- Bibliography | Chromatic Aberration Everywhere – As I tend to read a lot of more “academic” texts when it comes to studying anime, fandom, and interpretation, I thought it might be a good idea to throw up a list of all the things I’ve either read/seen so that anyone else interested in these types of ideas has a place to start.
- Japan’s Cute Army – The New Yorker – This stressful, ongoing debate fuels the seeming paradox of an “endearing” military force. In Japan, where indirect communication is highly valued, cute illustrations have long played the role of tension-breakers and mediators in situations of conflict. Thus kawaii mascots, whether miniskirted girls or bunny-rabbit decoy launchers, are both a reflection of pop-cultural trends and a way to defuse the very touchy issues surrounding the military’s undeniable presence.
- The Tyranny of Stuctureless – This means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an "objective" news story, "value-free" social science, or a "free" economy. A "laissez faire" group is about as realistic as a "laissez faire" society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of "structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones. Similarly "laissez faire" philosophy did not prevent the economically powerful from establishing control over wages, prices, and distribution of goods; it only prevented the government from doing so. Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power
- A Piece Of Toast – YouTube –
- Otaku Philosophy | Public Seminar – Its origins are in cultural forms imported from the United States after the war. “The history of otaku culture is one of adaptation – of how to ‘domesticate’ American culture… Otaku may very well be heirs to Edo culture, but the two are by no means connected by a continuous line. Between the otaku and Japan lies the United States.”
Articles with the Tag politics
Your Happening World (November 4th through November 7th)
- DWP orders man to work without pay for company that let him go | Society | The Guardian – A man who was let go at the end of a temporary job has been ordered by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to work for the same firm for six months without pay.
- Dear Griff Rhys Jones: if you don’t like tax, why not move to the Central African Republic? – Fleet Street Fox – Mirror Online – You’d have to be a complete idiot to leave a country where many of the citizens give you lots of cash and you live in great comfort, writes Fleet Street Fox
- shapeless, I’ve had a lot of people ask why I’m retracing… –
- Miles Davis Albums From Worst To Best – Stereogum – Ranking a catalog the size of Miles Davis’ is an impossible task. There are so many lavish boxed sets, live releases, compilations issued during his hermit period, etc., that in order to make this article at all manageable, major cuts had to be made before it could even be begun. So here’s how this is going to work: I chose studio albums only. But to truly understand Davis’ catalog, there are a bunch of essential live releases, including Live-Evil, In Concert: Live At Philharmonic Hall, Dark Magus, Agharta, Pangaea, and The Bootleg Series Vol. 1: Live In Europe 1967. So consider the 30 albums below a starting point. There’s so much more.
- A Report on Damage Done by One Individual Under Several Names | Laura J. Mixon – Friends, the tl;dr of this very long, comprehensive, analytical report is that up-and-coming John W. Campbell nominee Benjanun Sriduangkaew (who is also rage-blogger Requires Hate, who is also several other internet personalities including Winterfox, pyrofennec, acrackedmoon, and others) (oh yes, the list goes on), is VERY BAD NEWS.
- Cat Trap – Trends Addict – it's a cat trap Billy — and you're already caught!
- Women Rise in Sci Fi (Again) – The Atlantic – Like the fighters she wrote about, Hurley says that female science-fiction writers are often forgotten. “It’s always Asimov and Hineline,” she says. “You don’t hear about Russ or LeGuin. And there are very particular ways that people talk about it. One of those is by saying ‘well she did it, but it wasn’t really science fiction,’ or ‘her husband has a big impact.’”
- 179 RR Accountability and Diversity with Meagan Waller – DevChat.tv – a treasure trove of insights and info about unconscious biases , diversity, employment, culture, tech, and more.
Your Happening World (September 22nd through September 24th)
- Your Princess Is in Another Castle: Misogyny, Entitlement, and Nerds – The Daily Beast – Fixating on a woman from afar and then refusing to give up when she acts like she’s not interested is, generally, something that ends badly for everyone involved. But it’s a narrative that nerds and nerd media kept repeating.
- #GameOverGate (with images, tweets) · strictmachine · Storify – Zoe Quinn blows #GamerGate wide open.
- Timothy Snyder’s Lies | Jacobin – In Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, Hitler and Stalin are one and the same. And the partisans — Jewish fighters included — only encouraged German crimes.
- Whirling Nerdish: Asthma and THE MIRROR EMPIRE – I’m particularly interested in how Hurley handles this character because all my life, I was told by movies and TV that people with asthma were nerds. They were geeks, dweebs, losers. Pathetic little wastes that fly into a wheezing, gasping fit when things get difficult while, meanwhile, the HERO goes and kicks the bad guys ass and handles his shit.
- A few disjointed thoughts on other cultures and diversity in SFF – Aliette de Bodard – Researching another culture is freaking hard work, PLEASE do not undertake it lightly (and when I say “freaking hard work”, I don’t mean a few days on Wikipedia, or even a few days of reading secondary sources at the library). And PLEASE do not think you’ll be exempt of prejudice/dominant culture perceptions/etc. No one is.
- Public Domain Super Heroes – Public Domain Super Heroes is a collaborative website about comic book, comic strip, film, literary, pulp, mythological, television, animation, folk stories, etc… Characters in the public domain fitting in genres such as the masked vigilante, caped crusader, villains, scientists, magicians, robots, jungle lord, and their supporting characters.
- Pioneer winners — Butler: Thirteen Ways of Looking at the British Boom – “There certainly seems to be something of a boom. To a certain extent these things are always artefacts―there’s no objective criteria by which one can judge ‘boom-ness’ (boomitude? boomosity?―so the fact that everyone’s talking about it is to a certain extent definitional of the fact that something’s going on”
Your Happening World (June 27th through July 1st)
- I was there when a lesbian pride march got picketed by bigots | Another angry woman – It was clear that they were not here as fellow lesbians, which was evidenced by the fact that they did not participate in the march itself. They just showed up to try and wreck the event. I consider their intervention an act of lesbophobic violence.
- » Lesbians protesting a lesbian pride march for being inclusive. Hypocrisy thy name is TERF – Hilariously the “boycott” actually happened in the form of six TERFs holding up placards when everyone was marching, waiting until Sarah got off stage from her speech and then singing misogynistic chants and blogging about how they chased Sarah off stage.
- DRM Removal Tools for eBooks | Apprentice Alf’s Blog –
- Joe Sacco’s WWI drawings, in the Paris Metro –
- VK2014: Proper geframed naar de stembus » Apache.be – Dat was deze keer niet anders. Hoe trachtten de partijen zichzelf te framen met het oog op de stembusslag van zondag? Welke rol speelden de reguliere media daarbij? Wat betekenen de sociale media? En valt er nog wat te halen via klassieke huisbezoeken, affichecampagnes en het afschuimen van markten en braderieën?
Art and politics
I don’t know if any of y’all read Roy Edroso at all, but Roy specialises in making fun of the kind of rightwing meathead who only appreciate any kind of art if it’s propaganda for their cause. There’s a whole army of lowrent rightwing cultural commentators making a living by telling fellow wingnuts how conservative a movie is or not, who only value art for how well it adheres to their own political positions, and Roy is very good at showing up the absurdity of this. Roy’s basic position seems to be that when politics are put above art, art suffers, so only fools want art to be nothing more than propaganda. And he’s right of course,there’s nothing quite as awful as art that is mindlessly political (Ian McEwan’s Saturday springs to mind).
But at the same time, art, good or bad, always has a political dimension. Even art that says it’s apolitical has one, if only in the refusal to engage openly with politics. How an artist, a novelist sees the world informs their art and politics is always a part of it. And it’s the subconscious politics that are the most interesting, when it’s not put in there for purpose, but because that’s the way the author thinks the world works.
An example, Wag the Dog, that 1997 film about a president who two weeks before the elections get involved in a sexual scandal, for which his advisors fake a war to get him out of. It’s surface politics are trite and predictable: you can’t trust politicians, they will do anything to keep their job, you can’t trust the media because they fake everything blah blah blah. But behind that surface lie much more interesting politics. This is a movie that wants to present itself as cynical and knowning, but seen with a decade of hindsight, it just looks incredibly naive and, well, dumb.
Dumb because the cynicism at the heart of it is fake, a Hollywood idea of how politics work. A war with Albania is faked to distract attention from the president being accused of sexual assault. How is this done? By getting a movie producer to fake this war, who gets in a lot of other people to do this with them and it’s all swallowed by the great unwashed. In the end the producer, once he wants the credit for his success of course has to die to keep it all a secret, but the president gets re-elected and nobody is any the wiser… Nobody innocent dies, the phony war is so phony that nothing happens outside a television studio and it’s all smug bullcrap. We’ve seen what really happens when wars get faked and the endresult is a lot less neat than this movie suggests. We’ve seen that presidents do not hesitate to kill thousands of innocents for the sake of their own career, without the need of Hollywood advisors to help them on their way.
That’s right, Wag the Dog actually sugercoats the real truth, its cynicism is fake. And I think it is because it’s actual target is not the corruption in Washington, but corruption in tinseltown. It’s all about a bunch of Hollywood liberals playing around with things without once considering their impact on the real world. It is in fact a very conservative criticism of Hollywood, despite the fact that supposed liberals like David Mamet have worked on the movie.
And that’s what I mean with the subconscious politics of a piece of art.