Category Archives: blogs

Eva Deadbeat on Peep Show

Eva Deadbeat does a portrait of the UK tv series Peep Show.
Who is Eva Deadbeat?

Eva Deadbeat (aka Eva Sollberger), who has worked at various film festivals (Sundance, San Francisco Int’l) in the past and now resides in Burlington, VT where she has a public access television show and makes “obsessive montages with an eye for the absurd and a taste for pop culture in all its glory.” Eva has an astonishing 93 vids on YouTube so far. —indiewire

Eva Deadbeat uses Youtube for what it is best at: for broadcasting original material. A couple of posts ago I introduced her with her ‘tortured artists 101‘. I love her work and I’m sure we will hear more of her.

I was seeking a soul resembling mine

I was seeking a soul resembling mine, and I could not find it. I searched throughout the seven seas; my perseverance proved of no use. Yet I could not remain alone. I needed someone who’d approve of my nature; there had to be somebody out there with the same ideas as me. –Stanza 13 of Maldoror via Dennis Cooper who has a series of posts concerning Les Chants de Maldoror (1869) – Comte de Lautréamont in a version illustrated by Salvador Dalí.

Ballardian psychogeography

K punk has an analysis of an interview with Iain Sinclair by Tim Chapman which touches upon psychogeography, the art of the 20th century flâneur.

Of all the intriguing moments in Tim Chapman’s fascinating interview with Iain Sinclair over at the ever-excellent Ballardian (Sinclair so much more arresting and engaging as a commentator and critic than as a novelist, where writerly obsurantism fogs over all his insights and sharpness), this is one of the most telling: —k punk

Introducing Mr. Dante Fontana

Mr. Dante Fontana is a regular contributor to PCL Linkdump but has his own blog Visual Guidance LTD here.

Recent (mostly Youtube) posts have included. Don’t forget to check Les Rita Mitsouko – Marcia Baila and kleenex / liliput – die matrosen.

k-punk’s contribution to the pornography symposium

k-punk’s contribution to the pornography symposium:

What Ballard, Lacan and Burroughs have in common is the perception that human sexuality is essentially pornographic.

For all three, human sexuality is irreducible to biological excitation; strip away the hallucinatory and the fantasmatic, and sexuality disappears with it. As Renata Salecl argues in (Per)Versions of Love and Hate, it is easier for an animal to enter the Symbolic Order than it is for a human to unlearn the Symbolic and attain animality, an observation confirmed by the news that, when an orang-utan was presented with pornography, it ceased to show any sexual interest in its fellow apes and spent all day masturbating. The orang-utan had been inducted into human sexuality by the ‘inhuman partner’, the fantasmatic supplement, upon which all human sexuality depends. —k-punk [Aug 2006]

Capitalized Phrases analysis:

Eyes Wide Shut – J. G. Ballard – Jacques Lacan – William Burroughs – – Renata Salecl – Boschian – Jean Baudrillard – Sigmund Freud – Delvaux – Helmut Newton – David Cronenberg – Immanuel Kant – Marquis de Sade – Sacher-Masoch – Jonathan Weiss – Dior – Chanel – Iain Sinclair

Blogging and remediation

In search of genre theory

One of the fundamental principles of new media that directly influenced our teaching and research is the principle that old media and familiar genres end up as the content of new media. Marshall and Eric McLuhan (1988) call this principle the “law of retrieval” (pp. 102-06), Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (1999) call it “remediation” (pp. 2-15), and Lev Manovich (2001), drawing on the McLuhans and Bolter and Grusin, says, “the language of cultural interfaces is largely made up from elements of other, already familiar cultural forms” (p. 71). The web is remediating all media that has come before it (print, music, film, television, radio, paintings, email, etc.); therefore in our teaching we wanted to emphasize for our students that weblogging is not a radically new way of writing, but a repurposing of familiar (we hoped) print genres. Other theories of or approaches to media, like Gregory Ulmer’s theory of electracy and his pedagogy articulated in Internet Invention (2003) might lead to more experimental uses of weblogging than what we encouraged from our students, but rather than emphasize the newness and unfamiliarity of weblogs, we wanted to balance the novelty of the activity with a grounding in familiar literate practices. Bolter and Grusin’s response to the “modernist rhetoric” of making a “radical break with the past” sums up our own understanding of new media, including weblogs: “what is new about digital media lies in their particular strategies for remediating television, film, photography, and painting [and print]. Repurposing as remediation is both what is ‘unique to digital worlds’ and what denies the possibility of that uniqueness” (50). —Into the Blogosphere

See also: genre theory

What is a blog-a-thon?

A blog-a-thon is a recent phenomenon in the blogosphere. It consists of a number of bloggers writing posts on a certain subject. According to girish the word was coined by Darren of longpauses.com (although I couldn’t find the post). Girish conducted a blog-a-thon on avant-garde cinema early August. The earliest post I was able to trace featuring the term blog-a-thon is this one.

Since I am a fan of Wikipedia, I wish that the participants to blog-a-thons would share their knowledge with the entire world by contributing the results of their efforts to Wikipedia. The Wikipedia equivalent of blog-a-thons are called Wikipedia Collaborations or WikiProjects. One possible future trend could be blikis, a combination of blogs with a wiki system. I first came across the concept of the bliki two years ago in this post by Belgian blogger forret.

Porn symposium

Update: Aug 24: pornography – symposium

Via girish again comes:

Terrific post by Owen Hatherley, part of the Porn Symposium (hey, there’s an idea for a future blog-a-thon): Russ Meyer, Vilgot Sjöman, etc, but mostly Dušan Makavejev.

Sexpol and Sexploitation in the cinema of the New Left

Part of a Porn Symposium with K-Punk, Infinite Thought, Poetix, Effay, Bacteriagrl and Different Maps. —Owen Hatherley

There is a story of the permeation of pornography into mainstream cinema and into everyday life, and it goes much like this; a combination of American exploitation directors and French arthouse in the early 1970s, through a conjunction of fake orgasms and truck drivers on the one hand and soft focus and cod-philosophy on the other takes what was previously suppressed and places it in the heart of the multiplex. In this narrative the heroes are the hucksters behind Deep Throat or the faux-sophisticates of Emmanuelle, with even dissenting semi-mainstream directors like Russ Meyer considered too original to be relevant. These are two films from which one can trace a line to the frat film, the overlit horrors of most American porn and the ‘another round of whispering on a bed’ (Foucault) that is, the French sex drama, always aiming to reveal some essential truth or other. The confirmation seemingly of the Foucauldian admonition that ‘sex is boring’. —Owen Hatherley

P.S.

[This post forms part of a symposium with bacteriagrl, k-punk, sit down man you’re a bloody tragedy (I still dream of orgonon), infinite thought (the money shot and vintage porn), effay, poetix.] —Different Maps

My two cents:

 

Related: 1971 – European cinema – Freudo-Marxism – Dušan Makavejev – Wilhelm Reich – the sexual revolution in the cinema

The ravishing sex reformer and radical in a provocative pose; composing sex and politics, it also reveals Makavejev’s “aestheticism”; the unexpected rabbit, the strong, two-colored vertical stripes and particularly the inexplicable empty frame. SC via Film As a Subversive Art (1974) – Amos Vogel

Update Aug 23 2006:

As you’ll recall, Ariel Levy snarled about porn studies in the confessional section of Female Chauvinist Pigs. If you are unfamiliar with the evil that is porn studies, you should check out the Porn Symposium going on now! You can see why Ariel Levy felt that this kind of feminism contributed to raunch culture and the gyrations and tough talk of female chauvinist pigs. –via blog.pulpculture.org

Introducing “You cried for night”

“You cried for night” is an Australian literary blog, found via the comments on The Reading Experience’s piece on psychological realism. From its header:

” You cried for night – it falls. Now cry in darkness.” (Sam Beckett). How quickly will these colours date in the service of Australian literature and other bookish matters? It’s the content that matters…And the dots.

In one of the comments on Freud, the novel and the New York Times Anne remarks:

Wonderful post: one thing blogging surely is good for is puncturing the gaseousness of other bloggers. You’ve done a lovely job here.