New Year's Pics and A Playlist for a Decade.

I am obviously intoxicated because I am taking pics of myself.










Some dignity.










Drunk.


Yellow created an amazing and beautiful playlist which she dedicated to this decade. It inspired me to create my own. See below. Yes, I know; hers is better. She is more skilled.

Zach's Best of 2009

"Best of" posts are always slightly dangerous for me to write because I can never find enough time to see everything or listen to everything. Several people have asked me for various lists recently, though, so this is my attempt to oblige their requests. If you feel that I have neglected something hugely important, please feel free to comment and let me know.

Movies

Top Seen
1. Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire
2. A Serious Man
3. Inglourious Basterds
4. Star Trek
5. I Love You, Man
6. District 9
7. Fantastic Mr. Fox
8. (500) Days of Summer
9. Up in the Air
10. Away We Go

Movies I Wish I Had Seen
1. Broken Embraces
2. The White Ribbon
3. Avatar
4. The Road
5. Up

Television

Top Seen
1. Modern Family
2. True Blood
3. Glee
4. Nurse Jackie
5. Parks and Recreation
6. Big Love
7. 30 Rock
8. Lost
9. The Office
10. Law and Order: SVU

I Should Have Seen
1. Fringe
2. House
3. Mad Men
4. Battlestar Balactica
5. Sons of Anarchy.

Albums

Not even going to attempt to discuss the albums I haven't listened to. Below are my favorites of the year that I have spent the most time thinking about.

1. Grizzly Bear, Veckatimest
2. Andrew Bird, Noble Beast
3. Animal Collective, Merriweather Post Pavilion
4. Phoenix, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
5. The Dememberists, Hazards of Love
6. Camera Obscura, My Maudlin Career
7. Neko Case, Middle Cyclone
8. Bon Iver, Blood Bank
9. The Mountain Goats, The Life of the World to Come
10. Beirut, March of the Zapotec

Double Feature

On my first day back in Bellingham after spending the holidays with my parents, I decided to cram in all of the things that I missed while at the 'rents'. I slept in late, I went out for coffee, I went grocery shopping, and I went to two movies. I always try to see all of the films nominated for multiple awards, and that typically means I have to catch a lot of films at the end of December/beginning of January. Today I saw Up in the Air and Precious, two films based on very interesting novels. Below are very brief thoughts on the films. Though unintentional, both of these reviews center on issues of voice and perspective.

Up in the Air









Adapted from Walter Kirn's novel of the same name, Up in the Air could not have been released at a more perfect time. With the economic crisis, rising unemployment, discussions of executive perks, and a cultural obsession with flying and air security, the novel about a "career transition counselor"/axe man with a goal of reaching 10 million air miles holds an interesting relevance. I do wonder if the timeliness of the film somehow overcompensates for other attributes of the film that are weaker. Though George Clooney is his sexy self in the film, he seems to play the exact same person in all of his films. He is clever, but he seems all too familiar to the viewer. What is so powerful about Kirn's novel is that it gives voice to one of those anonymous men and women that we all see in airports standing in the MVP boarding line or walking into the mysterious airline club rooms. It presents the insights of someone who lives in the place that most of us think of as transitional space. With Clooney playing the lead in the film adaptation, the viewer knows this character, there is little new that the viewer gains. I am also slightly annoyed with the way that the chronology of the novel was rearranged to facilitate the development of a plot arc more consistent with romantic comedies. It is a film that seems really tongue in cheek and lacks a grate deal of teeth.

Precious









I was very nervous when I first read that a film adaptation of Sapphire's novel Push was in the works. My concern was not the very valid concern about how the filmmakers could possibly represent the horrific sexual and physical abuse on screen; the first concern I had was related to one of the novel's central issues--literacy. What is exquisite about Sapphire's novel (and what makes it incredibly difficult to read) is the way that the novel gives voice to illiteracy. Sapphire's choice to write in her protagonist's voice, to include nonstandard spellings, syntax, and misuses of words forces the reader to slow down and to confront both the writing of someone with limited literacy and to also consider to complicated nature of literary and the ways in which it is socially defined. The fact that the reader is able to comprehend the nonstandard text reveals the constructedness of standardization. Because this aspect of literacy has to be seen in textual form and not heard, I wasn't sure how the film would be able to explore it. The answer? It really doesn't. The nonstandard spelling and syntax are relegated to a very strange place--it is explored in the opening credits. I suppose it is nice that the filmmakers tried to touch the issue, but it feels a little off in the paratextual material.

Despite my fears about adapting the film and my slight frustration that the very important literacy issue takes a backseat, I must say that I think it is the best film I have seen this year. It is certainly the best acted film of the year. It's complex and emotionally-intense subject matter is brought into powerful, dizzying, and sickening focus in the dialogue, in the voice-over narration, and in the use of images as mental process. The entire cast was amazing, but certainly the star Gabourey Sidbe as well as Mo'Nique and Mariah Carey must be mentioned. Their affects and their presences on screen surpassed everything else I have seen this year. The film's use of montage, juxtaposition, and superimposition was incredibly smart and thoughtful. These visual techniques allowed the filmmakers to examine the very difficult issues of physical and sexual abuse and incest without feeling like a Lifetime movie.

***

Both films are definitely worth seeing. I would likely suggest waiting until DVD for Up in the Air. Push, in my opinion is worth the $10, but it is a difficult film. Still, it is incredibly executed in my opinion.

You gotta have faith.

It is criminal how many webpages I had to sift through to find out where each document went, and then what the actual addresses that I needed to send things to. The idea of spending almost $1100 on applications and spending so many countless hours on these applications felt suddenly overwhelming. I really hope I get in somewhere...

Qualify this!

I turned in my Qualifying Exam essays on Monday morning after a weekend of writing. Despite the craziness involved in the writing, I actually sort of enjoyed the process. Below are abstracts for both of my papers. I was going to make each abstract under 50 words, but I gave up.

"Trying Literary Men: Walter Pater, Walt Whitman, and the Libel Trial of Oscar Wilde"

This essay examines the aesthetic and social implications of Walter Pater and Walt Whitman's work and how the influence of these two 19th century figures manifested itself in the 1895 libel trial of Oscar Wilde. It argues that the 'ontological aestheticism' of Pater, Whitman, and Wilde were on trial more so than the question of whether or not Wilde was, in fact, "posing as a somdomite [sic]."

"Haunted History: Surfacing the Supernatural in Morrison's Beloved and Kushner's Angels in America"

This essay works from Derrida's Specters of Marx and examines the rhetorical and narratological functions of ghosts in Beloved and Angels in America. It examines the way these two novels use ghost figures to reflect on history, announce their own historical situatedness, and challenge and/or reconstruct existing metanarratives.

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I dont really have energy to write an interesting post. In other news, I have been super obsessed with MGMT's "Time to Pretend" for some reason. I used to hate the song. The video is interesting. I love the Alejandro Jodorowsky references.


Time To Pretend

MGMT | MySpace Music Videos

FML

**Note** This is NOT meant to be an emo "let's feel bad about Zach" post, but this is taking a turn toward the personal blog (with some cultural commentary mixed in).

Today I had a total FML moment. After class and lunch, I caught the number 14 bus back to my apartment, and because the Fates have a wicked sense of humor, I sat down next to the wrong person on the bus. Without realizing it, I sat down next to a guy that I messaged on OkCupid, a guy who did not write back.

I should back up for a second, provide a little context, and discuss the significance of this. Since Marcus moved to Spain, officially putting an end to whatever the romantic dimensions of our relationship were, I have decided that I do not want to seriously date anyone at the moment. It is just not wise. I hope to be accepted into a PhD program, and I will surely be moving next fall. I do not want to start something serious until I will be somewhere for a good 4-5 years. That said, I would like to date. I like people, and as much as I LOVE my English department colleagues, it really is important for me to develop relationships with people outside of the department, even if it is just dinner or coffee for a couple hours. Thinking about these things, I updated and reinstated my OkCupid profile and decided to message some people and maybe set up a couple dates.

The curious (and horrifying) part of OkCupid, though, is that you can see who looks at your profile. That means that if I message a guy, I can see if he looks at my profile and then chooses to not respond. This is not a good thing, especially for someone like me who tends to be fragile and paranoid anyways, and this is why the 5 minutes on the bus this afternoon were utter Hell. I was sitting right next to a person who I decided was worth the stress of messaging, who looked at my profile, and who decided I was not worthy of a reply. Naturally, this would occur on a day when I felt especially unattractive, after a stressful morning meeting, and just after consuming a chicken pita on campus which seemed overloaded with garlic. Amazing. Like I said, FML.

This experience definitely made me think about OkCupid's "Stalker" feature which allows you to look at who has checked out your profile. It is an interesting tactic, but it also seems strange. I think the initial appeal of online dating was that there was a level of anonymity involved in it. You could learn about people without them actually knowing that you were reading their profile and examining their pictures for evidence of positive relationship potential. It is interesting that several sites have begun moving away from this model to construct the process as much more transparent. This rhetoric of transparency is everywhere now. I hear it from the White House and from pundits, I see it in recent theories of pedagogy, and I see it manifesting itself in all sorts of cultural production--including internet dating sites. There is definitely something to be said for transparency, for knowing what is out there. Still, sometimes opaqueness can be a lot easier. That sand just might feel warm around my fragile little head.

(Post)Modern Family

"Modern Family works because it does something the network sitcom hasn't managed in years: It offers a comic equation for almost every audience segment, while never blanding out the characters for mass consumption. Its gift to us is a postmodern modern family"

                     -Ken Tucker in his EW review of Modern Family

Reading Ken Tucker's review of ABC's Modern Family, my new favorite show of the fall season, I couldn't help but roll my eyes at the last line. The overeagerness of reviewers and critics to describe everything in popular culture as "postmodern" frustrates me to no end. Such a label seems even more absurd when one looks at how much time Tucker spends discussing the complexity of the characters and the depth and "genuineness" of the show--characteristics which seem somewhat at odds with postmodernist aesthetics. Still, Tucker's review forced me to consider my own thoughts on the aesthetics of the show and the meanings behind the show's signifying practices.

Surely the most commonly discussed aspect of the show is its structure as a mockumentary, a genre that seems to be everywhere lately (crossing genres and media from NBC's new comedy Parks and Recreation to the recently released and well-received horror film Paranormal Activity). The mockumentary is interesting in its use as satire, but I think it is currently being revised to establish a sort of genuineness in much the same way that cinéma vérité functions in the Modernist film tradition. Perhaps the mockumentary is evidence of a sort of nostalgia, a way for postmodern texts to attempt to discover/point to a sort of Real. But of course, the only Real it can point to is its own constructedness, and I would certainly argue that this is the way the mockumentary fuctions in Modern Family. This metatextual quality of the show is interesting in light of the plethera of reviews that discuss its realistic depiction of family life.

The aspect of the show that I find most interesting is the casting. Because the show draws from a pool of actors so identified without other family sitcoms (Married with Children's Ed O'Neil most notably but also Shelley Long in a recent episode), the show almost feels haunted by the ghosts of family sitcoms past. Again, I think this reminds the viewer of the show's consructedness and its position within a tradition of such shows.

Likely because I am interested in representations of masculinity and sexuality in popular culture, I am fascinated by the representation of Mitchell and Cameron, the show's hilarious gay couple. I must say that I am thrilled to see gay characters who are overweight and not especially attractive. I really tire of gay characters who look like they walked off of an Abercrombie and Fitch photoshoot only to whine about how they cannot get a boyfriend because they are so unattractive. It is important to have a more complex and varied representation of gay men in popular culture¹. Still, I would argue that their very deviation from the stock A&F gay character reasserts the concept of the stock character in the viewer's mind. Though maybe this is a good thing; perhaps it does ask the viewer to confront such expectations.

I am not sure how to end this post. I guess that I will end by saying that I think that I agree with Tucker's use of the word "postmodern," but there is absolutely nothing postmodern about the families in the show. What is postmodern is the show and its structure. It is formally postmodern more so than thematically postmodern, and it is certainly not postmodern based on anything Tucker cites in his review.

That said, it is an incredibly amusing show. Like I said, it is my favorite show of the fall season, and I would encourage you to watch it. It is on Hulu!

¹ *Note* I am not unaware that in many ways these characters are still perpetuating existing and problematic gay stereotypes. I do not care. That is not the focus of this post. My comments about them have to do with their physical appearance; I am not discussing other aspects of their constructions as characters at the moment.

Saying when...

For Yellow and Pocha, two people who recently mentioned my neglect of this blog.

With the quarter only a couple weeks in, I already feel exhausted. I do not know if it is the cold I am desperately fighting or catching up from the conference a week before last or if it is the thyroid lagging behind. Whatever it is, I feel like I am constantly running somewhere, working on catching up, slipping, and falling further behind. It also doesn't help that the thyroid medication makes me feel hot and breathy and like I am literally running everywhere.

After climbing the hill up to my apartment and finishing the last of the comments on the latest batch of student writing, I decided that I needed to take a break. The importance of breaks is perhaps the most important lesson that I have learned since starting graduate school. I have had to learn how to say when. There are moments when I have to tell myself to step away from the student e-mails, to make choices about the reading I have to do, and to do something fun, something that will remind me that I am human. Below is tonight's list.

1. Order pizza (cooking is too difficult tonight).
2. Watch Smoke Signals (Yes, this IS assigned, but I also love it).
3. Peel apples and bake an apple crisp.
4. Watch Glee, Modern Family, and various other TV shows.
5. Blog
6. Listen to the song below on repeat.

"Intersting"

I just realized that I somehow mistyped "interesting" when I was setting up the domain for this blog. Amazing.

Thank you all for not making fun of me, even though I am sure that many of you noticed. ;-)

Oh well...

I still dont understand why "Bradley" is bigger than "Cooper"

Click to see a word cloud of the journal article that I submitted today.

"This Is NOT a Love Story"

I know that I am a couple weeks behind schedule, but I finally saw (500) Days of Summer yesterday evening. Though I did not have that overwhelming "I LOVE THIS MOVIE!!" sort of reaction to the film, I did find it clever and very interesting on several levels. Beyond the almost sickeningly cute Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt and the very enjoyable indie-tastic soundtrack, I was fascinated by the emphasis placed on surface levels in the film and by the film's self-referential nature. There was frequent reference to the film's fiction and to the filmic apparatus.

The film's nonlinear narrative structure is surely designed to simulate the way that memory works; it jumps from time to time and place to place, inspired by a thought or emotion or connection. This was a clever choice by the filmmakers. I think that this sort of a narrative structure also has the potential to remind the viewer of the filmmaking process. As scenes in films are almost never shot in chronological order, the structure of (500) Days followed a pattern similar to the way it might actually be filmed. Other elements such as the voice-over narration, the addition of animation, and the use of split screen to display alternate narrative trajectories all call attention to the film as a constructed text.

One of the most interesting scenes in terms of the film's metafictional qualities is a(n almost annoyingly) sweet scene in which the two leads are walking (and then running) through an Ikea. They play house in Ikea's stylized artificial living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms, constructing a fake life together, and then when trying to work the sink or the television or some other useless prop, the fiction is broken (or at least complicated). This scene can be seen as a metaphor for the entire film and for the genre of romantic comedies. It is a constructed world, and the thing to remember is that it isn't real; it is all artifice. The sinks don't work.



One of my favorite parts of the film is at the very beginning of the film when the voice-over narration informs the viewer that "this is NOT a love story." I think that this reminder functions in much the same way that René Magritte's The Treachery of Images functions. In much the same way that Magritte reminds the observer that they are not looking at a pipe, that they are looking at a representation of a pipe, the words of the narration serve to remind the viewer that the object they are consuming is not a love story, is not a relationship--it is the filmic depiction of a relationship; it is a a fiction.

It is ironic that so many reviews of the film comment on the realism of the relationship when the film tries so hard to make known its fiction, but maybe that is the "real" relationship the viewer is supposed to take notice of--the precarious relationship between mediated images and our conceptions of reality.

"Disinterestedness"

Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.

Abraham Maslow

One of the most controversial and most covered aspects of Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings had to do with the question of objectivity. The barrage of questions and comments that followed the review of Sotomayor's now infamous 2001 "wise Latina" comment surely reveals anxieties and assumptions about objectivity in United States culture. For one, it exposes the still existing influence of the Enlightenment on American politics (an influence that I believe a lot of people still hold dear). I would argue that the attention to the comment also reveals that there is a sort of default subject position in the United States. With assertions that Sotomayor's gender and ethnic identity will influence her decisions suggests, there seems to be an implication that she would be more objective, more neutral, were she not situated by those identity markers. The white male heterosexual subject is apparently one that does not need to be interrogated in confirmation hearings, and this likely explains why John Roberts was not asked how being a wealthy heterosexual white male will affect his decisions.

Questions of objectivity, situatedness, and attachment/detatchment are especially interesting to me recently. My discipline has in many ways abandoned notions of objectivity, critical detachment/disinterestedness in favor of theories that emphasize and seek to expose situatedness, power structures, social construction, metanarratives, etc. Though I very much subscribe to these postmodernist/poststructuralist theories, I do think that they have the effect of detaching the discipline from other fields in academia (the sciences and some aspects of the social sciences, especially) and from the general public. It is ironic that my field's insistence on situatedness makes us seem disconnected from the "real" world and too caught up in the theoretical realm.

It is exciting and interesting that there has recently been a resurgence of the idea of critical detachment and formalism in the humanities because I do think that it will force us to re-interrogate what detachment and objectivity mean and how they function, which will hopefully result in a more nuanced positioning towards them. Critics like Seyla Benhabib and Amanda Anderson have have recently articulated theories that put a more positive spin on detachment. Benhabib argues that effective social criticism almost always involves some sort of separation from a society and tradition (which, for her, are likely corrupt). Anderson relates detachment to cosmopolitanism and argues that new cosmopolitanism can be defined "as the capacious inclusion of multiple forms of affiliation, disaffiliation, and reaffiliation, simultaneously insisting on the need for informing principles of self-reflexivity, critique, and common humanity."

What I think is most important is to examine the critical, social, and rhetorical agency of these various theories on objectivity and detachment and see how they themselves are situating mechanisms. One of my biggest problems with opposing subjectivity to objectivity is that such an opposition fails to examine how the desire for objectivity is surely part of one's subjectivity. I prefer "situatedness" because one can be situated by their belief in disinterestedness, but that is just me at the moment.

Edit: Chelsea was smart and reminded me that my glorious friend and fellow blogger Matt recently had a post related to issues of subjective and objective criticism. I encourage you to read it over at Cinema without Organs

"Interesting"

One of my good friends once complained to me that "English majors don't say that something is 'good' or 'bad.' They don't say that they 'like' anything. They say that things are 'interesting.'" I recall laughing off his comment at the time and letting my mind quietly scroll through the millions of times I had said "interesting." I cannot say for sure if that there is any truth to my friend's assertion, as I doubt that there are statistics collected on adjective choice by major. I can say that I am guilty of the charge he leveled against my cohort, and I can say that many of my colleagues are guilty of the same charge.

It is an interesting (there is that word again) phenomenon, and I wonder if there is something to the discipline that would leave the English major predisposed to make a such an assertion that is more tentative, less judgmental than a more typical opinion statement. Thinking about it, I would argue that the word choice makes sense. Students today at most universities in the country are educated by a professoriate that has been so influenced by post-structuralist and postmodernist theorists. Because the theoretical grounding of most departments is based on a rejection of absolute value and meaning and often rejects good/bad or positive/negative value systems, it makes sense that students would adopt the communication and conceptual strategies of the discipline. What is perhaps more interesting (I seriously can't stop myself) is that this sort of positioning and/or aesthetic response would bother people like my friend.

Perhaps it is unfair for me, someone who is drinking the kool-aid, to try to defend the phrase. I don't have a problem with its sweet, ill-defined sensibility. Still, I feel to need to try to rationalize it for myself (and for others). The only way that I can at the moment is that I like how the term functions and opens up discussion in my own work, in my classroom, and in the work of my students. Behind the assertion that something is interesting, there is a reason that it is interesting, and that subtext is what opens up discussion and intellectual debate. Explaining that something is "interesting" is more open and can allow for more complex and nuanced discussions of a given textual phenomenon. It is different than defending a thesis structured on a binarily defined value system, and I like this. I like to see my students looking at how something is functioning and at all of that various components that make it up. They will surely make value judgments along the way, but starting from a position where something is "interesting" is much more open than starting from the position that something is "good."

This new blog will seek to explore things that I find interesting, and I look forward to writing it and hope that you enjoy reading it.