New Blogs

I've started a couple of sidelines in the blogosphere (further diluting my readership, no doubt). One is a blog entitled, "Cultural Globalization" which will be a series of short, informal reflections on issues and ideas arising from my last book, Cultural Globalization: A User's Guide, a continuation of the discussions in that book. Unfortunately, Blogger has tagged the blog as a Spam Blog and have slapped some weird warning on it. I'm working to have this taken down.


The second, "The Clickable World" will be a space for ongoing notes on my next research project regarding everyday life and interactive mobile media. There have been scattered reflections on "Ain't Got Time to Blog" on this project; the new blog is just to focus these more. I'll post some earlier parts of this there too (like the link to the paper I presented in Korea). Right now there's nothing there, but check back later. It's nighttime in the clickable world. :)

Me, in the paper

Missed when this actually hit newsprint (assuming it did), but there's a series of quotes from me towards the end of this column in the Arizona Republic. Of course, if the inverted pyramid structure of newspaper writing holds true, the stuff at the bottom is that which is least essential and most easily cut :)

New in Surveillance

First, apparently the NSA has been spying on Americans beyond the already lax boundaries set up by the Bush administration. Is anyone surprised?

Anyone?

Anyone?

And these oversteps included plans to wiretap (without a warrant) a member of Congress. To quote from the New York Times:

The official said the plan was ultimately blocked because of concerns from some intelligence officials about using the N.S.A., without court oversight, to spy on a member of Congress.

One would think such a plan would merit more than "concerns."


Second, apparently it is now illegal (or if not officialy illegal, greatly discouraged) to take pictures of anything having to do with public transportation in England, as an Austrian tourist found out.

Roller Coaster and Clazziquai

Roller Coaster is an acid pop group from South Korea. I've got several of their CD's, and just ran across this video on YouTube. Love this song.

Check out Clazziquai Project while you're at it. Or this video from them.

thought for the day

It seems that the only place in North America (at least) that we publicly debate (or at least engage) issues of technology, responsibility, and humanity (apart from the odd lecture hall here or there) is in popular science fiction films and television shows.

Backscatter to become the default?

From the most recent EPIC alert: apparently the TSA is planning on making Backscatter X-Rays the default security screen at airports rather than metal detectors.

Lots of links off of the EPIC page.

Dave Arneson

Dave Arneson died. NYT obituary here. He was co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, along with Gary Gygax. Gygax died last year about this time. I thought I had gotten Arneson to sign one of my old D&D books, but I guess not. Gygax was more of a presence at the GenCon gaming conventions in the early 80s than Arneson.

Thought of the Day

Why does cat food always come in these bourgeois* flavors like Salmon Feast, Filet Mignon (not kidding--see here), and now this new line of Fancy Feast that is "Restaurant Inspired" (Tuscany?? Florentine??) and so on.

Shouldn't cat food come in, like, "Small Mammal Flavor" and things like that?

Update: Squirrel Flavor, Pigeon Flavor, Rat Flavor, and now, for a limited time, Vole Feast!


___
*Update: perhaps "Yuppie" would be more accurate than "bourgeois"?

Updated my spelling, too, which was really off in the initial post

follow-up

This is a quick follow-up to my earlier post about my camera phone. When I checked it this afternoon it told me that I had 502 pictures saved in my gallery.

Yes, 502.

About 25 of those are pictures I took myself. The rest are ones the camera decided to take in my pocket.

Now I've got to delete 475 or so pictures of blackness off my phone.

Sheesh.

The Clickable World

Jennifer sent me the link to a fascinating video on new work introduced by Pattie Maes (who pioneered intelligent agent work back in the 1990s*).

I think this deserves a Keanu Reeves-like "Whoah!"

And it represents a big step forward towards the clickable world.




*Once upon a time (mid-1990s) I actually got a letter published in Wired which was a response to an interview with Maes. Intelligent agents, I argued, are always double agents. They work for you, but also for (e.g.) Microsoft.

Kennedy

So, just got some old newspapers from my in-laws. Now I need to figure out how best to preserve them.

The future of malls

Interesting discussion in the NYT about the future of malls. Just started in on it, but fascinated to learn that no new enclosed malls have been built in the US since 2006.

Crying Nut

What does it mean that when you Google "Crying Nut," my blog is the 4th site on the list?

New Books

New books over the threshold (in no particular order):

Stephen John Hartnett and Laura Ann Stengrim (2006). Globalization and Empire: The US Invasion of Iraq, Free Markets, and the Twilight of Democracy. U. of Alabama Press.

Phaedra C. Pezzullo (2007) Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice. U. of Alabama Press.

Helene A. Shugart and Catherine Egley Waggoner (2008) Making Camp: Rhetorics of Transgression in US Popular Culture. U. of Alabama Press

Paul Alkebulan (2007) Survival Pending Revolution: The History of the Black Panther Party. U. of Alabama Press

Carroll Pursell (ed) (2005/8) A Companion to American Technology. Blackwell

Sharon Marie Ross (2008) Beyond the Box: Television and the Internet. Blackwell

Paul Hopper (2007) Understanding Cultural Globalization. Blackwell. [Checking out the competition :) ].

Angharad N. Valdivia (ed) (2003/6) A Companion to Media Studies. Blackwell.

Kelly Askew and Richard R. Wilk (eds) (2002) The Anthropology of Media: A Reader. Blackwell. [Ever since reading Horst and Miller's book on the cell phone in Jamaica I've been interested in how anthropologists deal with media; I'm really liking this work]

Neil Gaiman (2009) Blueberry Girl. Illustrations by Charles Vess. HarperCollins. [This is an absolutely beautiful children's book, a prayer for a new daughter, with all ones wishes for her life. I highly recommend it].

Gas Pump TV

Watchmen

Not bad. I’ve been rereading the comics over the last week (apparently the original set is becoming more of a collector’s item). In many ways the film is like an animation of the graphic novel; it stays true to the feel of the graphic novel (which in itself was very cinematic), and the limitations of the graphic novel. As a whole, I think the film worked (though less sure of how it worked as a film if you came in without prior knowledge). I think they carried off the feel of it, and it didn’t seem awkward (as films about caped crusaders may). Could they have done something more with it? Certainly. Perhaps made the melodrama of the original into actual drama. If Malin Ackerman had been a better actress, perhaps (and she’s not; she’s got to carry a lot of emotional moments in this film and comes across as wooden). Night Owl is supposed to be dweebish and wooden; he’s not a dramatic center for the story, and actually I thought Patrick Wilson played it with some subtlety (the audience liked him). Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach was quite good, though they had to trim some backstory (the whole Kitty Genovese connection was gone) and radically truncate the days of “therapy” he gets in prison (which cheapened the reveal a bit). R. was certainly a crowd favorite, and it’s always disturbing to watch an audience root for a brutal misanthropic psychopath. Jeffrey Dean Morgan as the Comedian was fine, but needed a bit more Robert Downey, Jr. (touch more charisma, touch more psycho).

I thought that the film evoked the 1980s quite well. Little details, not just of the movie, but of the ads, styles, TV images. What was anachronistic was the fighting style. In every movie these days it seems that everyone does some form of martial arts, and this film is no exception. This is fine in an of itself, but a bit of variety would be nice. And back in the 70s and 80s, that wasn’t superhero fighting (despite that song)

Can we have a moratorium on shots of violence that suddenly slow down to a crawl so we can see the impact, the splatter of blood, and then suddenly accelerate again? ITS BEEN DONE. Move on.

I’ve never liked the ending of the original series. It seemed too silly for all the gravitas that came before (giant psychic squid???). This ending actually makes more sense (while making the same point), and explains events more logically. The actual end of the film dragged. Too many final scenes (watched a number of audience members leave early at points which looked like the final scene).

One big change from the graphic novels is a ramping up in the brutality and graphic nature of the violence. It’s a violent novel, don’t get me wrong, but the film lingers on prolonged fight scenes to beef up the action between the debates about humanity’s future. [This is sort of like battles which are brief paragraphs in Lord of the Rings or the Narnia books suddenly becoming elaborate set pieces]. Especially disturbing was the increased violence by Night Owl and Silk Spectre. In the scene in the alley, they’re not just defending themselves against a gang, but brutalizing them until the gang members lay about as twisted broken bodies. It collapses some the moral distance between them and Rorschach. In the novel, they always stood apart a bit, still the goody-two-shoes of the Watchmen, but seeming to silently assent as Rorschach and the Comedian do their thing.

What’s missing: the pirate comic I was never that fond of (though I see the point it was trying to make in parallel with the main story about losing one’s moral compass), and the dynamic of the newsseller and neighbors, but we get their anxiety about the end of the world and the coming war grafted onto Dan and Laurie. They did skip one of my favorite lines from the book, which is when the two detectives are in their office and get a call tipping them off. And the officer says, “What did you say? Raw Shark? Why would I want to know where I can get raw shark?”

Another chapter in the general cultural narrative of the armored fascist male body. Between this and Iron Man (which, I must admit, was more fun that Watchmen in and of itself) Claudia Springer’s critique of Robocop et al is still quite relevant and needs to be revisited. Which means I should see the Batman film sometime too.

Global Nomads--part 2

Darn it! I actually had started sketching out a short essay on the fact that President Obama is a Third Culture Kid/Global Nomad and that at least one of his closest advisors is also a TCK/GN (and why all this is a Really Good Thing for this country), but Ruth Van Reken got there first.

Ah well, the important thing is that it's been said.

Global Nomads

I just got the nicest email from a woman in Japan, writing that as a TCK/global nomad herself she really felt she could relate to my Cultural Globalizaton book (which she found in a bookstore in Tokyo).

This got me thinking more about TCKs (third culture kids) and global nomads. So I ran a couple of searches just to see if anything new was out there and found, sadly, that Norma McCaig passed away last November. She was the leader of Global Nomads International and the woman who coined the term "Global Nomad." Ruth Hill Useem, the sociologist who coined the term "Third Culture Kids," died in 2003.

Also ran across Janera.com, a social networking site and magazine rolled into one which seeks to bring together global nomads (defined rather broadly, it seems) in conversation. Could be an interesting site, but have to read more of its articles.

This also got me thinking that a way to describe my book would be that it's a Third Culture Kid/Global Nomad's perspective on the processes of globalization and culture.

And this also got me thinking: my book is on bookshelves in Tokyo?? Why can't it be on bookshelves here?

ASU

Quick update. Looks like the Master's Programs at the west campus will be safe after all. They're hammering out a new vision statement for the campus, which includes MA programs.

Obama motorcade