7" of Separation

Not a man to answer a question directly, here’s Derrida on ghosts from the 1983 film Ghost Dance.

Not sure that I’m 100 percent tracking with him on this one. Derrida’s answering a fundamentally spiritual question with a literal, yet metaphoric, theory of human memory. And then somehow, he ties that to the physical world, not to mention the American on the phone. I understand when he ties an evoked memory — or even the girl’s sexuality — to phantasmal auras. But, that’s metaphor. Sorry JD, not there yet. Maybe I need to watch some more of the movie.

Spring — I just noticed it.

This is quickly turning into a video blog. Sorry gang, I’ll have some other content later. I really hope you took the 15 minutes it takes to watch the previously posted Billy Bob Thornton interview, as it’s pretty spectacular.

Anyway, I’m in the video lab, working on what’s turning out to be a pretty standard vacation slideshow. It’s for my production class, and the point is learning how to use Final Cut Pro, which is going just fine. (Like second nature to any apple user.)

As part of the class, we’ve been talking about overused effects. You know, things that after effects and final cut have built in. Mostly, we’ve been talking about dissolves and star wipes and the such. But a more advanced overused effect is the lightsaber rotoscope.

I grew up in the late ’80s. It was always a boyhood dream to fight with a lightsaber, and like the rest of Star Wars, it’s been completely overdone to the point of digust. Any nerd with a computer and stolen software can make it happen.

For instance, this little battle that sullies both the lightsaber and Princess Bride. Leave it be people, leave it be.

I used to interview bands for college radio, and even on a small scale, it’s a hard job. Here’s two reasons why.

This is Billy Bob Thornton — and his band — in the worst interview ever:

I think Thornton is being overly difficult, but not totally without reason. “I grew up as pretty much a music historian. So, yeah.”

Seeing that crazy interview reminded me of this older NPR interview by one of my all-time favorite bands, Sigur Ros:

As awkward as this interview is, it makes me love the band even more.

“Do you think you will ever start to use more standard words?”

“Uh. I don’t know.”

Which leads me to the obligatory Sigur Ros video, here live with Bjork:

It’s a shame their country’s economy crashed like Sully into the Hudson.

Oh, and I wanted to post a video for Billy Bob’s Boxmasters, but they only have poorly shot live videos. And the band is overall pretty terrible, too.

Tom Petty is the man Billy Bob instantly compares himself to?

I loved Disney’s Robin Hood and Jungle book growing up. I always thought it was because they were pretty much the same movie. Turns out I was right about that:

The Library of Congress launched a Youtube channel last summer and recently got around to loading a number of old Edison video recordings.

A few choice cuts include these boxing kitties:

And this guy, doing what he’s doing:

And this, what appears to be fight choreography for the Matrix:

A friend from school turned me on to Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls at the Party, a short comedy series available at OnNetworks. Each episode features an in-depth interview with some of today’s most talented women. Check it out:

I really recommend these videos, and the whole series, for their subtle laughs. And then also sometimes GOB shows up to dance.

The three ladies in charge of Smart Girls are really on the cusp of intellectual, dry comedy these days. I’d lump Tina Fey and Kristen Schaal in with them to say that there are some pretty amazing female comics on top of the comedy game. There’s probably a feminist point to be made here, but it’s late and my Judith Butler collection is back in Oregon. So, it’s an argument for another time.

I’m going to go make ellyn a sandwich now.

My prompt, which I sorta followed:

Twitter seems to be a particularly interesting theme for media theory. In a context of ever increasing complexity, Twitter represents an artificial constraint (an imposed length of one’s message). The short length of one’s message requires a peculiar mode of expression–a tweet–which forces one to formulate one’s thought concisely.

It is clear that there is a certain level of stupidity to Twitter, and yet it is nonetheless intriguing — it is attracting new users and much media attention. Make a case in support of Twitter, by focusing on the relation between form and content (for instance, the way in which this new format transforms the content of thought.

I don’t know that I agree with the basis of the prompt — that the artificial constraints of Twitter force a more concise message. Have you followed The Real Shaq?

However, Twitter is fascinating for many reasons. Beyond it being a media darling, Twitter gets at something deeper in human communication: the utterance. Specifically, Bakhtin’s view of the utterance, which would place Twitter in its own speech genre, where the sentence (much to Bakhtin’s delight) is tossed out the window. Twitter is, in fact, Bakhtin’s chain of utterances made tangible, scrollable on a computer screen or iPohone — a chain of utterances, drafted in response to others, calling for the response of yet more utterances, all developing a web of interpersonal connections.

That concludes with a realization that Twitter holds a great deal of weight in reality. There is an ethics of Twitter, which is now developing. And as this conflict of ethical development has begun, Twitter has become intriguing to its users and mythical to those uninitiated. The result is a vast social experiment in communication, in languaging. And I think we’re all interested because we realize that.

So, my argument in favor of Twitter goes like this: Twitter’s interesting. And, it might be important, linguistically, in the long run.

Other reasons we should let it have our attention:

The economic gamble — figuring out how to monetize twitter will save the e-conomy.
It’s Fun. Period.
Did I mention the Real Shaq? It’s really Shaq.

P.S.
You can follow me @insertmedia. I’ll follow you back.

Bonus Video!

This video was part of the lecture that prompted this prompt. Is it too nerdy to admit that it gives me goosebumps to think about some of the ideas presented in this silly thing? Booya:

Let’s see if I can keep this up on any regular basis.

You should know about Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. The Tramp sings a nonsense ditty, “speaking” for the first time. The humor is slapstick and subversive, topical today in our new found recession. Download the whole darn movie at the Internet Archive, legally and free.

And please, please take advantage of some of the greatest underground docs from the last few years at hulu.

First, the tragically honest Confessions of a Superhero. As well as the classic rock-doc Dig!. I’m not sure how long they’ll be up, so watch them now.

I assume this next act will be really popular in high schools across our country. Right now, they’re real popular with the hipster’s in the burg, being that they’re hipsters from the burg, as well. Everyone, matt and kim.

It was sunny on Sunday, and I actually did float down Grand St. in the daylight.

Matt and Kim recently stopped by On Network’s Dinner With the Band. A great show filled with hipsters singing and cooking.

Here’s some cooking:

And, some singing:

Time Magazine recently published an article about America’s recent recession-approved buying habits. And what’s one of our least necessary hobbies? Trading cards.

But the far more important read from Time lately is Kurt Anderson’s essay on our current predicament and the future my generation can choose to go.

That’s all I’ve got.

Sleep.

Humanity wasn’t born into language. That is, language is a tool learned — it’s nothing innate.

Derrida would argue, and Kenneth Burke would agree, language establishes hierarchy — humanity operating under the umbrella of a lingualism not owned, nor created, by any one user, but one cultivated to serve the interests of a powerful minority. Further, no human is raised to be truly multilingual, forever operating in a “mother tongue” (though, even mother tongues are vapor, an illusion of social interaction). These conclusions represent an oversimplified, reduced core of Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other, an obscure take on human languaging and our inability to grasp the true nature, or rather, daunting meaninglessness of spoken word and languaged thought.

Derrida exerts we dwell within our own monolingualism, drawing from it self, identity, culture, and powerful metaphors and idioms, with which we structure our understanding of reality. (But, in genuine, contradictory Derrida fashion, we also do none of the above.) In many ways, language is a trap. For, as Derrida explains, we cannot accurately speak of language but in that language itself, rendering cross-cultural communication and translation ineffectual at their core. Also trapping us inside our own minds, language is no less created by the individual than reality. The language by which we define ourselves is simply, from the beginning, a language of the other — created through history, by millions, owned by none.

Of course, Derrida has more to say (and much more to self-contradict), but this core idea of the trappings of language can be wonderfully extrapolated through Ngugi’s Decolonising the Mind. Colonized Africa has been systematically forced into the language of Western Imperialism, striped of a mother tongue (a first-level language of the other), crammed into the language of another, drawing Derrida’s theory into a second-level perspective.
Derrida states a foreign language, while possible to translate, is never inhabitable in the way a mother tongue is. In Africa, this resulted, as Ngugi explains, in the complete loss of power, and culture, of native Africans, as well as the creation of a corrupt, second-tier power in post-colonial African politics. Ngugi’s accounts support Derrida’s idea of power-creation by naming. Ngugi ancestors and contemporaries were forced to discard their native language, and as a result, discard their identities, in exchange for the language of the power holders. This rendered the liberal arts and creative class, the religious and the petty bourgeois even weaker due to the fact African culture was completely lost in translation or discarded for the cause of Western power.

Ngugi, working with concrete examples, is slightly more cheery than Derrida, speaking of a harmony of the mother tongue. And even though Derrida would argue Nguigi’s mother tongue also deceives him, Ngugi’s experience puts Derrida’s theory in perspective, allowing a sense of the real to rise out. For all who control language, control power — a lesson easily learned, but hardly applied.

Calling back to my reaction to escaping Adorno’s Culture Industry, it appears the solution lies in the individual. As Derrida puts it, and clearly Ngugi agrees, invention is the holy answer — individual invention of language, invention of form, invention of medium (as in Ngugi’s case of the African novel). Using this path, one can make some wonderful leaps, advancing the argument supporting art as a medium for social reform: from individuals (such as Ngugi), to collectives, to movements, to true progress.

But to return to the point, a more grounded argument could be made (and is by Derrida) for the importance of language in the creation of identity, and thus a stressed importance of the individual in the creation and cultivation of language. As Ngugi found, through creating a medium, by inventing, and owning, a new language of the other, one for the descendants of the mother tongue, he was rewarded with considerable power in the development of the resulting cultural movement. Knowing creation is power, then, is the first step toward securing freedom, the all-important universal ideal.