Archive for the 'Media' Category

Why I’m Glad That Ta-Nehisi Coates Sold Out

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 29, 2008
in Media
. 0 Comments

I’m not exactly surprised that Ta-Nehisi Coates is joining the Atlantic blogroll (I know, no one else is, either) but I’m absolutely tickled pink about it.

I say all the time that there aren’t any bloggers on the Left who seem to care about culture, but Ta-Nehisi is absolutely the exception: he posts for the sake of narrative rather than the sake of fact-checking, and he weaves cultural logics and socioeconomics together so well that he makes it look easy. I’d call him “Gramsci to Yglesias’ Marx,”  but aside from the inaccuracy of the political comparison there’s the little matter of hegemony.

You see, unfortunately, I suspect that the reason he’s gained traction among liberals for writing about culture is that “he has a culture to write about” — which is to say that the culture of urban black America is subaltern and therefore readily noticeable, whereas that of white America and/or the American mainstream and/or coastal elites is not, i.e. hegemonic. It’s not that the blogosphere lacks cultural self-consciousness — to the contrary, bloggers relish in self-caricature regarding their personas virtual (see also: Cheetos Experiment) and actual (see also: Stuff White People Like). But that’s a far cry from using personal narrative, or talking about codes of behavior and social norms — that is to say, writing about culture the way Ta-Nehisi writes about culture. The implication is that growing up African-American in Baltimore is a unique experience, a perspective worth reading, in a way growing up somewhere else isn’t: that the dominant culture is in fact predominant, even universal.

Just last week, Ta-Nehisi’s response to David Brooks warned against calling a middle-class “economic” phenomenon “cultural” when it hits a lower class. Fascination with West Baltimore as “a culture to write about” among white, coastal policy bloggers is the flip side of the same coin. I hope that this isn’t actually why the blogosphere likes Ta-Nehisi; maybe his reception when he makes the move to the Atlantic will definitively prove me wrong.

With my freeze-ray I will stop the world…

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on July 19, 2008
in Extemporanea and Media
. 12 Comments

5 reasons you should watch Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog:

  1. It’s a musical about superheroes.
  2. It was made for free, during the writers’ strike, to prove that there was another way.
  3. It goes down tomorrow.
  4. It’s written by Joss Whedon, and thus is hilarious.
  5. It includes fantastic lines like this:

Billy: I want to be an achiever…like Bad Horse.
Penny: The Thoroughbred of Sin?
Billy: I meant Gandhi.

Get thee hence.

Dear World: This Will Not Do

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on July 17, 2008
in Extemporanea and Media
. 3 Comments

I am (slowly) catching up on my missed reading. There has, in my absence, been a lot of silliness.

The Absurd — Bill Kristol, in eulogizing Tony Snow, writes:

For quite a while now, optimism has had a bad reputation in intellectual circles. The fashionable books of my youth — and they are good books — were darkly foreboding ones… We who read Albert Camus — and if you had any pretensions to being a non-Marxist intellectual, you read Camus — loved the melancholy close of his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus”: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Melancholy? Has the man read “The Myth of Sisyphus“? (I suppose it’s his father who was the Marxist intellectual.) That’s the least melancholy passage of the entire book — the statement that there is meaning and heroism in struggle even in a struggle you know you’ll lose makes it a powerfully optimistic close. Call this the Applebee’s salad bar of literary criticism.

Justice is Sweet – Obama seems to get the hint:

I said I wouldn’t give because of the FISA vote, and the caller instantly launched into some talking points about how the law expired in August, which is why Obama voted for it even though it wasn’t a perfect bill.

Luckily, if we want to know more we can just ask AT&T for a transcript of the call!

My Cold, Dead Hands — Details of proposed DC gun legislation:

Firearms in the home must be stored unloaded and disassembled, and secured with either a trigger lock, gun safe, or similar device. The new law will allow an exception for a firearm while it is being used against an intruder in the home.

“Just hang on a sec, Mr. Burglar — I have to unlock, reassemble, and load my gun.” Yeah. Really effective.

The Doctor May Dance — But he doesn’t smoke. I will, however, make an exception on the basis that the Tennant eyebrow-raise looks good on Julian.

Puppy Love — I am heartened to hear that the Obamas are getting a dog, but this phrasing makes me suspect either insufficient copy-editing or a wicked sense of humor:

While we don’t disagree that it’s important to choose a dog that matches well with the family, mixed breeds should certainly be considered along with pure breeds.

I Don’t Care If You Burn — San Francisco legislators propose to prohibit tobacco sales in pharmacies and limit outdoor smoking:

“Tobacco remains the No. 1 cause of preventable death in the U.S. - period,” [Mitch Katz, director of the Department of Public Health] said. “It’s government’s responsibility to protect people from obvious risks.”

Then just outlaw the damn thing! Enough of this namby-pamby combination of death-in-a-box rhetoric and irritating-but-ineffective legislation.

Try to do better next time, world.

Shame, with Love at strife.

Published
by
Kate Maltby
on July 13, 2008
in Ladies, Media and Social Theory
. 4 Comments

Helen continues her advance on the heights of literary society by getting paid to blog ’bout ha’ obsessions. Shame culture, as ever, is on the agenda, as today Ms Rittelmeyer applauds the cashier who told a teenager trying to buy a pregnancy test that “you shouldn’t be having sex in the first place”. Helen has long championed “shame culture” over “guilt culture”, a distinction known to popular parlance ever since ER Dodds identified Homeric society as a “shame society” (even if JT Hooker’s analysis of Iliad threatened to prove him wrong). According to Helen, in a moral society, there should be no “freedom from shame”. The problem is that the example she has picked to illustrate it, on further examination, actually illustrates shame failing to police the teenage sexual activity that Helen so deplores.

According to Helen’s argument, teenagers should cease a behavioural practice simply because other people will express disapproval (which is why Benedict, in her groundbreaking study of shame culture in Japan, defined it as fundamentally collectivist social trait).  Letting aside the obvious protests about the tyranny of the majority, this doesn’t involve the girl in question making a change to her own moral philosophy, just going to enough lengths not to get caught. What the individual does in private doesn’t matter, unless the consequences of that action ever become public and identifiable. This is fine if you think the problem can be solved by the teenager using enough contraception to ensure she never has to face another check out clerk. That’s not what the clerk herself had in mind, however, given that she was keen to dictate her customer that “you shouldn’t be having sex at all”. 

The social behaviour actually enforced by the clerk was: Buying pregnancy tests is shameful. Therefore, don’t buy pregnancy tests at all. 

This, of course, is no help to anyone. Whatever your views on abortion, it’s clear that the earlier a pregnancy is discovered, the better. 

We now live in a society where sex has been largely divorced from its visible consequences. So to use shame culture to stop someone having extramarital sex, you have to ensure that shame is inherent in the very moment of the sexual act. You can’t rely on pregnancy itself being shameful. Sexual acts only take place in the presence of people who approve of them. So the only way in which a disapproving spectator can be philosophically introduced is through belief in God. It is possible to teach people to feel shame in the sight of God. 

And isn’t that what we Christian cultures just call guilt?

In which the U.S. Conference of Mayors agrees with me.

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 7, 2008
in Immigration, Media and Politics
. 0 Comments

Insofar as Noah’s response to my post of yesterday can be summarized as “The most pragmatically viable response is to blame employers because it’s better than blaming immigrants,” I agree completely. Insofar as it can be summarized as “We shouldn’t be talking about changing our own perception in ways that can’t make for more viable public narratives” I disagree vehemently.

The initial reason that I wrote the post was actually that I’m frustrated generally with a refusal to expect business owners to see their workers as human beings rather than warm bodies and this is a very good example of that. But Noah’s attribution of it to my radical localism on immigration is also valid. I suspect that a paradigm shift will be a more durable solution to the issue than even the most liberal legislation will, and the xenophobes are more likely to change their minds when they get to know actual immigrants — or at least have to confront them at marches and town-hall meetings — than through narratives delivered on the national stage.

The short-term effects will be pretty bad in places like Hazleton or Prince George’s County, but the short-term effects will be pretty bad there anyway, and what ICE is doing — in those cities as well as more immigrant-friendly places like New Haven and LA — is worse by orders of magnitude. And if the news out of the Conference of Mayors is any indication, local governments are largely at least somewhat pro-immigrant in their outlook. So pragmatically we’re in decent shape.

I get the importance of narratives. But I suspect it’s the smaller, private changes in attitude that will end up driving immigration reform on a human scale.

Layover NYT blogging

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 6, 2008
in Immigration, Media and Politics
. 0 Comments

The more I learn about immigration policy, the more frustrated I get with the (mostly) uncritical consensus that employers who hire undocumented immigrants deserve to be prosecuted. Today’s NYT lead story reads to me like a step and a half in the right direction.

First of all, since employers are lobbying for more liberal immigration policy at the grassroots and state as well as federal levels, they’re more likely to have an impact where the legislative action is as well as changing citizens’ opinions. (Public opinion, incidentally, is offered by Secretary Chertoff at the end of the article as the reason immigration policy can’t be liberalized — which would be a satisfactory explanation if his department’s own ICE, wholly unaccountable to public opinion, weren’t pursuing more aggressive anti-undocumented-immigrant practices in the absence of any change in law.)

Second of all, this is being covered without recourse to the phantom the pro-immigrant Left usually raises over this issue: “employers who hire undocumented immigrants engage in abusive and inhumane practices!” It’s true that noncitizens don’t have the leverage to protect their rights that would make abuse impossible, but from what I’ve heard in the field the phenomenon is greatly exaggerated.

In fact, the relationship between employer and employee is often more humane than it’s usually given credit for being, and I’m disappointed that the Times didn’t touch on this as well (hence the half-step). Most employers the NYT quotes are driven by their need to “fill” positions, i.e. with warm bodies — providing at least some credibility to the claim of inhumane treatment. One employer goes further in recognizing her employees as human beings, arguing that their skill and knowledge make them “irreplaceable.”

But no one the Times quotes finds himself (or is willing to admit he finds himself) in the position that I hear is most common: having been presented with documentation that appeared to be legitimate at the time of hiring, employers don’t want to confront their workers about it now because they feel a personal connection to them and don’t want to leave them out in the cold. Perhaps this is mostly true of small business owners, who are less likely to be on the radar of a Times reporter; but it seems to me that much of the reason no one says these things in the press is that no one expects them to do so.

Both Left and Right expect employers to treat their employees according to a purely transactional logic rather than a corporate one — some call it exploitation, some entrepreneurialism. And they’re expected to lobby as business owners protecting their interests, not people engaged in relationships with others. But the ability of various dynamics to play into a single relationship — economic and personal, for example — is one of the strongest arguments for integrating immigrants into their communities completely rather than allowing them to remain in the shadows. Failing to recognize the humanity of business relationships makes it impossible to talk about this, and impugns the transactional logic by which we’re expected to talk about business in general.

Classics geekery pays off. Sort of.

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on July 5, 2008
in Media, Politics and Yale
. 2 Comments

Will pointed me towards this ridiculous article in the Washington Post. It starts out well: mocking Maha is always appropriate.

She’s the pouty protagonist in the melodrama that runs throughout “Al-Kitaab,” the standard beginning text in Arabic classes at Harvard and other American universities.

We are taught to speak our first Arabic sentences by expressing Maha’s incurable angst. We learn in Chapter 1 that Maha is desperately lonely. In later chapters, we are told that she hates New York, has no boyfriend and resents her mother.

I tried to find a clip from the Al-Kitaab DVDs, but for some unknown reason no one thought they were interesting enough to put on YouTube. Instead, I present you with a claymation re-enactment of her cousin Khalid’s greatest hits.

Pollak concludes that “[l]earning Arabic should not include lessons in political propaganda.” (Propaganda, apparently, being teenage ennui and sad Palestinians.) All I can say is that if Pollak thinks this is propaganda, he’s clearly never encountered Thrasymachus.

Published in 1965 for boys at English public schools, Thrasymachus combines the best of Greek grammar with the remnants of British imperialism. The story itself deals with a painfully stupid child who descends to the underworld, where he encounters — and offends — various heroes of Greek myth. (The episode where he hits on Briseis in front of Achilles is particularly choice.)

It’s in the prose composition exercises that the ideology really comes out. (Prose comp, for those fortunate enough to escape its horrors, involves translating English passages into Latin or Greek. Theoretically this is to practice tenses and particles, but really it is a particularly fiendish bit of torture invented by Classics teachers who think there should be more pain, and that irregular verbs are insufficient for that purpose.)

The prose composition passage for Chapter 29, for instance, reads:

“If I give you this sword, my son, will you promise to fight bravely when you become a man?” “Yes, father. If the enemy attack the city, I shall never betray you but I will fight until they are all driven out.” “If our king leads us against the enemy’s city, you must follow him and never run away.” “But, father, mother has told me never to leave home. If I leave her, she will grieve.” “If she said that, she was foolish. You must always obey the king if ever he orders you to fight for your native land.”

It strikes me that if you get to college, decide to study Arabic, and don’t already know mainstream Arab opinion on Israel, or who Nasser was, your textbook is as good a place as any to learn it. Al-Kitaab has plenty of problems pedagogically, but by presenting famous Arabs from Nasser to Ibn Batutta, it never claims to be making an ideological statement.

Pollak’s objection isn’t really that the book is political — he wants it to be political, in the direction of his own beliefs. He’s welcome to write his own book. If it has better DVDs, I’ll buy it.

Parenthetically, I present my favorite prose comp passage:

In a certain house, which has only one bath, live two young men, Xanthias and Orestes by name. Xanthias likes the bath, but Orestes is already washing in it. Xanthias says savagely to Orestes, “Get out of that bath, young man.” Orestes, however, who is an insolent fellow and does not like Xanthias, does nothing but wash himself. Xanthias therefore seizes an axe with which he cuts off Orestes’ head. Thus Orestes dies and Xanthias washes himself in the bath. Phew! What young men!

American Birthday Defamiliarization Blogging

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 4, 2008
in Arts, Media and Social Theory
. 2 Comments

Savage Minds seems fairly willing to follow the Los Angeles Times in anointing Christian Lander, of Stuff White People Like, a “satirical ethnographer.” (The Times also calls him a “grassroots anthropologist” — would someone please tell them that’s more or less the only kind there is?) I appreciate the willingness to connect anthropology to cultural criticism, of course, but if it were actually anthropology it’d be funnier.

The key to this particular style of observational humor is the defamiliarization it accomplishes, which dovetails, SM notes, with “the idea that anthropologists cleverly reveal the deep structure of the seemingly close at home or obvious.” But the reason that Lander’s site is neither anthropological nor really that funny is that defamiliarization is stylistically tougher than it looks. It’s not just a matter of zooming out and noticing that all of these self-styled individualists that populate the hipster class (a class which Lander admits includes himself) are just the same, but pointing out that their everyday preferences and practices are completely ridiculous. The former gives you one joke, perhaps two; the possibilities of the latter are as limitless as the conventions and neuroses of the culture itself. But in order to properly achieve this kind of critical distance, the way in which the humorist leads his audience toward the subject — themselves — has to jar them out of their own skin: defamiliarization. (The best example I can come up with of humor that embodies this without being at all anthropological is Breakfast of Champions-era Vonnegut.)

The problem that I have with Lander isn’t that he’s unwilling to look beyond his own social circle for content (not even “lifting a Google,” to borrow a cringeworthy phrase from the Times piece). The subculture he’s describing is small and uniform enough that it works. My problem is that, at the end of the day, he doesn’t bother to disguise the fact that he knows he’s writing for them, too — or at least for people familiar with them — so he needs to do no more than point out an item on a list for his readers to start with the ironic smiles and knowing nods.

When he does continue to the “anthropological” analysis in the second part of the post, he continues to rely on the shared point of reference. Tying a phenomenon that the audience understands completely into an unfamiliar framework is about as jarring as tying an ornament to a Christmas tree. It’s not defamiliarization if they get it from the beginning. This is especially true on a blog, where any paragraph over two sentences has a drastically lower chance of actually getting read — especially if it’s not the first or last. (Lander’s less unfunny when he breaks with form, such as the post on scarves which opened with the assertion that “White People’s body temperatures do not operate on logical or consistent levels…”)

The result is that Lander doesn’t write about white people anthropologically — he’s not actually writing about them at all. He sticks quite faithfully to the name of the blog, less an ethnographer than a curator.

If you want to read a more effective (if dated) defamiliarization of the American bourgeois, check out another of my guilty-pleasure favorites of classic anthropology: Horace Miner’s “Body Ritual among the Nacirema.” In fact, I’d strongly recommend it. Holiday weekends are as much for reflection as for anything else, after all, and the Fourth — despite our continued narcissism over our origin myth — isn’t just about a moment but about the people, or peoples, to whom it gave a name.

Incidentally, when we read the Nacirema piece in my twelfth-grade English class, I was the last person to get the joke. Then I went off and became an anthro major. Funny, that.

Meme adoption, behind the Times.

Published
by
Dara Lind
on June 29, 2008
in If You're Not Postmodern You're Not Paying Attention, Media and Technology
. 2 Comments

Before this morning, I had only one Facebook friend who had adopted the middle name “Hussein” — an acquaintance I acted with back in Ohio. After today’s NYT trend piece, I now have six.

I can’t help but feel that adopting a meme after you’ve read about it in the New York Times isn’t just a cardinal violation of the Hipster Code of Conduct, but a total misuse of social media. As laid out in the article, the point of the meme isn’t just to declare support for Senator Obama — heaven knows, there are dozens of other ways to do that on Facebook alone — but to force a reconsideration in one’s own friends of the supposedly “dangerous,” “un-American” nature of the man’s middle name. It’s a brilliant idea, using the individual connections of social networking to influence individual political attitudes.

But if you don’t interact online with people who would judge someone negatively based on the associations “Hussein” presents, it’s a useless gesture, and I doubt many Yalies do have Facebook friends who fit that description. Furthermore, while a few friends spontaneously adopting the name Hussein might be recognized as a political statement, and therefore merit some consideration by those who would otherwise draw bigoted conclusions, dozens of friends doing so can’t be seen as anything other than “the next Facebook trend,” and therefore doesn’t provoke much further thought at all — sabotaging its purpose.

The rapidity with which memes can become mass phenomena on the Internet is astounding, but that doesn’t mean everything has to be a mass phenomenon. When we turn every gesture into a Gesture (a wave into The Wave), we blunt the edge of the original action. Maybe once we start treating everything on the Internet as a new toy, we’ll be able to develop notions of scale and proportion; more likely, though, the capitalist confidence that spontaneous, unchecked growth will allow everything to find its proper place will defeat inclinations toward more cautious planning. The Internet never found a good idea it couldn’t broadcast, but this may be far too much of a good thing,

Friday Border Skirmish Blogging

Published
by
Dara Lind
on June 27, 2008
in Arts, Links and Media
. 0 Comments

Because if Helen gets to link to anthropology blogs, I get to link to movie reviews.

I’m sure I’ve gotten more of a kick reading merciless reviews of The Happening than I possibly could have by watching the movie itself, and Chris Orr’s non-review review obviously takes the cake. But Anthony Lane, taking advantage of the mini-time-warps of print media (the review is published weeks after the movie comes out? Bizarre!), engages in a meta-review of both movie and reception, and in the process manages to turn M. Night Shyamalan into something like an Old Testament prophet:

he is trying to reinsert the fear of death into a moviegoing culture that would prefer to think of it as laughable, dismissible, or gross. People around me in the cinema were cackling…the same audiences who go tense and quiet on the rare occasions when, as Shyamalan did in “The Sixth Sense,” he makes sombre and controlled use of the same anxieties.

It’s an interesting read on his career: a cautionary tale against trying to be Buckley’s “man who stands athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’” by means of shock therapy. Because shock is just another peculiarly modern thrill.

Meanwhile, Sudes’ review of Wanted (which is thoroughly great) wins for the image of the week:

my dog-eared copy of Summer Action Movies: Theory and Practice (eds. Joel Silver & Jerry Bruckheimer).

Not least because the second edition of said book would totally include my as-yet-unwritten essay on why Iron Man is the first truly postmodern action movie.