Posts by Kracklite
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Erratum: Pelham is not banning the books themselves, rather commenting on the kind of pressures that they have to suffer. Librarians tend to be liberal sorts, contrary to stereotype. Canadian one's especially so, I'd imagine.
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I don't mean this question to sound glib, but has Shakespeare been taken off the curriculum in NSW and England?
I don't know about there, but if you look at the list of banned books compiled by the Pelham Library, you'll find some WS. Here's a pdf of their 2008 list of books banned by fundy nutters. Farenheit 451 is of course included in at least one year (tho' to be pedantic, Bradbury was commenting on a generally anti-intellectual, instant-gratification culture rather than censorship per se).
What was that law that stated that it's impossible to parody a fundamentalist because somewhere, one will have seriously stated a position that's even more absurd than anything you could imagine?
Having had my experience with depression, I find this moral panic not only bone-headedly ignorant, but a vilely opportunistic example of journalistic necrophilia as well.
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'Gollum with 'roid rage' went through my mind
Maybe it could have been a giant marshmallow man - or has that been done?
At less than 80 minutes it (just) avoided outstaying its welcome.
True. It was about the right length and as a roller-coaster ride it was OK.
Really, another couple of minutes of grainy seizure-cam and I'd have started bleeding from the eyes too.
Pity about Marlene exploding - she was about the only interesting character.
Pegg I wouldn't call stunt casting, but he's definitely one out of left-field that makes more sense as time goes by
Yeah, I agree, that's more or less what I meant - a seemingly very odd choice that actually might work - like Jim Carey in Eternal Sunshine blah blah.
But isn't it spooky to see Joanna Cassidy has barely changed over twenty five years. Spooky.
Obviously there's no termination date on her model.
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DIFFERENTLY ABLED!!!
Dead White European Male: Metabolically-challenged high albedo geographically displaced person of inadvertently hegemonic gender identity.
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Random observations...
Saw a woman once wearing a T-shirt that read 'Don't stare, grow your own.'
And Control has John Cooper Clark as himself performing 'Evidently Chickentown' - very fast and it isn't 'bloody' that he says. Quite a tongue twister - makes 'She sells sea shells' look easy, even if it lacks the tricky variation.
Sort of ambivalent about Cloverfield - it's a bit too generic 'monster-attacks-people-flee' and the monster was just a boring monster. Am I too demanding about monster movies? Why shouldn't I be? The Host had real wit, after all. Moreover, academics like me have built whole careers writing papers on the sexual semiotics of Alien - but was over a quarter of a century ago and since Cronenberg's started doing more mainstream thrillers, the pickings have got pretty lean.
The first-person aspect is narratively interesting and may provoke some interesting new films without so much queasy-cam...
Anyways, re Trek. Urban as Bones - and Pegg as Scotty - how's that for stunt casting? Well, I'll look forward to it. I should just be emerging from my 5-disc Blade Runner-induced state of nerdvana.
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You sound like a chap with finer feelings. Thank you for anything you can do.
Why thank you, but in my current position I can't set curricula - I'm part-time and low rank while I concentrate on my Piled Higher and Deeper (in English Lit, of all things... you want eclectic, I'll show you eclectic).
I'll blame architecture schools for the lack of a truly classical sensibility, it's the developers that have to be blamed for the kitchens and loos. A fixation on the 'aspirational' consumer has led to houses designed for the sort of people who think that sleep and any bodily functions other than responses to opiates and alkaloids are for wimps.
There is the problem of whittled budgets too. I remember while back - and the details have slipped my memory, so forgive any inaccuracies please - a school was touted as representative of the government's green credentials in action... and then every green feature was progressively stripped from it to leave a banal, inefficient box. The minister responsible could only giggle when confronted with this and I could only seethe.
You're absolutely right about toilets and wheelchairs and babies of course. A point made back in the days when I tutored ergonomics is that everyone is disabled at least once in their lives.
On a positive note, while architecture has historically been a male-dominated and sexist profession (the childless males jibe is on the mark), despite the rare example of women like Eileen Grey, things do seem to be changing. These days there are a lot of female students and despite the brutal culling that takes place between first and second year (250+ to less than 80), they've monopolised the A+ echelon this year. The woman, Alex Hills, who co-ordinates 2nd semester third year design at Vic is very much into sustainability and is... not small... and brings her infant daughter into class is an inspiration - now if only they'd give her tenure. Alex, I'm sure won't mind a plug here :)
Meanwhile, by chance, the co-ordinator of communication (drawing and suchlike) injured her leg setting up an exhibition and spent the second semester on crutches.
I suppose I serve to demonstrate the special needs of the mentally ill and alcoholic.
Anyway, things could be on the upturn, long term. Fingers crossed.
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John Key's pad is really a simulation?
If only it were virtual reality, then I could turn it off and watch something just as artificial but more edifying, like a twelve-hour Andy Warhol film of astroturf (not) growing.
There is something uncanny about it, as if it were an 80s low-rez CGI of itself.
Well, nobody's kidnapped me and strapped me into a chair, braced my head and forced my eyelids open to force me to look at the thing like Alex in A Clockwork Orange. I shouldn't complain, but I do like to mock.
Ahem, as Dame Edna said, 'What kind of world would it be if we couldn't laugh at each other?'
Sorry, but the etiquette of postmodernism demands that there be quotes.
On the lighter side, check out this and all will become unclear, it's The Postmodern Essay Generator.
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I seek the Unsnob,
Ah, but being a snob is just so much fun if done with sufficient irony and humour (not the same thing). Comic Book Guy on The Simpsons is a snob with neither... and I've met people like that. Saint Oscar was a snob with those qualities.
Umberto Eco.
Good call. Travels in Hyperreality offers a good definition too. I think that that's where U2 got the idea for 'Even Better than the Real Thing'.
Wasn't the term Pomo first used for the architectural style of Las Vegas?
Charles Jencks gets the credit for first applying the term to architecture. One of my favourite writers on the subject. (Wiki says that he's American, but like Gwyneth Paltrow, he's almost more English than the English now).
As for LasVegas, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown are the ones to look at. RV's Learning From Las Vegas and Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture are bibles of pomo architecture.
From Wiki:
He is also known for coining the maxim "Less is a bore" as antidote to Mies van der Rohe's famous modernist dictum "Less is more".
There's also The Death of The Author stuff.
Barthes, I think. The idea is that the reader is an active participant and not a passive consumer and they create a narrative from the words written that effectively supercedes/obscures/contradicts/whatever the writer may have intended. It lays the groundwork for deconstruction (hmmm, that's an interesting metaphor...)
Actually, 'postmodernism' is a very broad and flexible generic label, like 'classical music': 'Do you mean music characteristic of late eighteenth century Vienna listened to by the upper stratum of the socio-economic system of the time or do you mean early, Baroque, Romantic, Modernist, Serialist, Minimalist or another style?' 'Er, I like Shostakovich.'
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clash of ideas at cloud 9.
As someone said... and I can't remember who... the one thing worse than a snob is an inverted snob.
Oh yes, it's postmodern to put quote marks around everything.
And I can't resist this quote, from The Belly of an Architect, from which I take my nom de plume:
Speckler Snr: "Are you a modern architect, Senor Kracklite?"
Kracklite: "No more than I need to be."
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"No one can tell you what postmodernism is"
It's rather like the one about Deconstruction: Deconstruction is not what you think it is.
If only I could see what was postmodern about it.
Well, as I said, I don't like pomo per se. Anyway, bearing in mind varying interpretations and people telling you that people can't tell you, the middle of the big fuzzy cloud labelled pomo, there is something more or less like this:
It's postmodern if it's not a thing-in-itself but is also self-consciously a representation of itself, a Simulation, as Baudrillard... oh bugger, sorry, I shouldn't have mentioned him, because that's another can of worms.
Anyway, as an example, someone used this situation: a man loves a woman and says to her, 'I love you' and that is modernist, but if he were a postmodernist, he would say, 'As Barbara Cartland would have one of her characters say, "I love you".'
Or... a postmodern banana is an expression of banananess that is incidentally edible.
Something like that anyway.