see sawed

dumbest post ever!!

seesawed — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 16:43:58 +0000

So one thing that I have been thinking about lately is how much I dislike some of the words/concepts that have been made popular on the internet and have or have not drifted into speech patterns, since what I do is make lists here I think this is how I will convey them

1) excessive exclamation points and writing in allcaps–have noticed this a lot lately coming from uh facebook acquaintances, also I am super guilty of the former (not the latter) myself–I understand that text doesn’t allow for the registering of many emotions (duh hence emoticons) but I wonder what allcaps is becoming shorthand for and whether people will begin screaming or whatever instead of talking soon

2) Fail: man I hate this one! so lazy!

3) any kind of “nerd”. Tons of boring slate and slate-like articles have been written about the cultural resurgence of the term “nerd” but really, most of the time someone calling themselves a “history nerd” “grammar nerd” etc. makes me bananas–this is possibly because I am a “real” “history nerd” (whatever that means) and have problems with people being into like funfacts with no context (did you know General Ambrose Burnside invented sideburns? man I love history!!) . Is it that “nerd” implies being into any kind of specified knowledge and thus as a category points to our anti-intellectual tradition in and of itself? Also, 99.99% of the people who self-identify as “nerds” are not smart.

Okay, that was all not really thought through or well-articulated but whatever, I am going to let it stand, maybe just so I can come back to it sometime and make fun of my own pettiness.

In other news, I recently spent some time in Park Slope and now really want to be a rich urban adult, although Park Slope people continue to be some of the worst people around. But hey, the food is good and the brownstones are nice! Since January I have been leading a kind of awesome nomadic existence and with several other trips imminent I am wondering how long I can sustain myself on this kind of lifestyle–one thing for sure is that I want/need a better suitcase!

boring boring internet looking stuff

seesawed — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 01:49:07 +0000

man I have to get back into writing this thing but lots of times i forget about it, which I guess is just symptomatic to the internet in general, like I spend so much time in front of the computer pretending to work but looking at the internet that I feel like I am constantly remembering and forgetting webpages, blogs, articles, etc. Which is probably true of lots of people who spend lots of time on the internet and like a new form of cognition, etc. etc. I like bookmarking things but then I forget why I bookmarked them, but have a good time going back and forth around them when I find them again in a year or so. I will also read something several times, which I do with books as well, so this might not be connected to the internet as a medium per se, just a way that an existing tendency of mine lines up well with it…

At the same time, I will look at everything and everyone which probably is related to whatever the uh internet technique of the observer is, although I don’t know how to articulate it since its main features seem to be no attention span and no memory, but also a great capacity for seeking out (meaningless) information. I don’t think this is normal (or if it is, the people that I know are weird about it and won’t admit it) but I will try to think of random names of people I went to school with, friends of friends that come up in conversations, names I read about in the newspaper, people who have helped me like buy wine at the fancy liquor store and given me their cards, basically anyone I come into contact with, etc. etc. and google them, I am not sure why, it doesn’t have anything to do with actually wanting to find information about them, more with being fascinated that the information is actually there. Does that make sense?

Anyway, I’m not exactly sure what I am trying to describe here, except the fairly captain obvious observation that the internet as a medium (media?) makes people process or seek or require different kinds of information in different ways (I think I wrote about this before somewhere) but that no one is thinking yet about what this means, except in cheesy ways that center on internet identity (could not give a shit about this) or like making the private public (also no care). I am probably not the typical internet user anyway but I am probably manifesting behavior that is symptomatic of a larger general tendency? I dunno and I will stop here cause it’s getting rambly and boring….

list of things I cannot do whilst riding my new bike

seesawed — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 17:05:29 +0000

(my new bike is a 70s peugeot and looks french as shit, in my old age I am becoming incredibly conscientious about not looking affected/quirky)

1) wear my trenchcoat

2) wear anything striped (this will be really hard because I own a lot of striped clothing)

3) carry a bouquet of flowers in the basket (especially wildflowers or anything that looks like wildflowers)

4) carry a loaf of bread in the basket

5) wear any combination of red, white, and navy (especially stripes)

6) wear any gingham (this will not be difficult, gingham went on my twee ban list about two years ago)

7)smoke (probably)

8 have my hair in pigtails or braids**

9) possibly use my netted grocery bag

10) sing merrily to myself or whistle

As more uh, situations come up over the course of the spring and the summer, I am sure I will be adding to this list, the other thing about this bicycle which deserves remark is that it is really hard to ride–my former bike was one of those big 60s Raleighs that weighed a ton and so I could like hop it up curbs and ride over cracks in the sidewalk but this one is so light I am constantly picturing myself falling off. Also, the tires have no treads but I am too broke right now to buy new ones…

I am sure that in a month or so I will be writing a blog about the expensive and painful experience of getting new front teeth or something…

**the discerning reader will note that there is no parenthesis following the “8″ in this item–do you want to know why? because wordpress automatically defaults it to that smiley emoticon wearing sunglasses!! what the??? do people not make lists on wordpress?? I am sure, incidentally, that there is a way to change this default but I am not smart enough to do so at the present time….

avatar, three propositions

seesawed — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 01:57:23 +0000

okay so i saw avatar because its like a cultural phenomenon and everything and i guess i am glad i did for the experience (this is how i know it is a cultural phenomenon: i counted FOUR fur coats in the theatre. usually there are NO fur coats in the theatre) The movie itself was actually really, really boring, and if i hadn’t been committed to seeing it through for the sake of tracking all of its uh ideologies, i would have walked out. So what I am going to talk about here is what everyone else has been talking about, which is whether/how the movie is racist. I identified three distinct but related discourses on race and I think I will list them below in order from least to most interesting.

1) This is the most obvious way that everyone has been talking about avatar’s position on race which is in terms of arguing about cameron’s “white guilt” (a phrase i don’t really find productive for reasons I also don’t feel like going into here) and his intentions to make a heavy-handed anti-imperialism think piece. Ho hum, boring, boring.

2) The depiction of the “alien”/native peoples: basically a pastiche of like every indigenous stereotype (tribal african, native american, etc. etc.) which of course sends the message that all non-white people are basically… the same, whether or not they live on this planet. Also, the fact that the person who ends up being the best and leads them to victory and tames their big butterfly horse or whatever is…a white guy. Okay, this stuff is really, really depressing and I wish more mainstream commentators had a problem with thinking about how these stereotypes are played out.

3) This is the thing that I am still trying to figure out: what is Avatar’s position on race itself. i.e., at what point does the protagonist become an indigenous person? How is race/otherness defined? The Na’vi call the protagonist an “alien” when he first appears to them, even though biologically he appears to look exactly the same as them, but because his customs/outlook are different, he is not one of them until he learns their ways. I want to think more about it, but am tired and this is not really the forum for anything but beginning to sketch out my ideas.

Besides, the best commentary on Avatar is that one summary of Disney’s Pocahantas where someone wrote in Avatar stuff instead…

the kindle

seesawed — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 17:57:26 +0000

so it was an uh acquisitive xmas for me this year, which means that I got a lot of stuff. Most of it was stuff I asked for and can use (books, a big tote for hauling said books, expensive toiletries, etc. etc.) but one thing I didn’t ask for and so wasn’t expecting was the amazon kindle. I have probably seen like one in real life, and it was the older version too, and I never really thought I’d own one until they got way less expensive, so I had never really considered how I would use it.

In some ways, I am the perfect kindle consumer because I read a ton and I am also fairly mobile. The person who gave me the kindle was motivated to do so after seeing me carrying around copies of wolf hall and nixonland–probably the two heaviest bestsellers from the past year.

so yeah, I am a reader of the 21st century, hurrah. below, in no particular order, is a list of things that I am thinking about having to do with the kindle:

1) The first thing I wondered when I got it is how quickly it is going to be outdated–the kindles and other e-readers right now look the way the first ipods did–really strange and almost like prototypes. I haven’t been interested enough in the mac tablet news, but I am sure that as soon as it comes out this will be history….

2) Incidentally, one day really soon I am going to throw in my two cents here about mac culture and mac users but maybe that post is already too boring…

3) I am already stressing about putting “bad” books on the kindle and being embarrassed when people see them, kind of like when I am embarrassed when people see like my third eye blind on my ipod. On the other hand, I buy bad paperbacks all of the time and then try to either hide them behind my other books or discreetly rid myself of them so maybe the option of simply throwing them away on the kindle will be even better…

thats all I can think of right now, maybe I will end up adding onto this list but probably not…

seesawed — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:02:40 +0000

This is probably going to be a long and complicated post because it’s not about anything I usually think about (movies, etc.) and I am also still trying to think it out, but it seemed important to me (for me?) to do so while I was writing it out, and this seemed as good a forum as any.

So this thing that I may have alluded to (sort of) is that my partner and I broke up (or possibly, we were never “partners” in the actual sense of the word) and in any case I have been reevaluating my selfhood in a few different ways:

One is that I am living in one place for the first time in several years. I moved to this city to go to grad school but I always had the other city too, and if things were bad or boring in one, there was always the promise of the other one just around the corner. Now I only live in this city, which I like, but I have had a hard time figuring out what that mean–I am definitely beginning to process life and other people here a little bit differently, in a non-transitory way, like I am here now, and will be, at least for a little while. What’s worse, is that after I am done being here, I can go somewhere else. Before, I always sort of assumed I would live in the other city and hey I still might, I have ties there, but really, I could go anywhere.

I guess I had always been sort of living in the future, like both in the sense of treating my present as ephemeral, but also always looking forward to something–either going to the other city, or having it come here in the form of my partner (or vice versa–my partner coming here in the form of the city?). I have sort of a problem with time anyways, in the sense that I hate being late and stress about it a lot, to the point of distraction, and ironically, my scholarly work is a great deal about time as well–I write about history and about how people think about history. Could it be that the greatest adjustment for me is moving from a sense of self rooted in the future to one rooted in the present? That actually sounds really healthy, although I am not sure how I will go about accomplishing it.

One of the things that living in the future has always done for me is that I don’t care so much about the everyday (or am not thoughtful about it, if that makes sense) because I am always waiting for something else. There have been more than a few moments in the last few weeks that I have been walking home alone and stopped and thought to myself this is my life in kind of a scared, out-of control sort of way.

The funny thing is that my actual daily routines and relationships haven’t changed so much because my partner wasn’t often around, it’s really only my perception of them.

One of the things that I have been thinking about is re-nesting, which is the way that a friend of mine put it to me the other day at a party. I want to change furniture, paint walls and work on this as a home. It actually looks really nice already but I can make it look nicer.

I am not sure what other things I can do to reconcile my future and present selves but I am going to try. A big one is to remember to be more independent which is what every newly single person says ever but eh it’s true.

Okay, this is probably (hopefully!) the last time I am ever going to be so personal in a post and hopefully I will put some other ones behind this but whatever, it helped me out a little bit and helped me think of one way to conceptualize my problem…

seesawed — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 06:22:53 +0000

so what I should really be doing right now is sleeping but this has been sort of a problem for me lately. i have had some big changes in my life lately and I guess I am still processing them? does that sound vague and nonspecific enough? just checking.

I am about to hand in another chapter of my dissertation which feels good kind of but not amazing because the really pat part of the project is over and from here on I am going to have to be more rigorous both in the level of my scholarship and in my workload. So I guess then that these nonspecified changes in my life (see above) might help that along, or perhaps hurt it should I uh become preoccupied with something else.

In other totally random news I have suddenly become an avid cinema-goer, but only by myself and only to the multiplex, I hope the latter at least changes soon, I don’t care so much about the former. This is probably like the #1 sophmore year of college insight but going to the movies kind of shouldn’t be a social activity and that aspect sort of makes it more stressful for me. Below I am going to make a list of the previewed multiplex films I am interested in seeing in the coming months…

shutter island–am a huge scorcese fan although not too happy about current dicaprio partnership

the lovely bones–even though I dislike the book, I like peter jackson and I like heavenly creatures which is somewhat in the same genre?

clash of the titans–will be AMAZING

okay that’s it–eventually I want to write up 2012 which was like the most fun movie ever to see!

seesawed — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 02:35:27 +0000

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

seesawed — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 01:31:34 +0000

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

seesawed — Thu, 21 May 2009 00:10:40 +0000

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…