Jon Stewart
Bill Moyers Journal
Why do so many get their news and analysis from his fake news show?
The NEW YORK TIMES declared that when Jon Stewart took over as anchor of Comedy Central's THE DAILY SHOW, he "breathed new life into a show that hadn't even seemed to need it." In 2003, Stewart said of his role hosting the show, "Liberal and conservative have lost their meaning in America. I represent the distracted center." As declared on the show's site, "THE DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART is the most important television show ever, with the most important guests, hosts, and news - current event news, pop culture news, sports news, entertainment news - of all time."
For the past eight years, Stewart and "The Daily Show" have received 18 Emmy Award nominations and won nine. Jon himself was nominated for Outstanding Individual Performance in a Variety or Music Program in 2002, 2003, 2005 and again last year in 2006. In 2004, "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" was also honored by the Television Critics Association by winning for Outstanding Achievement in News and Information, beating out traditional news shows in the category. In 2003 and 2005, Jon won for Individual Achievement in Comedy and the show won in 2003 for Outstanding Achievement in Comedy. In 2001, "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" also received the prestigious Peabody Award for its "Indecision 2000" campaign coverage and again in 2005 for "Indecision 2004."
To Watch the Episode
Showing posts with label Popular Culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Popular Culture. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Friday, April 23, 2010
Wu Ming: New Italian Epic; Roberto Saviano: Gomorrah
(I recently read Gomorrah while traveling. It is a gripping expose of the Italian Camorra and resonates for anyone exploring the tangled web of the global economy--highly recommended!!!)
NEW ITALIAN EPIC: WE'RE GOING TO HAVE TO BE THE PARENTS
by Wu Ming
Opening talk @ the conference "The Italian Perspective on Metahistorical Fiction: The New Italian Epic", Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London, UK, October
2, 2008.
Wu Ming Founbdation
...
This is what I call the New Italian Epic. Its main characteristics are:
1. Ethical commitment to writing and storytelling, which means: a deep trust in the healing power of language and stories.
2. A sense of political necessity -- and you can choose between the broader and the stricter sense of the adjective "political".
3. The choice of stories that have a complex allegorical value. The initial choice may not even be intentional: the author may feel compelled to tell the story and later on understand what he was trying to say.
4. An explicit preoccupation for the loss of the future, with a propensity to use alternative history and alternative realities to force our gaze into imagining the future.
5. A subtle subversion of registers and language. "Subtle" because what's important is not language experimentation in and of itself; what's important is telling your story in what you feel is the best possible way.
6. A way of blending fiction and non-fiction that's different from the ones we've gotten used to (e.g. Hunter S. Thompson's "gonzo journalism"), a manner that I dare describe as "distinctly Italian", which produces "unidentified narrative objects".
7. Last but certainly not least, a "communitarian" use of the Internet to - as Genna himself put it - "share a hug with the reader".
Several books published in Italy in the past few years share all or many of these features. Each one is peculiar, and sometimes, if we judge by immediate appearances, a novel doesn't resemble the next in the slightest: different styles, different plots, different historical backdrops, seemingly different genres. And yet, if we go down deep enough, we'll see that all these books are in resonance with each other.
The most famous and successful of these works is of course Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah, which sold about a million and a half copies and triumphantly entered Italian popular culture. In Gomorrah the synthesis of non-fiction and auto-fiction is so subtle that it reaches uncanny heights. It looks like a powerful report on Naples' organized crime and the way it operates in the globalized economy, and certainly the state of things it describes is painfully real, but this is no ordinary piece of journalism. There are also autobiographical, introspective chapters. In many passages the prose is rather visionary. The "narrating I" frequently hallucinates and "hijacks" the points of view of other people, intentionally playing on the confusion between the author, the narrator and a "narrating I" that doesn't belong to any of them. Alessandro Vicenzi summarized this matter in the most simple and effective way:
As I said a few minutes ago, these works are different from the"non-fiction novels" and hyper-subjective news stories in the tradition of so-called "New Journalism" or "gonzo journalism". That kind of writing is now quite familiar, while these works are more disquieting. I believe that the most appropriate adjective is "uncanny". When the book was published in the English-speaking countries (unfortunately in a poor translation), reviewers got puzzled about it. Here's a passage from Rachel Donadio's review in The New York Times:
I guess Donadio never had such perplexities in reading a book by Hunter S. Thompson. Nobody ever cared about what was true and what was fictional in Thompson's writing. What's the difference here?
The difference is that Gomorrah is far from being an ironic piece of work. Gomorrah is d-e-a-d-l-y serious.
As you all probably know, "uncanny" is the way we translate into English a word Sigmund Freud used: "Unheimliche". Unheimliche is used for things that look repulsively strange and attractively familiar at the same time.
As happens in Genna's Medium, in Gomorrah too a troublesome relationship between the narrator and his father becomes strongly symbolic of something bigger. It casts light on the ambiguous "double-consciousness" several Southern Italians are painfully aware of. The narrator is the child of a culture that he cannot really renounce, and although he deeply despises the mafia and fights against it, he knows that the mafia is part of that culture, that it is consistent with that culture. In fact the nàrrator shares some deep conceptual frames with the people he denounces, and he admits it by sharing with us memories from his childhood, conversations with his father. To the narrator's eyes, the camorra is uncanny, it's repulsively strange and attractively familiar at the same time. Gomorrah is an unidentified narrative object about an unidentified feeling. The readers read their way through an "uncanny valley", and Saviano walks through another "uncanny valley": a larger one, a social one, an anthropological one.
"Uncanny valley" is a phrase coined by Japanese engineer Mori Masahiro in 1970. Mori's hypothesis is that when a robot looks and acts almost like a human being, this will cause a response of horror and rejection among humans. According to Mori, it's a case of the night being darker just before dawn, because as soon as the robot will look and act exactly like a human being, reactions among humans will be positive. He calls this period of revulsion "the uncanny valley", because it's a dip in a graph.
Now, forget about robots. I think this is a useful metaphor to describe the way an unidentified narrative object is perceived by attentive readers. There's a phase in which you start asking yourself: how is it possible that Saviano witnessed a scene like this? Mobsters using heroin addicts as guinea pigs to test newly arrived stuff, junkies collapsing after they shot up, people left to die? Where the hell was Saviano to see anything like this? Who's the narrating I? If this is undercover journalism, what is Saviano's cover? Where is he hidden? Is the narrator Saviano? Am I reading a piece of journalism or am I reading a novel disguised as a piece of journalism? You just entered the "uncanny valley" of the unidentified narrative object. Less attentive readers may never experience this, because they take everything for granted.
Anyway, it's just a dip in the graph, because you go on reading the book and gradually understand what Saviano is trying to do, and you not only accept it: you're moved by it, because this thing does the job very well, and doubts and revulsion are replaced by admiration.
My hypothesis is that many of those who criticized Gomorrah for its "ambiguity" and accused Saviano of "having confused things", never got over the dip, they stopped reading right in the middle of the "uncanny valley", and never got out of it.
Every "unidentified narrative object" has its "uncanny valley". In Medium, for example, it is located at the beginning of the second chapter, right after the funeral.
One of the most impressive things in Gomorrah is the scope, the scale of the book: the journey begins at the docks of Naples and in the destitute outskirts of that city, but then Saviano takes us to Russia, Bélarùs, Scotland, the United States, Spain, the Middle East, Hollywood, Colombia... Saviano's gaze makes incursions all over the world, because Italian organized crime makes business all over the world.
Nothing to be patriotic about.
To Read the Entire Essay
NEW ITALIAN EPIC: WE'RE GOING TO HAVE TO BE THE PARENTS
by Wu Ming
Opening talk @ the conference "The Italian Perspective on Metahistorical Fiction: The New Italian Epic", Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London, UK, October
2, 2008.
Wu Ming Founbdation
...
This is what I call the New Italian Epic. Its main characteristics are:
1. Ethical commitment to writing and storytelling, which means: a deep trust in the healing power of language and stories.
2. A sense of political necessity -- and you can choose between the broader and the stricter sense of the adjective "political".
3. The choice of stories that have a complex allegorical value. The initial choice may not even be intentional: the author may feel compelled to tell the story and later on understand what he was trying to say.
4. An explicit preoccupation for the loss of the future, with a propensity to use alternative history and alternative realities to force our gaze into imagining the future.
5. A subtle subversion of registers and language. "Subtle" because what's important is not language experimentation in and of itself; what's important is telling your story in what you feel is the best possible way.
6. A way of blending fiction and non-fiction that's different from the ones we've gotten used to (e.g. Hunter S. Thompson's "gonzo journalism"), a manner that I dare describe as "distinctly Italian", which produces "unidentified narrative objects".
7. Last but certainly not least, a "communitarian" use of the Internet to - as Genna himself put it - "share a hug with the reader".
Several books published in Italy in the past few years share all or many of these features. Each one is peculiar, and sometimes, if we judge by immediate appearances, a novel doesn't resemble the next in the slightest: different styles, different plots, different historical backdrops, seemingly different genres. And yet, if we go down deep enough, we'll see that all these books are in resonance with each other.
The most famous and successful of these works is of course Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah, which sold about a million and a half copies and triumphantly entered Italian popular culture. In Gomorrah the synthesis of non-fiction and auto-fiction is so subtle that it reaches uncanny heights. It looks like a powerful report on Naples' organized crime and the way it operates in the globalized economy, and certainly the state of things it describes is painfully real, but this is no ordinary piece of journalism. There are also autobiographical, introspective chapters. In many passages the prose is rather visionary. The "narrating I" frequently hallucinates and "hijacks" the points of view of other people, intentionally playing on the confusion between the author, the narrator and a "narrating I" that doesn't belong to any of them. Alessandro Vicenzi summarized this matter in the most simple and effective way:
Saviano indifferently uses police reports, judicial documents and personal experience, and describes the camorra adopting a first-person narrative, but the "I" of the novel isn't always the real Roberto Saviano. The book oscillates between objective accounts and literary renditions of facts. [...] If Saviano uses the first person to describe things he didn't actually witness it's because that is the most effective way of telling them, the most communicative one, the most absorbing one. [...] Saviano doesn't only jump over the barriers between fiction and non-fiction: he utterly ignores them. I don't know on what shelves bookshop clerks are putting Gomorrah now. I suspect that the success of the book allows them to overcome embarrassment and put the book in those displays of best-sellers at the entrance, where there are no particular genre distinctions.
As I said a few minutes ago, these works are different from the"non-fiction novels" and hyper-subjective news stories in the tradition of so-called "New Journalism" or "gonzo journalism". That kind of writing is now quite familiar, while these works are more disquieting. I believe that the most appropriate adjective is "uncanny". When the book was published in the English-speaking countries (unfortunately in a poor translation), reviewers got puzzled about it. Here's a passage from Rachel Donadio's review in The New York Times:
Far more problematic is the difficulty in pinning this book down. In Italy, Gomorrah was described as a "docufiction," suggesting that Saviano took liberties with his first-person accounts. [The American publisher] calls it a work of "investigative writing," a phrase that suggests careful lawyering. Some anecdotes are suspiciously perfect — the tailor who quits his job after seeing Angelina Jolie on television at the Oscars wearing a white suit he made in a Camorra sweatshop; the man who loves his AK-47 so much he makes a pilgrimage to Russia to visit its creator, Mikhail Kalashnikov. Did the author change any names? If so, readers aren’t informed. These are ot small matters, and should have been disclosed. But the emotional truth of Saviano’s account is unassailable. I could not get this brave book out of my head.
I guess Donadio never had such perplexities in reading a book by Hunter S. Thompson. Nobody ever cared about what was true and what was fictional in Thompson's writing. What's the difference here?
The difference is that Gomorrah is far from being an ironic piece of work. Gomorrah is d-e-a-d-l-y serious.
As you all probably know, "uncanny" is the way we translate into English a word Sigmund Freud used: "Unheimliche". Unheimliche is used for things that look repulsively strange and attractively familiar at the same time.
As happens in Genna's Medium, in Gomorrah too a troublesome relationship between the narrator and his father becomes strongly symbolic of something bigger. It casts light on the ambiguous "double-consciousness" several Southern Italians are painfully aware of. The narrator is the child of a culture that he cannot really renounce, and although he deeply despises the mafia and fights against it, he knows that the mafia is part of that culture, that it is consistent with that culture. In fact the nàrrator shares some deep conceptual frames with the people he denounces, and he admits it by sharing with us memories from his childhood, conversations with his father. To the narrator's eyes, the camorra is uncanny, it's repulsively strange and attractively familiar at the same time. Gomorrah is an unidentified narrative object about an unidentified feeling. The readers read their way through an "uncanny valley", and Saviano walks through another "uncanny valley": a larger one, a social one, an anthropological one.
"Uncanny valley" is a phrase coined by Japanese engineer Mori Masahiro in 1970. Mori's hypothesis is that when a robot looks and acts almost like a human being, this will cause a response of horror and rejection among humans. According to Mori, it's a case of the night being darker just before dawn, because as soon as the robot will look and act exactly like a human being, reactions among humans will be positive. He calls this period of revulsion "the uncanny valley", because it's a dip in a graph.
Now, forget about robots. I think this is a useful metaphor to describe the way an unidentified narrative object is perceived by attentive readers. There's a phase in which you start asking yourself: how is it possible that Saviano witnessed a scene like this? Mobsters using heroin addicts as guinea pigs to test newly arrived stuff, junkies collapsing after they shot up, people left to die? Where the hell was Saviano to see anything like this? Who's the narrating I? If this is undercover journalism, what is Saviano's cover? Where is he hidden? Is the narrator Saviano? Am I reading a piece of journalism or am I reading a novel disguised as a piece of journalism? You just entered the "uncanny valley" of the unidentified narrative object. Less attentive readers may never experience this, because they take everything for granted.
Anyway, it's just a dip in the graph, because you go on reading the book and gradually understand what Saviano is trying to do, and you not only accept it: you're moved by it, because this thing does the job very well, and doubts and revulsion are replaced by admiration.
My hypothesis is that many of those who criticized Gomorrah for its "ambiguity" and accused Saviano of "having confused things", never got over the dip, they stopped reading right in the middle of the "uncanny valley", and never got out of it.
Every "unidentified narrative object" has its "uncanny valley". In Medium, for example, it is located at the beginning of the second chapter, right after the funeral.
One of the most impressive things in Gomorrah is the scope, the scale of the book: the journey begins at the docks of Naples and in the destitute outskirts of that city, but then Saviano takes us to Russia, Bélarùs, Scotland, the United States, Spain, the Middle East, Hollywood, Colombia... Saviano's gaze makes incursions all over the world, because Italian organized crime makes business all over the world.
Nothing to be patriotic about.
To Read the Entire Essay
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Alexander Billet: The Children of Woody Guthrie -- An Interview with Antonino D'Ambrosio
The Children of Woody Guthrie: Interview with Antonino D'Ambrosio
by Alexander Billet
Socialist Worker
Never underestimate the ability for pop culture to water down its most firebrand figures--especially after they're dead. Luckily, there are people like Antonino D'Ambrosio. His book Let Fury Have the Hour: The Punk Rock Politics of Joe Strummer, released in 2003, is essential reading for anyone who wants to learn who the Clash front man really was. D'Ambrosio's new book A Heartbeat and a Guitar: Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears is a passionate examination of Cash's album protesting the conditions for Native peoples in the early 1960s.
Here, D'Ambrosio takes to Alexander Billet about the new book, his influences, and his thoughts on music and politics.
To Read the Interview
by Alexander Billet
Socialist Worker
Never underestimate the ability for pop culture to water down its most firebrand figures--especially after they're dead. Luckily, there are people like Antonino D'Ambrosio. His book Let Fury Have the Hour: The Punk Rock Politics of Joe Strummer, released in 2003, is essential reading for anyone who wants to learn who the Clash front man really was. D'Ambrosio's new book A Heartbeat and a Guitar: Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears is a passionate examination of Cash's album protesting the conditions for Native peoples in the early 1960s.
Here, D'Ambrosio takes to Alexander Billet about the new book, his influences, and his thoughts on music and politics.
To Read the Interview
Monday, March 08, 2010
Peter Singer: Let wild animals be wild
Let wild animals be wild: The killing of a SeaWorld trainer by an orca ought to make us rethink keeping animals in captivity for human amusement
by Peter Singer
The Guardian
Last month, at the SeaWorld amusement park in Florida, a whale grabbed a trainer, Dawn Brancheau, pulled her underwater and thrashed about with her. By the time rescuers arrived, Brancheau was dead.
The death of the trainer is a tragedy, and one can only have sympathy for her family. But the incident raises broader questions: was the attack deliberate? Did the whale, an orca named Tilikum and nicknamed Tilly, act out of stress at being held captive in a sterile concrete tank? Was he tired of being forced to perform to amuse the crowds? Is it right to keep such large animals in close confinement?
Tilly had been involved in two previous human deaths. In one episode, a trainer fell into the pool and Tilly and two other whales drowned him. In another, a man who appears to have entered the enclosure at night, when Sea World was closed, was found dead in the pool with Tilly. An autopsy showed that he had a bite mark. One of Tilly's offspring, sold to an amusement park in Spain, has also killed a trainer, as have orcas in other parks.
Richard Ellis, a marine conservationist at the American Museum of Natural History, believes that orcas are smart and would not do such a thing purely on impulse. "This was premeditated," he told the Associated Press.
We will never know exactly what was going on in Tilly's mind, but we do know that he has been in captivity since he was about two years old – he was captured off the coast of Iceland in 1983. Orcas are social mammals, and he would have been living with his mother and other relatives in a pod. It is reasonable to suppose that the sudden separation was traumatic for Tilly.
Moreover, the degree of confinement in an aquarium is extreme, for no tank, no matter how large, can come close to meeting the needs of animals who spend their lives in social groups swimming long distances in the ocean. Joyce Tischler, of the Animal Legal Defense Fund, described keeping a six-tonne orca in Sea World's tanks as akin to keeping a human in a bathtub for his entire life. David Phillips, director of the International Marine Mammal Project for the Earth Island Institute, which led the efforts to rehabilitate the orca Keiko – made famous by the movie Free Willy – said: "Orcas deserve a better fate than living in cramped pools."
But if we are pointing the finger at SeaWorld for what it does to its captive animals, we should also look more broadly at the way we confine performing animals. In most countries, it is possible to visit zoos and see bored animals pacing back and forth in cages, with nothing to do but wait for the next meal.
Circuses are even worse places for animals. Their living conditions are deplorable, especially in travelling circuses where cages have to be small so that they can go on the road. Training animals to perform tricks often involves starvation and cruelty. Undercover investigations have repeatedly shown animals being beaten and given electric shocks.
Several countries – among them Austria, Costa Rica, Denmark, Finland, India, Israel and Sweden – ban or severely restrict the use of wild animals in circuses. In Brazil, a movement to ban wild animals from circuses started after hungry lions managed to grab and devour a small boy.
Several major cities and many local governments around the world do not permit circuses with wild animals. Last year, Bolivia became the first country to ban all animals, wild or domestic, from circuses. That decision followed an undercover investigation by Animal Defenders International, which exposed shocking abuse of circus animals. Now the British government is holding a public online consultation on the use of animals in circuses. Many hope it will be a first step towards a ban.
Attempts to defend amusement parks and circuses on the grounds that they "educate" people about animals should not be taken seriously. Such enterprises are part of the commercial entertainment industry. The most important lesson they teach impressionable young minds is that it is acceptable to keep animals in captivity for human amusement. That is the opposite of the ethical attitude to animals that we should be seeking to impart to children.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
by Peter Singer
The Guardian
Last month, at the SeaWorld amusement park in Florida, a whale grabbed a trainer, Dawn Brancheau, pulled her underwater and thrashed about with her. By the time rescuers arrived, Brancheau was dead.
The death of the trainer is a tragedy, and one can only have sympathy for her family. But the incident raises broader questions: was the attack deliberate? Did the whale, an orca named Tilikum and nicknamed Tilly, act out of stress at being held captive in a sterile concrete tank? Was he tired of being forced to perform to amuse the crowds? Is it right to keep such large animals in close confinement?
Tilly had been involved in two previous human deaths. In one episode, a trainer fell into the pool and Tilly and two other whales drowned him. In another, a man who appears to have entered the enclosure at night, when Sea World was closed, was found dead in the pool with Tilly. An autopsy showed that he had a bite mark. One of Tilly's offspring, sold to an amusement park in Spain, has also killed a trainer, as have orcas in other parks.
Richard Ellis, a marine conservationist at the American Museum of Natural History, believes that orcas are smart and would not do such a thing purely on impulse. "This was premeditated," he told the Associated Press.
We will never know exactly what was going on in Tilly's mind, but we do know that he has been in captivity since he was about two years old – he was captured off the coast of Iceland in 1983. Orcas are social mammals, and he would have been living with his mother and other relatives in a pod. It is reasonable to suppose that the sudden separation was traumatic for Tilly.
Moreover, the degree of confinement in an aquarium is extreme, for no tank, no matter how large, can come close to meeting the needs of animals who spend their lives in social groups swimming long distances in the ocean. Joyce Tischler, of the Animal Legal Defense Fund, described keeping a six-tonne orca in Sea World's tanks as akin to keeping a human in a bathtub for his entire life. David Phillips, director of the International Marine Mammal Project for the Earth Island Institute, which led the efforts to rehabilitate the orca Keiko – made famous by the movie Free Willy – said: "Orcas deserve a better fate than living in cramped pools."
But if we are pointing the finger at SeaWorld for what it does to its captive animals, we should also look more broadly at the way we confine performing animals. In most countries, it is possible to visit zoos and see bored animals pacing back and forth in cages, with nothing to do but wait for the next meal.
Circuses are even worse places for animals. Their living conditions are deplorable, especially in travelling circuses where cages have to be small so that they can go on the road. Training animals to perform tricks often involves starvation and cruelty. Undercover investigations have repeatedly shown animals being beaten and given electric shocks.
Several countries – among them Austria, Costa Rica, Denmark, Finland, India, Israel and Sweden – ban or severely restrict the use of wild animals in circuses. In Brazil, a movement to ban wild animals from circuses started after hungry lions managed to grab and devour a small boy.
Several major cities and many local governments around the world do not permit circuses with wild animals. Last year, Bolivia became the first country to ban all animals, wild or domestic, from circuses. That decision followed an undercover investigation by Animal Defenders International, which exposed shocking abuse of circus animals. Now the British government is holding a public online consultation on the use of animals in circuses. Many hope it will be a first step towards a ban.
Attempts to defend amusement parks and circuses on the grounds that they "educate" people about animals should not be taken seriously. Such enterprises are part of the commercial entertainment industry. The most important lesson they teach impressionable young minds is that it is acceptable to keep animals in captivity for human amusement. That is the opposite of the ethical attitude to animals that we should be seeking to impart to children.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
Codes of Gender: Identity and Performance in Pop Culture
Codes of Gender: Identity and Performance in Pop Culture
by Sut Jhally
Media Education Foundation
Written and directed by MEF Executive Director Sut Jhally, The Codes of Gender applies the late sociologist Erving Goffman's groundbreaking analysis of advertising to the contemporary commercial landscape, showing how one of American popular culture's most influential forms communicates normative ideas about masculinity and femininity.
In striking visual detail, The Codes of Gender explores Goffman's central claim that gender ideals are the result of ritualized cultural performance, uncovering a remarkable pattern of masculine and feminine displays and poses. It looks beyond advertising as a medium that simply sells products, and beyond analyses of gender that focus on biological difference or issues of objectification and beauty, to provide a clear-eyed view of the two-tiered terrain of identity and power relations.
With its sustained focus on how our perceptions of what it means to be a man or a woman get reproduced and reinforced on the level of culture in our everyday lives, The Codes of Gender is certain to inspire discussion and debate across a range of disciplines.
To Watch the Trailer and/or Preview the Documentary
by Sut Jhally
Media Education Foundation
Written and directed by MEF Executive Director Sut Jhally, The Codes of Gender applies the late sociologist Erving Goffman's groundbreaking analysis of advertising to the contemporary commercial landscape, showing how one of American popular culture's most influential forms communicates normative ideas about masculinity and femininity.
In striking visual detail, The Codes of Gender explores Goffman's central claim that gender ideals are the result of ritualized cultural performance, uncovering a remarkable pattern of masculine and feminine displays and poses. It looks beyond advertising as a medium that simply sells products, and beyond analyses of gender that focus on biological difference or issues of objectification and beauty, to provide a clear-eyed view of the two-tiered terrain of identity and power relations.
With its sustained focus on how our perceptions of what it means to be a man or a woman get reproduced and reinforced on the level of culture in our everyday lives, The Codes of Gender is certain to inspire discussion and debate across a range of disciplines.
To Watch the Trailer and/or Preview the Documentary
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Nick Bostrom: Why Make a Matrix? And Why You Might Be in One
Why Make a Matrix? And Why You Might Be in One
Popular Culture and Philosophy (Open Court Books)
Are you a flesh-and-blood person, or an electrical impulse on a circuit board somewhere? According to ... philosopher Nick Bostrom, there's a high probability that you and everyone you know are living in a matrix. Think it's farfetched? Listen as Bostrom's ... arguments paint a picture of a computer-simulated reality with citizens just like you.
To Listen to the Reading (MP3)
Popular Culture and Philosophy (Open Court Books)
Are you a flesh-and-blood person, or an electrical impulse on a circuit board somewhere? According to ... philosopher Nick Bostrom, there's a high probability that you and everyone you know are living in a matrix. Think it's farfetched? Listen as Bostrom's ... arguments paint a picture of a computer-simulated reality with citizens just like you.
To Listen to the Reading (MP3)
Thursday, November 19, 2009
The Children of Woody Guthrie: Interview with Antonino D'Ambrosio
The Children of Woody Guthrie: Interview with Antonino D'Ambrosio
by Alexander Billet
Socialist Worker
Never underestimate the ability for pop culture to water down its most firebrand figures--especially after they're dead. Luckily, there are people like Antonino D'Ambrosio. His book Let Fury Have the Hour: The Punk Rock Politics of Joe Strummer, released in 2003, is essential reading for anyone who wants to learn who the Clash front man really was. D'Ambrosio's new book A Heartbeat and a Guitar: Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears is a passionate examination of Cash's album protesting the conditions for Native peoples in the early 1960s.
Here, D'Ambrosio takes to Alexander Billet about the new book, his influences, and his thoughts on music and politics.
To Read the Interview
by Alexander Billet
Socialist Worker
Never underestimate the ability for pop culture to water down its most firebrand figures--especially after they're dead. Luckily, there are people like Antonino D'Ambrosio. His book Let Fury Have the Hour: The Punk Rock Politics of Joe Strummer, released in 2003, is essential reading for anyone who wants to learn who the Clash front man really was. D'Ambrosio's new book A Heartbeat and a Guitar: Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears is a passionate examination of Cash's album protesting the conditions for Native peoples in the early 1960s.
Here, D'Ambrosio takes to Alexander Billet about the new book, his influences, and his thoughts on music and politics.
To Read the Interview
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