rant over! I am probably going to ‘award’ myself a viewing of Any Given Sunday tonight rather than forcing myself to watch more of the Waltons…

Another one of those times that I have very little to write about but somehow feel compelled to write nonetheless–I think I take the timestamps on this thing too seriously, like i get stressed out if like a month has passed? It’s funny too because currently I have no readership and am not particularly interested in having one, if anything maybe one day I will share this with someone as an archive… but because weblogs are a real-time medium by default, I feel compelled to at least attempt to update regularly, even as I know that it doesn’t really matter…

On a semi-related topic I am running my dissertation in much the same manner–I am overly interested in meeting self-imposed deadlines, no matter how poorly, so if I tell myself I have to write ten pages by the end of the week, I will, but they will be shoddy. Other people in my department take a long, long time to write and I tell myself that probably their work is more thoughful, but hopefully this way will work for me. I am a good editor if not a good writer so I am hoping to fix those ten shoddy pages somewhere else.

I saw the new Julia Roberts/Clive Owen film Duplicitly recently, not especially by choice.  They play corporate spies that are working against each other to steal a pharamceutical secret but are also in a complicated love relationship and possibly secretly working together–but just as likely not working together. It has that very annoying trait of constantly interrupting its own narrative by producing more information–like, “oh you might think this happened but what you didn’t know ist that a month earlier THIS OTHER thing happened that makes you completely reevaluate your understanding of the main characters’ basic relationship.” I know it’s supposed to be titilating but honestly I don’t like having to work for something not that rewarding, like finding out if Clive Owen and Julia Roberts characters have actually broken up or not, haha.

I am very tired and I have to do a million things tomorrow so I am going to sign off…

90210 addendum

I should probably go and retroactively add this to my original post about 90210  http://seesawed.wordpress.com/2008/09/06/6767/

but I was talking to someone about it today and they asked what made 90210 issues different than say, Family Ties issues. I said (and I think this is true) that

a) 90210 issues weren’t initially clear cut–in a show like FT you know right away what the correst response to the problem is but I would argue that 90210 was more nuanced–in most episodes there were shades of gray (the rape episode, animal activism, etc.) and the “right” (i.e. program-sanctioned) answer was not readily available at the beginning of the program.

b) While “very special episode” sitcoms like Blossom featured the family negotiating the problem as a unit (or the problem threatening the family structure), the 90210 people confronted the issues as either individuals, or a peer group. This might signify the post-familial space of the program

So I have been thinking a lot about The Waltons. I know what you’re saying, why would anyone want to think about the Waltons? The answer is because they are  a (small) part of this larger project I am working on.

If you are not familiar, this is a 1970s TV show in the vein of Little House on the Prairie, i.e., about an old timey family making it work in West Virginia during the Depression. Papa Walton runs a sawmill, Momma Walton stays at home with two elderly grandparents and seven (!) children, the oldest of which is John Boy, a whiny dreamer who gives me the skeeves for some reason. Anyways, each week, a new misfit-runaway-lost soul comes to the Waltons, teaches them a little something about being grateful and is themselves changed for the better after time spent in the familial home. In the very first episode, a little deaf girl is abandoned by her mother (reluctantly) and father (forcefully) into the bosom of the Walton family. The father apparently had a developmentally disabled brother (or, in hillbilly parlance, “a throwback”) and thus resents the deaf daughter, not wanting to deal with a ‘dumb’ child. The mother’s intuition tells her that the girl is actually bright, but she woefully concedes to her husband and gives up the child. The Waltons quickly teach the child the ASL alphabet and pretty soon the little girl proves her smarts by signing the location of a trapped junior Walton, saving the day and thus gaining her father’s love and respect.

I am not sure where a negleted backwoods deaf child would have learned the reading skills necesssary to master communicating in the ASL alphabet but this is another story for another day… Anyway, this is the gist of the show, this continues for like ten seasons.

I guess what I find striking about the show is the continuous reinforcement and even offensive strike of the traditional familial unit.  First of all,  the nuclear family of the Cold War (see Elaine Tyler May’s Homeward Bound for a really good reading of its hegemonic power) was pretty much falling apart after the upheavals of the 1960s,  to the point that even on television, a medium which had pretty much always been organized by the logic of the family unit, it was being represented as dysfunctional (All in the Family), affected by outside structural and economic forces (Good Times), or simply transferred to the workplace (Mary Tyler Moore). The only viable location for the stable and functional family on commercial television in the 1970s, then, was the historical past–thus shows like The Waltons and Little House were left to carry the standard of the nuclear family.

But the Waltons, with its typical story structure of the interloper redeemed seem to be on the offensive in a unique way; each individual who comes into contact with them is agressively converted to the Walton way and becomes an eager fan of the traditional family values (like the father of the deaf girl, or in another episode, a glamorous tightrope walker who ends up confessing to Mrs. Walton that all she wants is to settle down with a home of her own) that they seem to uphold. This is reinforced in scenes at the resolution of each episode, the individual in question is often overpowered by the sheer number of Waltons closing in on him or her to show their support. The Waltons love swarming around their victims, like the consumerist zombies in Dawn of the Dead (1978)

It’s interesting to me the way in which television continues to uphold the family unit and how it adapts to its temporal context through these strategies. The other show I am thinking about a lot is Roots, which is a family program (well a program for families and about families) to the nth degree….

Why hello there! I am still not really watching or doing anything that warrants my critical attention (sadly) except for this Michael Jackson thing I want to briefly write about.  The other day I looked at the auction catalog of his personal memorabilia and was sort of amazed at how many things he is selling–MTV awards, Neverland gates, everything! His personal memorabilia is the most interesting, looking through it I realized that as his looks have changed, his personal aesthetic never really has–MJ has always really been into military stuff or like really obvious ‘royal’ signifiers (crown, robe, sceptre, etc.) Why is that? Has he always been working towards something really specific and how close is he to achieving it? Why did he start wearing bandages in the early 90s? How does someone who has basically lived in the public eye for his entire life even think or process things? Is he self-conscious at all?

I also watched the Black or White and Leave Me Alone videos, I forgot how Black or White is basically about globalization and like 90s multiculturalism and how its him in all these weird places appropriating global ethnic dance styles, and then he’s on top of the Statue of Liberty and like the whole of Western civilization is behind him.

Also, at the beginning he sort of rescues Macauley Culkin out of his nuclear family which is interesting not only in the context of the Jacksons’ own (problematic/mythic) nuclear family, but in the context of the types of families MJ has tried to forge with young boys, Lisa Marie Presley (another person famous for literally her entire life), Debbie Rowe, and finally, his own mysterious (supposedly biological?) children.

The part I am least interested in is the part that was most interesting at the time the video came out–the montage at the end of people morphing into one another… I know this is pretty common practice by now so I am not impressed but I need to remember how mindblowing it was in 1991!

Leave Me Alone is amazing too, it’s about all of the rumors about Michael Jackson from the late 80s, like Bubbles the chimp and the Elephant Man’s bones and Liz Taylor… I think he as a persona is a really interesting marker of what 80s and 90s American culture pathologized…

Anyways, I think there’s a lot of work to be done on MJ and maybe it can fit into my 90s project… I would be surprised though if no one’s written about him from a cultural/media studies perspective…

Also, I think I need to watch T/T2 again, so many people think about Blade Runner but T2, especially for its termporal leaps is also really, really interesting…

I’m not sure why I haven’t been able to write anything lately, I guess I haven’t really been thinking about much stuff which sounds lame but is totally true. I also haven’t seen a movie or bought anything in ages so there’s like 75% of my material.