I'd like to be posting more often than I am but, & I think this excuse is a good one, my webrowser has been hijacked (by something calling itself windowwws - urrrh) & my computer has contracted a virus that switched the cooling fan off. I can't even switch my computer on for long enough to download the virus-killing software I need without the processor going thermonuclear. So, while I've been waiting to visit one of my tech friends to arm myself to the teeth with a virus-killing, spybot-wasting, adware-annihilating arsenal, I am forced to post on the library computers. This excuse is even media-related, yeh?
Interestingly, all of these problems started when I ran two of what are supposed to be the best spybot / adware removers to get rid of the things slowing my system to a snail's pace. I think the nasties inside realised they were on the way out so they decided to go all 'final solution' on my computer.
Anyhow, visit Lavasoft - they are related to Microsoft somehow, but at least they offer their adware-killer free to domestic users & also spybot S&D who are also free and much less affiliated to nasty, big corporations & who will give you the latest in spyware-destroyers.
Hrrm...another thing I'm running behind on is my playlists for the radio, but, I did this one recently, so please have a gander.
4ZzZ's Radiothon finishes today. We took a very low-key approach this year. This means less madness for station staff, I hope it hasn't meant a critical fall-off in subscriptions. Oh well, guess we'll find out soon. At least I got the cool new album from Josh Martinez, Buck up princess out on UK label (or West London, how much cooler is it to say West London?) Bella union. The label was set up by the Cocteau twins (I think it is also an offshoot of Beggar's banquet) & its artist roster includes people like the Dirty 3 & Explosions in the sky. As a hip-hopper Martinez only belongs there because he is crazy and from Nova Scotia & is doing the whole Tom Waits of hip hop thing like fellow Nova Scotian Buck 65. Well, actually, Buck has kind of owned the whole Tom Waits thing, but they both do what I like to call indie-hop: Bringing the best bits of underground rock & guitar music to hip hop. Both of them, also, used to be members of the coolest collective in US avant-hop: anticon.
It's funny, y'know, I was reading, I think it was an Edward Macan piece on prog. rock (why?, why was I doing that?) , & there was this little bit about upper-middle class white blokes turning jazz into something arty & white so they felt comfortable being involved with it. Well all my favourite hip hop is exactly like that. Do I feel guilty? No, kinda useless, maybe. As if everything is cyclical and art is incapable of any meaningful social traction. Like the only forum all these smart, white, wealthy-backgrounded folk (um, would WASPish be easier?) are capable of speaking in is one where they only speak to each other & when they do they are so overweeningly intellectual the net result is almost meaningless. Ho-well, time to pop a cocktail of anti-depressants & intellectual-viagra (eew, sorry) and get on with the biz.
BTW, since I was talking 'bout community radio just a bit ago, should you feel like supporting it, please ring 07 3252 1555 & pledge your support, with your credit card handy or visit 291 St. Paul's Tce in the Valley with your cash, livestock or any other barter materials. Visit 4ZzZ's website to discover why you can't live without us.
The first half of this week's reading seems like a big excuse (& I think I've proven that I know excuses) for not doing ethnographic research - "How do I know what's a likely interpretation" or "How to fudge primary research convincingly." No, really, it makes sense.
I don't know if I really have a favourite media object at the moment. I have been watching the HBO series "Oz", screening here on SBS (Mon, 10pm) pretty regularly. It's a show about a special, experimental facility for prisoners inside a maximum security jail in the US. Using McKee's system I came up with three points:
* The first thing which struck me was that there aren't really any candidates for exnomination. At least not so far. I think that this speaks to the intentions and alertness of the show's creators. Every single character is designed to represent some aspect of the maximum-security prison system & thus none of them are taken for granted.
* Explicit intertexts: I read internet fan boards about Oz (the link is not to the boards I'm talking about - but the way the fans talk on these ones might give u an idea) where interpretations of the show were radically different to what I was expecting. To give a rough summary, a lot of people saw it as a blokey and extremely violent soapie. This seems to be something the show mutated into after the first series (I've only seen one & a half) where it seemed to me to be an incisive, political, prison dramatisation. This is also connected to 'other texts in the series': At first I had no idea there were six series & that it first began in '97 - which made me think about the show very differently.
* 'Other texts in the genre' connect interestingly to Oz. Think of 'Prisoner' or, actually I don't know (recent, UK, women's prison drama) Bad girls very well (the link is to a dyke review of the show), but it might throw up some interesting comparisons. The most frison would be between Oz and more trad. US crime shows, say, for instance Law & order (& its subsidiaries), to which nearly every star of Oz seems to have migrated sooner or later. A few stark contrasts to be had there.
Gotta go soon, they'll close up the library.
Post more when I can.
I was quickly trying to find this Penny-arcade comic about violence and computer games - which I've been thinking about since I mentioned oppositional readings of the Doom III ad I talked 'bout in the last post - but I didn't find the right one. This one's still funny and topical tho.

I'll post the right one when I find it.

Ciao.

C.

Yo. How long has it been? I have missed you blog, but fear not, now I have official permission to continue pondering the pixelated navel of the media, once more.

Today was supposed to be my day for documenting all my media use, which I have dutifully done.

I have been wondering what to include, especially in light of the McLuhan article from the first week's reading. Well, I'm not including my bedside lamp, but I've still managed to accrue quite a list .

It began first of all with my clothes. These are nearly all branded. From my airwalk shoes (most commercial), to my Bocoo jeans (these are really bad quality and made in sweatshops I think) to my Suprize Zed t-shirt & 183 hoodie: Coz I always have to be wearing something weird and cool that other people aren't. It's kinda 'weak really. Anyway, all of these are advertising media, and also clothes.
The next media objects I collided with were my mobile phone & discman. I hurriedly recharge both. Then I hear my flatmate's radio playing inaudably, as usual.
Then I'm out of the house. I have Sennheiser headphones (sounds German quality, right?) which I wear around my neck too much, broadcasting a brand once again and giving me bad neck posture.
Look at that, very bad for posture.

I'm largely oblivious to the swarm of advertising on the way to the bus and while on it. First off I'm talking to someone, then on the second leg of the trip I'm busily engrossed in the media right in front of me, a score to Cosi fan tutte, which I'm trying to learn and listening to a recording of it on my discman.
Look, my very expensive discman...& it's blue (I wanted grey).

I did look up long enough to catch an ad for Doom III. Which has been released inexplicably on time, for a prestige PC title.
Ah yes, that's the one, with the disease and the glowing eyes.
Excellent.
PC gaming represents one of my longest and most debilitating relationships with the media. The less said about that the better, I suppose.
I also saw an ad for Driv3r, but who cares, right.
Scoot across to the lecture room where I am confronted with a dark projector (I'm not even entirely sure what that is, but it's like a normal projector, only cooler, I mean even the name is cool). On this dark projector they are projecting Windows XP, Winamp & Winamp is playing a jazz standard version of 'A few of my favourite things' (I can't remember the artist) - mediaobjectorama.
While I'm waiting for the class to start lots of other kids wander in & not as many of them are decked out in brand names as might be expected. I saw a Heineken baseball cap, a Technics LP bag & a sea of Converse shoes (coz they're cheap and also cool, I assume - that's not very common).
Did you see the product plaecment for Converse in I, Robot? Turning it into an artform, man. Another crappy thing about it was that Will Smith spends about three minutes talking about his antique Converse basketball boots, yet Converse has been re-issuing the same boots since the fifties & they travel in cycles of cool. As soon as they become 'old school' Converse (and every other sportshoe company) releases tons and makes a fortune. Bastards, I want my old school cred.!
I am drinking from my Cool ridge water bottle (as far as I know, one of the few brands not run by Coca cola) & writing with an Oz Electoral Commission pen.
My A4 pad is fairly ad-lite, but as I'm recording all this stuff in it, it is worth noticing as another form of media.
We spend the whole lecture looking at Adobe Audition. This used to be Cool edit pro, but Adobe absorbed it. It is a sound-editing programme. The dark projector is hurting my eyes. Are my contact lenses a medium - I mean I think they are y'know. A bad one too.
After the lecture I make my way down to the Citycat, noticing all the bill posters for campus socialists, a chalked play ad for the Cement Box Theatre & a couple of old looking Schonell Theatre billboards.
There is an even older ad on the crappy Telstra payphone box @ the Citycat stop.
I wait, listening to my discman and studying the score.
Converse shoes are everywhere. Everything is brandnamed, everything.
The timetable for the Citycat which I pick up a copy of when I get on board tells me that it is 'funtastic' to travel this way.
I have ceased paying attention to all the ad.s everywhere & get off the boat at Southbank. Lots of people are playing instruments at the Conservatorium - these are media I suppose.
I blast away in a practive room for 45 min.s and then go to a lesson where the student before me is recording hers on a Sony MZ-700.
One of these!
She is also using a Sony ECM-M907 microphone.
I need to buy one of these.
I just bought a cool little MZ-NHF800. This is a mid-range (Oz $550) new Sony hi-md recorder, the 'hi' means the new minidiscs which hold a gigabyte of data. I'm glad they released these, they are still the only decent quality consumer sound recorders, which I really need. I've had it for about a week, but because I am so technically inept I'm still working out how to use it.
Look there it is, ya cute little thing.
Alright, I'm back in the library computer labs at UQ, writing all of this on my blog - there's some new media for u. If you'd like to have one of your own please visit blogger and they will start helping you merrily waste as much time as I am.
Well I've got to get off here & go to the music labs to do some soundediting. Then, if everything goes to plan I'm going to watch Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind at the Schonell. They are having a retrospective of the films of Hayao Miazaki (the Japanese Walt Disney - only much cooler).
Nausicaa is a philosophical fairytale epic about a world destroyed by war and pollution and the meaning of the lives of its last survivors. It's all steampunk and it stars the very cool Nausicaa, pure heroine and saviour of the waste. (The name is Greek - a princess from the Odyssey, I think.) The film is much shorter than the manga by Miazaki, which he completed sometime after the film's release in 1984.
There she is, on the left.
I'm sure I'll have a few extra details to fill in. I'll do that tomorrow.

Cya.

C.