text:
shoulda put a ring on it, shoulda signed a contract, shoulda just kept your head down and worked, etc.
May 23, 2015 § 8 Comments
I had an idea of turning this blog around, as it were, come 2015 — it would be the diary of the angry Tamil spinster, or something. Her eternal disquiet. 2015 came and I spent a lot of time of twitter, faving tweets, retweeting tweets, wondering why bother to write anything. Thus far, I'm still wondering: why bother to write? And have not yet found an answer that is sufficient to make it worthwhile (not for myself, but for others.) Related: why should others read me, or how does my writing contribute to anything, if at all? More important than "why bother to write".
I've started to identify so much as "spinster" in my head, first as a joke, but now as reality, because I think back to how we were made to be afraid of being the unmarried 30-something woman taking care of her elderly mother when were in our teens, and thus encouraged to study hard and look pretty to avert this fate, and how I have arrived at this fate not through conscious choice but a series of decisions based on facts of my life that were beyond my immediate control. Is this what they call agency? Surely the spinster, being in the position she is, should be the most anti-capitalist of them all.
I read Kate Bolick's Spinster expecting to feel some kinship with it, moments where the writer stares into the abyss of utter aloneness and I stare along with her. Instead, it's about a pretty woman who is plenty sought-after by men and attends lots of literary parties and can never walk down the street without seeming like she winds up on a date. (This woman is Bolick, to be clear.) There are bits in-between about women from her past who have acted as her awakeners; all of them white, most of them pretty and sought-after by men in the same way, and in a creepy way, all very pale-skinned and eroticised because of this white skin (her descriptions of how Edna St. Vincent Millay was desired by men, for example, works in this creepy way … creepy because desire-for-white-women is always taken for granted.)
This book, as Jessa Crispin writes, also vexed me. At one point, when tracing the life of one of her awakeners, Maeve Brennan, and noting that she did actually end up living the spinster nightmare — that of a "bag lady" — Bolick wonders, "What did it mean that this was the woman I'd aspired to be?" Maybe some spinsters end up as "bag ladies" because of their position in society, alienated, precarious, and unwanted — how are they to thrive under the brutal conditions of capitalism? But in case the cover of Spinster wasn't already a clue, Bolick's book is for the shiny and striving. In identifying with Brennan but cringing at the bag lady, Bolick can't see what she won't see. All you need to do is awaken the neoliberal soul and be productively employed. Bonus: if you're pretty and can get a lot of dates, you can only worry about your strange desire to be alone without actually living the alienation that aloneness prescribes in a capitalist society.
The face of the new spinster movement or whatever, as determined by the Publishing World (i.e. New York), is pretty and white, so the rest of us will have to gather under a different banner, I guess. Hag? Bag lady? Take your pick. Like wage labour, the ability to make a choice between being undesirable and unproductive, or being desirable and productive, is a sign of agency. The choice is yours ladies! Will you work to improve your look, lean in, and make an effort? If you do, you deserve to exist.
The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt
June 17, 2014 § Leave a comment
This is my review of Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch for Pop Matters. I'm still steadily trying to post reviews up here and so this one is also several months old. Yes, we're still in 2013. Today in my Twitter feed, Sridala linked to an article about the atrocious racial politics in the book, and I was so glad to read it, and so glad that this piece exists. Joy Castro, who wrote the article, makes some pertinent points. This was something that I picked up on while reading it — it's hard not to — but was familiar enough with Tartt's previous two books to know that she only cared about moneyed, slightly disgraced WASPs. That's her Thing. By the time I got around to writing the review for The Goldfinch I was so tired. So tired of noticing and caring too much about how white people write about, and thus write off, people of colour in their highly-praised bestsellers. But Castro makes an important point about the depiction of racialised others in the book that fits in with the theme of the book at large: that of Art and Beauty and Great Literature. No room for anyone less-than-white (and rich, rich rich rich!) in that world. Castro emphasises how the working class non-white others in this book are willing to put themselves in service of these Great White People Living Their Fascinating Lives; willing to put their own (mediocre and unimportant, presumably) lives on hold so that whiteness can flourish. The labour of black and brown bodies for white ones is a story that must be told that way, as one of great willingness and good cheer. This view of the world is of a piece with the rest of the book. If great art must circulate (and this book does nothing in terms of deconstructing what great art is, how it's made, or what it does), it must always return to white "culture". For my part, by the time I got to the phrase "dead-eyed ethnic families", I was ready to stab Tartt in the face with an expensive, beautiful, authentic fountain pen.
I read Donna Tartt's impressive first novel, The Secret History, at an impressionable age and in a stage of my life I will politely refer to as Colonised Mind v. 1.0. Having grown up middle-class and Tamil in Malaysia—title of my forthcoming memoir, hahaha!—and fed Austen, Dickens, Christie (Agatha) and Blyton (Enid) throughout a very protected childhood, I was very susceptible to romantic Life of the Mind-type ideas and proclivities.
Besides, I had a tattered copy of Bullfinch's Mythology that followed me everywhere. I—like about a zillion other young kids who came to learn about Greek mythology by way of Anglo-European classicists—loved Greek myth. Who doesn't? Myths are great. Why would you not like stories? Stories are great.
So when I found a tattered copy of The Secret History in a used bookstore, an Ivy Books trade paperback with a lurid cover image comprising a mishmash of an imposing New England colonial building, a Doric column and a single stem rose, with various phrases like "Greek scholars, worldly, self-assured," "a terrifying secret that bound them to one another", "an incident in the woods in the dead of the night", "an ancient rite that was brought to brutal life", and "gruesome death" strewn across the back cover copy, it worked like a charm. I bought it, devoured it, and read it over and over again, before I even knew that Tartt was "a sensation" in that faraway place called the literary world.
This makes The Secret History sound almost flimsy, even silly, but it's not. Despite its premise, Tartt is a writer who plays with excesses and extremes in the most delicate way. You don't read Tartt for pared-down elegance, although there are moments when she does this, too. You read Tartt like you would watch Pretty Little Liars: for the unalloyed pleasure of surrendering to a familiar story that is, at turns, also new and menacing.
Tartt's third and most recent novel, The Goldfinch, was hugely anticipated among industry types and fans because she's only written three so far; ten years separated the publication of her second novel, The Little Friend, from her debut, and 11 years separates The Goldfinch from her second. I still pull The Secret History from the shelves every so often, skipping the parts that bore me, and going over the passages where the Greek scholars who so fascinated the novel's protagonist, Richard Papen, are at their most knowing and obnoxious.
Now older, wiser and bitter, I'm tempted to throw copies of Martin Bernal's Black Athena at their heads, then set off on a long lecture about the appropriation of Greek knowledge and thought by Eurocentric thinkers and writers. Still, the story remains tantalising. And, as reductive as this might probably sound, this is what Tartt does very well. She tells a good story.
The Goldfinch can be said to be an anti-bildungsroman, in that it traces the life of one Theo Decker from about 13years of age, where he survives a bombing at the Metropolitan Museum in New York that kills his mother, until his late 20s, where he reflects on this life while telling his story. It's an anti-bildungsroman because Theo, much like Richard in The Secret History and Harriet Dufresnes in The Little Friend, has his head firmly turned back to the past, to that point in time where a singular event changed his life.
This isn't a straightforward novel of growth and progression as it is a novel of regret, and for much of the book, Theo exists in a state of anguished perpetual adolescence. He's always that 13-year-old boy on that fateful day at the Met.
The premise of the novel hinges on Theo's possession of Carel Fabritius's "The Goldfinch" following the museum bombing. When Theo and his mother first arrive at the Met, Theo is drawn to a young girl with red hair and her elderly male companion, and after the blast, Theo finds himself in the same space with the dying old man, and in a distinctly hazy, dream-like encounter, this man gives Theo a ring and encourages him to leave the museum with the painting.
Later, after learning about his mother's death from a pair of social workers—his father having long since disappeared from their lives—and after having narrowly escaped a life in care by moving in with his friend Andy Barbour's family, the ring will lead Theo to the old man's business and home, an antique shop in the West End, and into the orbit of the lives of the man's business partner and Theo's future mentor and guardian and father-figure of sorts, Hobie, and the man's young niece, Pippa, the redhead of the museum encounter. The painting stays with Theo until, of course, it doesn't, which is a sort of plot progression the reader would have seen coming from the start.
Throughout the book we meet a cast of characters that includes the family members of the Barbour household, as well as Hobie, Pippa, and Theo's estranged alcoholic father and his new girlfriend, Xandra. Theo moves from the Barbour's upper-class posh lifestyle in New York to Las Vegas with his father and Xandra and makes a life-changing new friend named Boris, and then moves back to New York again, with a fevered, nightmarish pit-stop in Amsterdam before the novel's end.
Boris, as it turns out, is the novel's most entertaining character probably because he's Polish-Ukrainian and is made out to have both socialist and criminal tendencies, a perfect foil to the generally law-abiding and liberal Theo. Tartt's liberal American imagination allows Boris to be the wild and fun and yet corrupting influence in Theo's life—yes, he's a good friend, in his own way, but in some ways Boris just an amalgam of how Americans view foreigners who have lived in countries with different political systems. Those insane Eastern Europeans and their dangerous political ideas and lax ways with the law! Crazy Boris even tried out being Muslim for awhile, which teenage Theo finds positively incomprehensible.
While The Goldfinch is set in a politically-charged landscape—the bombing at the museum is vaguely attributed to "terrorism"—Tartt is a writer of bourgeois psychological novels, and the large cast of characters in this book only serve to contextualise Theo's interior life. This isn't to say they aren't well realised, even larger than life, as in Boris' case—but this isn't a novel that's grappling with social and political issues surrounding the bombing in 21st-century New York. It's about a boy and his painting, and how it both circumscribes and expands his relation to other people, and serves as a talisman that links him to his mother and to a gentrified world of art and beauty and stability—Hobie's world—that he wants to be a part of, even while he realises he stands outside of it.
Tartt's fascination with rich WASPs continues in this book, as seen in Theo's perpetual amazement of the Barbours and their lifestyle, but equally unappealing for me is the casual othering of people of colour. Boris is larger than life because he's a central character, but otherwise while criminal white Germans might each have a name, criminal Indonesians only appear inscrutable and are compared to anacondas, while criminal Chinese are inscrutable and wily and are in possession of a name that all the white people can't be bothered to remember, or have "difficulty" remembering, because it sounds so strange. (Theo can't even tell at one point, if this person is a man or a woman or a boy or a girl, and somehow this problem seems related to this person's Asianness.)
When Theo arrives in Amsterdam and looks around at the airport and sees "dead-eyed ethnic families", it's hard not to flinch, though I was also curious about where one could obtain this all-purpose "ethnic family"—at the gift shop, presumably? Does the ethnic family come in all sizes and colours? Theo even exoticises his own mother's appearance because she was part-Irish, part Cherokee, telling us that "in the slant of her cheekbones there was such an eccentric mixture of the tribal and the Celtic Twilight"—the what and the what?, was my question—and that sometimes the exotic character of her facial features were too stark when her hair was pulled back, making her look "like some nobleman in The Tale of Genji". Okay.
There's a Dickensian aura running through The Goldfinch, most notably Great Expectations, and there are certain similarities between Pip and Theo as they navigate their orphan hood (Theo's father is far from a father) and find parental figures in the unlikeliest of places, not to mention their inability to love anyone but the one woman they can't have, though Theo's spiritual twin appears to be The Secret History's Richard. In all her novels, Tartt is particularly adept at conveying the banal hazards of estrangement and evoking sensations relating to place and space. Both Richard and Theo, for example, wish they were anyone but themselves, and are particularly gifted in losing themselves in copious quantities of alcohol and pills. "A self one does not want. A heart one cannot help," as Theo puts it. And while The Secret History will always be reminiscent of frost and snow and ice and the chill of the unknown, this book is notable for the hot, barren, drug-infused Las Vegas suburban desertscape and its air-conditioned ennui.
In this novel, as with her previous two, Tartt seems to be circling around the same concerns about a person's fatal flaw. "Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs", Richard begins in The Secret History—and the same is true for Theo. His longing for beauty, and his inability to let go or exist separately of "The Goldfinch", once he's set eyes on it, is his constant downfall. For one thing, it connects him to his mother, who loved Fabritius's work before Theo even began to pay attention. But more alarming, for Theo, is how hard he fell for the painting, and the lengths he with which he destroyed little aspects of his life in order to keep it:
What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can't be trusted—? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one wilfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?
This is a thread that runs through all of Tartt's novels, with protagonists floating in a sea of banal everyday life routines, desperately wishing for wings to fly out and touch the sun. Even in The Little Friend, Harriet was convinced of her difference—her fatal flaw being the morbid longing to find out the truth, at all costs. (And the price is steep, as she learns by the end.)
While the ending for The Secret History was rather exquisite, evoking the tragic in a way that was both sad and tender, The Goldfinch ends with what feels like a sermon from Theo, desperately trying to attribute meaning to everything that had happened thus far while still assuring us that the knows that "life is catastrophe". It feels tacked-on and forced, and one wonders if Tartt felt compelled to drag the novel on for as long as close to 800 pages in order to give us A Lesson to make up for the dissatisfaction many felt with The Little Friend, which ended on a totally bizarre note, with no resolution of any sort for anyone—and which, I thought, was perfectly in keeping with the slow drip of menace that increased with every page.
While talking about how a novel is about one thing is a sure way to kill the experience of reading, the ending of The Goldfinch seems to want to reduce it to a meaning: about the magic that exists in that unfathomable place between illusion and reality, that lives on between people and things—in particular, things that are passed on from one hand to another. After some 700 pages of one catastrophic event after another, after repeated attempts at self-erasure, these words don't seem true delivered in Theo's voice, and the conclusion seems too tidy, too hopeful, too trite.
Tartt's novels aren't novels of ideas—there's a reason why I compared reading a Tartt novel to watching a TV show, and it's because it's propelled by a forward-moving momentum; it's about action and places and people. These are novels concerned with the psychology of its characters. The Goldfinch seems ripe for meditations on art commodities, and ideas and politics that are transmitted through works of art, as well as deep explorations about what cultural anthropologists like Arjun Appadurai have called the social life of things, but any asides or discussions on books or paintings and the exchange of and desire for commodities are tangential to the main story of Theo's life. It's only at the very end that Theo attempts to weave the history of this masterwork he's kept, hoarded, and lost into the trajectory of his own life, but by then it's all delivered in one big rush of a moral lesson, and the effect is one of vague disorientation at this newly-wise Theo.
The Secret History was a compelling modern tragedy because its effects were rooted in mimesis, in replicating the elements of the Greek plays in the catastrophes of Richard's, and his friends', modern American lives. The Goldfinch merely uses the central artwork as a prop for the plot, for the service of the protagonist's inner life, even while Theo tries to convince us otherwise through occasional meandering and repetitive musings on art that are, unfortunately, superficial and uninteresting. Tartt's novel is eminently readable and entertaining, even moving at times, but while I kept turning the pages I never wanted to linger over it like how Theo does when he looks at the painting and meets the eyes of Fabritius's all-seeing goldfinch.
tweets on magic mike
September 5, 2013 § Leave a comment
I watched Magic Mike early this year and was troubled by it, and in a fit of earnestness composed some grumpy tweets about what I thought, and posted none of it up except, I think, the link to the Joshua Clover article. Recently someone was talking to me about movies and this person had seen Magic Mike, and "as a feminist" was thrilled about how it centered "female desire", which is something that a lot of people have said about the movie, I think? Or at least that's how a lot of discussion on it was framed. And I'd have to agree with Clover that this film is not at all interested in women, or "female desire", whatever that means — I've used that phrase before, too, but now it makes no sense to me, and so it made me newly irritated with the film.
- Yes: "In the sex work movie, men get happy endings." Joshua Clover on Magic Mike (& Step Up Revolution) http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/dance-dance-revolution-20130204
- Wonder if Magic Mike is entertaining because it doesn't take sex work seriously when done by men. Think it wants to take precarity seriously
- but this is undermined by inability to show how precarity structures lives when focus is on hot white male leads who seem to be having "fun".
- It's a weird movie & completely unsexy since it is about sex work. So the comments about how this is the sexiest movie ever? Perplexing.
- How to unpack the layers of wrong in commentaries that celebrate this film for catering to "female desire" without acknowledging the work that produces it
- Talking about male sex work in a not-Soderbergh situation, in a dehumanising capitalist system, female desire comes at what expense?
- Not to mention what happens when it's First World women and Third World men. But here the main leads are conveniently white.
- Is this what liberal feminism means when it talks about "equality"
- "despite its stylized hetero-swinger proclivities, the film is interested in men"–yes, which is why this is strange: http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=956
- Her comments on Heti are astute but MM doesn't "play with female fantasies of submission" so much as affirm men's fantasies of dominance…
- Which I suppose is contrasted with how their material lives are out of their control/in capitalism's hands — thus, not about female fantasies.
- Because yeah Alex Pettyfer is unemployed but at the end of his first performance he gets a blowjob and an actual job out of it.
- Meaning, it you're an attractive heterosexual man and you're lucky enough to be a sex worker in a film
- with an attractive heterosexual female audience — jackpot!
- Heterosexual relations between thin, attractive white people. Rinse and repeat.
- How do they know which woman to pluck out of the crowd, who would enjoy being on stage with a strange man's groin in her face? Important q
- I mean, just because you show up to see men gyrate does not mean you want to be gyrated on. Or do you? What is "consent" in this case?
all the single ladies
June 15, 2013 § 4 Comments
Why capital doesn't like single women:
A woman of marriageable age who is neither wife nor mother, or who for some reason does not become fully a part of the housework labor-force, is under-employed. In other words, she carries out housework in a more limited way than her potential work capacity would allow. Hence single mothers — who do not reproduce a husband/male worker — are under-employed; so is a married woman with no children, who reproduces only a husband; and so also is the divorced, separated or widowed woman who has not remarried. The woman who is of marriageable age but remains single is, however, "non-employed": she reproduces neither husband nor children. ("Unemployed" cannot really be used here, because every woman living under capitalism who does not live on unearned income, must always reproduce at least her own labor-power.)
From Leopoldina Fortunati's The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital.
Let's get #reproducingneitherhusbandnorchildren trending on Twitter!
I'm too dumb for Fortunati but I press on. I was bingeing on Trixie Belden books and Josephine Tey mysteries for the last week because I needed comfort reading, where I wanted to read and couldn't read and so I read things where everything followed a convention, a formula. And so, dear reader, I discovered that you must not go from Trixie Belden to Italian autonomist marxist feminism just like that — you gotta ease into it.
Despite that, Fortunati is, as the kids say, blowing my mind. (Do the kids still say that?)
Review of The Demon of Writing
April 14, 2013 § 6 Comments
And also a month late–my review of Ben Kafka's The Demon of Writing: Power and Failures of Paperwork. This book was frustrating. I wanted to like it a lot more than I did. What I got out of it: 1) Paperwork makes assholes out of us; 2) Paperwork may facilitate, but mostly gets in the way, of people power. I don't like those conclusions, or rather, I'm not sure why Kafka didn't take them further. It's a thoroughly engaging and well-researched book, though, but not much to wrangle with beyond the historical facts and some Freudian speculations. Maybe the sheer amount of paperwork involved in the research overwhelmed Kafka in the end, too.
The key feature of all the "paperless" offices that I have worked in was the abundance of paper. While doing temp jobs that came with various spine-tingling designations like "data entry assistant" or "clerical assistant", I only knew that my job was to make all that was solid—paper—melt into air—data. But certainly, you don't have to work with paper to know how paperwork gets in the way of everything: a marriage or a driver's license, a new passport, citizenship.
Paperwork makes you wait. Paperwork disappears, sometimes never to return; or to return much later, with the vengeance of the repressed. Paperwork obstructs. Paperwork keeps you in limbo. Paperwork means what you don't know will hurt you, or eventually bite you in the ass when it turns out that all that stands between you and your goal is, "I'm sorry, it's just that there's a file missing."
Ben Kafka, media theorist and professor at New York University, understands this. That's why he's titled his book The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork—the ghosts of paperwork haunt every missed opportunity and unforeseen error in the attempt to fashion a structured, disciplined, and well-documented life. At the heart of Kafka's book on paperwork is the rerouting of Marx's theory of paperwork—what he called the "bureaucratic medium"—by way of Freud's theory of parapraxis. Paperwork has its pleasures, and more important—its powers—but it is fundamentally unstable.
Kafka begins his inquiry with a chapter called "The Disciplined State", in which the story of an 18th-century French clerk who loses his job—and his failure to recover it—is what Kafka calls "the story of the French Revolution's success", or how the bureaucracy became an essential component of the state. This bureaucracy, however, was a double-edged sword: "The disciplinary state, which relied on documents and details to keep track of its subjects, would also have to be a disciplined state, aware that those same documents and details could be used to keep track of it."
Morizot, the clerk who found his appeals and attempts to recover his job thwarted at every level by the power of paperwork—"What he needed was the right signature on the proper letterhead"—wrote frantic pamphlets to bring his case of bureaucratic misery to public light. As Kafka writes, "The French, Morizot asserted, were living 'among the debris of a ruined monarchy, now converted into a bourgeois aristocracy'" and, as such, "a world of privilege was becoming a world of rights; the personal state was becoming the personnel state."
While paperwork was designed to produce a more equitable form of society, where accountability for each citizen was recognized as an "inalienable, individual right", the "foundation of representative government", it also proved to wield power in inequitable ways. Kafka recounts the story of Labussière, an employee in the Committee of Public Safety's Prisoners Bureau, who in the aftermath of the French Revolution, during the Reign of Terror, destroyed the files of the prisoners before the Revolutionary Tribunal could get its hands on it, thereby destroying significant information about the prisoners and rendering punishment impossible or eternally deferred, subsequently saving lives. Perhaps Labussière, whom Kafka depicts as a kind of trickster figure, practiced a form of radical clerking—paperwork for the people, as it were. But the significant point, as Kafka points out over and over, is that paperwork makes paperwork fail, because the "proliferation of documents and details presented opportunities for resistance as well as for compliance."
Kafka's theory of paperwork loops around the same premise—paperwork can consolidate power as well as unsettle it and render it futile—and is determined to remain in history without the slightest detour into the present. One wonders about his theory of paperwork and shifting powers in relation to Wikileaks while Bradley Manning is held within state power. "The duplicitous simplicity of the trickster", as Kafka writes of Labussière, clearly doesn't apply in Manning's case, and if bureaucracy has the potential to beat state power at its own game, it's difficult to think of a way out of situations where the state's malpractices, corruption, violence, and excesses are laid bare—made transparent to all with access to the internet, even—while its powers remain firmly lodged in place.
In The Demon of Writing, Kafka circles around the same premise: "It is the story of how paperwork, even when it works, fails us. We never get what we want." As such, a psychoanalytic theory of paperwork by way of Freud's theory of parapraxis, or "the Freudian slip", much like the political theory by way of Marx that leaves Kafka unconvinced, also leaves us wanting:
"Like the symptom or dream, the slip represents an attempt by the unconscious to get its message across—an attempt that is made difficult by repression, the primary processes, and any number of measures taken by the ego to prevent embarrassment or worse. The question to ask is: What was being communicated? And the answer is: We don't know. We will never know. We can't know."
The Demon of Writing is witty and entertaining, and Kafka seems both charmed and inspired by writers and thinkers who disliked paperwork, like Rousseau, or who found both paperwork and its pushers to be quite contemptible, like Balzac, who writes of the clerks in Les employés: "It is difficult to decide whether these plumed mammals were getting stupider because of their careers, or whether they had these careers because they were born stupid. Perhaps it is equal parts Nature and Government." On the other end of the spectrum is Barthes, who predictably experienced jouissance while "dramatizing paperwork".
But as a theory of paperwork The Demon of Writing, in its impact and potential uses, is slight. How to explain, for instance, the parapraxis of paperwork—the "powers and failures of paperwork", as it were, to a "paperless" immigrant? To most, even while paperwork delays and obstructs and fails—or precisely because of this—the powers of paperwork and the administrative apparatus that supports it remain entrenched. If our stories about bureaucracy and its horrors are a means to thinking about the state, then this book shows that "we" don't always get what we want; instead, paperwork provides "us" with the opportunity to "fulfill fantasies of power and powerlessness, revenge and love". That leaves too much to chance and individual temperament, and material circumstances—economic and political systems—are able to remain very much unchanged despite these fantasies of power and revenge.
In his closing chapter, for example, Kafka talks about the short film The Paperwork Explosion that IBM commissioned in 1967 to promote its word-processor (see video, below). "Machines should work, people should think" was the message of the film, and Kafka wonders if the film could be read as a warning "against its own techno-utopianism". Perhaps, but the present shows us that IBM is a corporate giant, and in the age of smartphones and gadgets, people, more than ever, are being put to work for machines. Maybe corporations want you to think, but it's usually because they want you to think what they think.
Fantasies of revenge are compelling to consider, but if the powers of paperwork—in other words, the powers of the capitalist state—are unstable and diffuse, then it seems like Kafka's argument merely boils down to how the unconscious life of paperwork can often exceed or limit individual or collective expectations. This leaves no room for an alternative to paperwork. And as long as we have our fantasies and narratives of revenge, nothing really has to change.
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Review of Sonic Multiplicities
April 12, 2013 § Leave a comment
In yet another instance of Shameful Neglect of the Blog, I share with you a review of Sonic Multiplicities: Hong Kong Pop and the Global Circulation of Sound and Image by Yiu Fai Chow and Jeroen de Kloet that came out in Pop Matters a month ago. A whole month!
Why have I been slacking off on self-promotion? I don't know. I've been away, travelling in Sri Lanka, writing fragments in my notebook, fragments in Microsoft Word (do MS Word users still publicly admit to using MS Word?) and staring into my dogs' eyes in an attempt to find the answer(s) to various hard questions. No answers are forthcoming, but one of my dogs does like to nibble on my chin and nose–perhaps that should be enough for now.
I'm going to do a revolutionary new thing and post the entire review here, below.
When did Hong Kong popular music die? Theories abound as to the death of Hong Kong pop songs delivered in the local language of Cantonese, or Cantopop. Some say it died when Hong Kong was handed over by the British to the Beijing authorities in 1997. Others say that it died along with its two international superstars, Leslie Cheung and Anita Mui, in 2003.
Either way, facts and especially figures are marshalled up in defence of this death, with decreasing record sales being the primary means of assessing the pop music's industry ill-health. If the industry isn't making money, or as much money as it used to, then it's clear that something is ailing the Hong Kong pop music industry. The industry cannot imagine that Cantopop continues to live on in various different forms and places: as karaoke, for one, or on the internet, for another.
Sonic Multiplicities: Hong Kong Pop and the Global Circulation of Sound and Image enters into the discussion as a sort of corrective. Jointly authored by Yiu Fai Chow, assistant professor in Hong Kong Baptist University's department of Humanities and Creative writing and songwriter of Chinese pop songs, and Jeroen de Kloet, a professor in globalisation studies at the University of Amsterdam and author of China with a Cut, Sonic Multiplicities is deeply immersed in theories and techniques of cultural studies as it sets out to look at (and listen to) the multiple ways in which Cantopop has proliferated into new and different forms in late capitalism.
The issues of Chineseness and Chinese national identity is the spectre that haunts Hong Kong pop culture, and Chow and de Kloet are interested in troubling or resisting conventional "rise of China" narratives that present a stable and uniform history and Chinese subject. With Hong Kong's colonial legacy as the geopolitical starting point, the first chapter of Sonic Multiplicities is a combination of theory and autobiography that sees Chow speak on a political and personal level about the "politics of Chineseness" through articulations on nationalistic songs, or folk ballads known as minzu gequ.
The autobiographical "I" in this chapter is refreshing in an academic book, and Chow's struggle with notions of Chineseness growing up as a young boy Hong Kong, and later while living in the Netherlands, is reflected through the changing political and social mores of the '90s when, as Chow explains, "the Chinese Communist Party replaced its legitimizing ideology from communism to a market-driven nationalism". Chow's analysis of how Chineseness is performed in nationalist songs is undercut by his own ambivalence in having written songs meant to serve as nationalist propaganda and his attempts, within that particular framework, to subvert and discreetly undermine accepted, conventional narratives with his lyrics. How are newly (re)nationalised subjects allowed to dream of a nation, or a better nation?
"For the Hong Kongers at the time of imminent changes, we willed ourselves to be brave, to be Chinese, to become one with tens of thousands of those who at least looked like us. But it is not easy… It necessitates a logic of empowerment by conjuring up an enemy, the other… It also necessitates a submission of the part of us alien to the whole, the part of the city alien to the nation, the part of the future alien to the past."
To be of a nation but not of it is a theme that resounds over and over again throughout the book, and in their sensitive and generous assessment of the politics and cultures of fandom, the authors aim to show readers how "the fans" exercise their agency in their consumption of pop music and their engagement with, and celebration of, celebrities. In this sense, by focusing on two "local" celebrities from the Netherlands and Hong Kong, Marco Borsato and Leon Lai, Chow and de Kloet shift the pop cultural focus away from the US and onto what is truly a global sphere, although they recognise the hegemony that operates within "global pop culture", where North American pop stars are often claimed as "international stars" while Asian pop stars are rarely so—even when they are truly international, as was the case with Anita Mui and Leslie Cheung. In this sense, "whose international" seems to the concern here—whose cultural production is centred and considered "global"?
One of the more intriguing chapters focuses on sex and morality in Hong Kong and Chinese pop culture by way of the Edison Chen scandal. Far from adopting simple and reductive positions that sees the scandal as either bad (yet another spectacle!) or good (sex is healthy and we should enjoy it!), the authors interrogate the questions of morality that were mirrored in the media coverage of the scandal, particularly in how the subjects involved in the scandal immediately sought to control their reputation and image along conventional binaries of proper male and female behaviour.
Edison Chen, the sole male actor, sought refuge in cringe-worthy pleas and what the authors term "extreme moralism", even announcing at one point that he will need to "step away from the Hong Kong entertainment industry… to heal myself, and search my soul", in addition to performing the role of the moral, law-abiding citizen by publicly promising to assist the police in ongoing investigations. As the authors point out, the mediatised nature of the public spectacle demands the so-called salacious or transgressive act for collective consumption and, following Rene Girard, also demands a public scapegoat.
Meanwhile, with the women involved automatically framed as victims, the female stars in Chen's videos had to take another, culturally proscribed route: that of repentance with a feminine/maternal slant, as in the case of Cecilia Cheung, who said "I have to stand up for the sake of my son." The authors ensuing discussion of spectacle and conspicuous consumption—as evidenced by Edison Chen "bouncing back" from this scandal by throwing himself into his fashion business, and by co-opting the scandal for an art show—and its connection to "mediatized moral panics", which, by way of Stuart Hall's arguments in Policing the Crisis, act as "vehicles for the transmission of dominant ideologies." The more scandalised we are, it would appear, the more things stay the same.
If there is a problem in Sonic Multiplicities, it's that its ethnographic approach produces a rather shaky foundation on which the authors juggle multiple concepts and theories, going as they do from Rey Chow to Theodor Adorno, back to Guy Debord, then to Fredric Jameson. While discussions are deep-rooted and show an inclination to resist pat conclusions and easy assumptions, Sonic Multiplicities suffers from a less-than-rigorous consideration of political economy, as in the chapter on Beijing's Olympic ceremony and the production and interpellation of national subjects in spectacles of global sporting events.
In discussing Soviet and Chinese authoritarian communism, the authors rightfully resist dominant narratives in liberal democracies that tend to depict "the masses" in these countries as totally docile and utterly subject to control—being away from the local particularities and nuances, these narratives often miss out, or simply can't see, the necessarily discreet or prudent forms of resistance. But while they discuss the performative aspects of nationalist songs and speeches, the authors neglect to tease out the implications of a kind of performative Communism as espoused by China's main party, even while market reforms put into place by Deng Xiaoping since the late '70s have had everything to do with capitalism. In this sense, the authors missed out on an opportunity to interrogate China's official communist position against its increasingly capitalist reforms. While the authors state that "performative contestations" of the spectacle is not something unique to China, they neglect to draw connections between performativity and late capitalism and continued Western political and cultural hegemony in the global pop culture marketplace.
However, Sonic Multiplicities is an intriguing study of pop culture that doesn't take North America as its starting point and yet does not avoid analysis of political or cultural forms of dominance that affect and, indeed, produce these forms of "globalised" pop commodities. The authors are particularly attentive to the formation and production of both the national and diasporic subject, consistently grounding these subjects in temporal and spatial circumstances, especially or even when these circumstances are stable, shifting, or ambivalent. It manages to trouble notions of a radical or emancipatory potential in pop culture without demeaning either the cultural workers or the consumers—indeed, recognising that subjects and producers of popular culture using the internet as a platform are most often both.
Hong Kong pop is not dead, but it has transformed, mutated, and altered, and the authors want to encourage people to see, listen, and think in new and altered ways.
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this land is your land
March 5, 2013 § 6 Comments
Thus the age of anxiety and of electric media is also the age of the unconscious and of apathy. But it is strikingly the age of consciousness of the unconscious, in addition. With our central nervous system strategically numbed, the tasks of conscious awareness and order are transferred to the physical life of man, so that for the first time he has become aware of technology as an extension of his physical body.[i]
The younger of the two, who is happy to tell people "I'm the IT guy", taught me how to download YouTube videos on my overpriced, overvalued smartphone, and now the gadget puts me to sleep, too. Over the last week I've been downloading Jem and the Holograms episodes and watching them before bed. I haven't watched the cartoon in years, probably decades, but I was obsessed with it when I was younger, and while I used to want to be Jerica/Jem mainly because of her access to Synergy (by way of really funky star earrings), now I watch Jerica/Jem being perfect and I want to vomit. I see The Misfits driving tractors through mansions and I feel a true fellow-feeling of solidarity. The Misfits "are allergic to work" say one of the members of the Holograms, and they all smirk, because the Misfts are mean and they're lazy, but I can relate. All I want to do these days is have big hair, sing shit songs with my shit-sounding nasally voice, drive tractors through mansions, refuse work, and scream.
Jem and her friends are so earnest. I want to ask them why they abide by the rules that were made by someone else. Do they think they will be granted a space in hologram heaven? And if so, what does it mean to them to be good girls in the here and now? Do they get the boyfriends? The record contracts? The cool earrings? The mansion? The legacy from dead daddy?
(All of the above.)
Just when I want to write a Marxist reclamation of the Misfits, I remember that the "leader" of the group, Pizzazz, is basically a rich twat. This complicates matters, because her group-mates all come from a poor(er) backgrounds. The Misfits are made to appear "tacky"—loud, brash, uncivilised and unladylike in comparison to the docile, polite, and pastel-attired Jem and friends, who speak proper English, not slang, in modulated voices. Jem and the Holograms are a band of Kate Middletons. Even if they are not well-off, or orphans, they come from good stock. They have a claim to a legacy of good breeding. But the Misfits are always destroying things, even property.
Property is the problem. Even for Tom Branson, the sexy Irish chauffeur-revolutionary turned sexy Downton Abbey husband. Downton domesticates; it wants to tame Branson's wild side. Alas, Branson was found to be present during a protest at a Dublin castle, a protest that involved burning the said castle. The Earl of Grantham, hitherto utterly nice and utterly useless, has now found his raison d'être, or rather the raison d'être of his entire class: to be really really really angry about the destruction of property. He's really angry, the Earl. I mean, he was almost resigned to losing his property but now it is saved, and so he knows about real tragedy, the Earl, and it is with this full force of the pain of an almost-lost Downton Abbey that he takes it out on Branson. He is really angry. ALSO, HE IS AGAINST VIOLENCE AND WANTS TO KNOW IF BRANSON IS AGAINST IT, TOO? Branson capitulates; half-revolutionary, half-son in law. Yes, Branson was at the meetings where the planned this attack, but no, Branson does not condone the burning of property and violence against harmless aristocrats. Really, Branson? THEN WHY WERE YOU AT THE MEETINGS?
The writers of Downton Abbey can't come up with anything so nuanced or sensitive as such an answer might require, so they leave us with silence and the face of Allen Leech, hoping that his sad, beautiful eyes will distract us.
It does, but only for a bit.
Branson is also uncomfortable being in Downton Abbey—first as tragedy servant, then as farce family. He wants to hightail it out of there.
Then why marry the Earl's daughter? Don't you know that the Earl's daughter comes with the Earl's family and however many centuries of dead ancestors? How did you think you were going to outrun that, foxy Branson? One look at this family, Branson, should have reminded you of Marx's words: "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living."
Luckily, Branson's wife dies, leaving behind a young daughter. Branson gets to live out the life that his wife would have wanted for him. He knows this is the life she would have wanted for him because everyone else tells him this. The housekeeper, Mrs. Hughes—not a fan of the rich, as such, but like all the servants in Downton, committed to and invested in class difference—tells Branson not to be embarrassed that he's a rich fuck now, and part of a rich fuck family. She uses different words, but the message is the same. Mrs.Hughes tells him that he has "come so far", and it's a good thing.
This is a relief, as the formerly Marxist Branson is now co-manager of the vast estate Downton estate. He can forget about the people, think about profits, raise his baby, enjoy stately bedrooms, be waited on hand and foot.
He has come quite far.
I've been thinking about witches and spinsters and property. Once I started reading Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner I realised it spoke to my unmarried spinster witch self in a way that so many books by women don't, anymore, because: 1) now it's important to show how women are a hot mess in a sexy way (i.e. you must be a mess but sexually available to men, and not that those stories are wrong and shouldn't be told, but the underlying premise is that you must be sexually available to men and you must perform your femininity in this socially idealised ways and above all, please be pretty, try to be pretty); and 2) "modern" stories also remove the extended family from the equation. The assumption is that all single women the world over live lives like those of American or European women in big cities—where they're single in a way like Charlize Theron's character is single in Young Adult. It's interesting to me that the character of Lolly Willowes is given a brother as patriarchal gatekeeper after her father's death. I quoted this bit out of Juliet Flower MacCannell's The Regime of the Brother on Tumblr while I was reading it and I'm quoting it again because it's relevant:
What then does this son enjoy in replacing his father? Well, he gets to act as if, without having to take any action. A father-figure, he mimes, selectively, the father's features. But he also gets to imitate and mock up relations to all other family members, too: not only is he the "father" (but only metaphorically) he is the mother's lover (the object of her love, but only in her dreams) and he is his brother's lover (but only rhetorically—the brotherhood of man). But most of all he is his sister's boss, and really so. It seems that what he "enjoys" is the power to distort and center all familial relations on himself alone, warping the world into a fiction of fraternity, the dream of a universal, which becomes the nightmare lie of the family of man. Agent and sole heir of patriarchy's most negative features, he creates as many false leads and artificial ties as he needs to cover his destruction of his real familial roots and relations. And he thus absolves himself of any obligation toward them. He does not have to fill the father's role any more responsibly and positively than the tyrant had: he is only acting, after all. It is he who is a pro forma father, without a communal or global species-saving goal, a despot, a mute sovereign, the (only) one who really enjoys.
If there's one thing you learn about being an unmarried woman in a Tamil family is that Tamil culture really needs the sister to be bossed around; if not her father who is sadly now dead, if not her potential husband who is sadly nowhere in sight, then a brother or an uncle will do in a pinch.
What relatives don't want to talk about when they're exhorting you to get married and "start a family" is that you're out of place, overstaying your welcome in your original family, because inevitably it's about property. You must belong to a father or a husband but not exist in a liminal state of belonging to no one, especially if you're doing it on family property. (How about belonging to yourself, you might ask, and others will laugh—we all belong to someone, if not a husband for life, then maybe a corporation.) So Lolly Willowes, in the world of 1920s Britain, is shunted about from one brother's home to another brother's home because as a genteel woman she is not meant to work for a living.
The thing about being a witch woman like Lolly is that there is a still a male presence in the form of the Devil. Clearly the Devil is interchangeable with capitalist patriarchy. There's no escaping the male power. When I see the Misfits driving a tractor through the property of a rich man I feel satisfaction even while I recognise that their brand of liberal feminism is thoroughly self-serving: they are not even there for each other. Their manager is the one rubbing his hands together in glee, thinking of publicity and future sales. Behind every so-called misfit is a male manager/disciplinarian waiting to make a profit. Sometimes it's money; sometimes it's an investment in souls.
More from The Regime of the Brother:
The way it works in traditional Oedipus is that the woman is the living embodiment of a deficient male identity: wanting physically and emotionally. The girl-child is supposed to assume an identification with the father and then be left with/as nothing—unless or until she becomes a mother, her only acknowledged relation to sexual difference. But the mother is precisely what Oedipus rejects and is designed to reject, so the cycle begins anew.
The girl under patriarchy is faced with an inhuman choice: to do without an identity, or to identify with what she is not (it amounts to the same thing).
she can demand no special love—except according to a male agenda, set by a father, a husband, or a son.
This mother desires only a phallus (a baby, a son, power) and forgoes other options for her desire.
Under the modernized Regime of the Brother, however, the father/son relation ceases to have centrality. Woman potentially comes into her own.
the "patriarchy" in modernity is less a symbolic than an imaginary identification of the son with the father he has completely eliminated even from memory. He has thrown off the one—God, the king, the father—to replace it with the grammatical and legal and emotionally empty fiction of an I who stands alone and on its own: "his majesty the ego." Self-created, however, he is only a figment of his own and not the father's desire. This is the dilemma he simply refuses to acknowledge: he makes the law.
The brother denies his sister her identity, affirming his own. This is not just in the abstract, no mere question of repressed instinctual desire. Because the brother cannot recognize his absolute reliance on her for his identity, her place and her desire are "not there." While the mother of Oedipus might want her son and the phallus, the post-Oedipal sister is permitted to want nothing. To regulate woman's desire—and thereby her identity—was always the way of the patriarchy; to outlaw it and do away with her identity is a cardinal feature of the Regime of the Brother.
In volume one of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, the brother permits his sister to want nothing. It becomes quite clear how patriarchy nurtures (produces?) the regime of the brother with its careful disciplining of women's bodies. Clarissa is kept to her room for not performing her duties as daughter and sister and marrying the man the family has decided upon. The brother is an engineer of both her punishments—the potential marriage to a man she finds repulsive, and the current punishment where she is kept mainly to her room and ostracised by her family who won't see her directly or talk to her. Clarissa seems content to see her problems as her own, which is perhaps not her fault—surrounded by her odious family members on all side and increasing lack of agency/independence, she can hardly be faulted for not seeing some commonalities between the personal and the political. Her friend, Anna, to whom she writes, is clearly the only feminist killjoy of the story we can hope for, thus far. Anna zeroes in on the mother's role in Clarissa's predicament:
Your mother tells you, 'That you will have great trials: that you are under your father's discipline.'-The word is enough for me to despite them who give occasion for its use.-'That it is out of her power to help you!' And again: 'That if you have any favour to hope for, it must be by the mediation of your uncles.' I suppose you will write to the oddities, since you are forbid to see them. But can it be, that such a lady, such a sister, such a wife, such a mother, has no influence in her own family? Who, indeed, as you say, if this be so, will marry, that can live single? My choler is again beginning to rise.
Why all the fuss about marriage if a mother can only subject her female child to the whims of the father, the brother, and the uncles? Who indeed , if this be so, will marry, that can live single?
How brothers (sons?) are inducted into the regime.
I'm not a mother, just as aunt, but I can see how boys grow into young men, and how the ideal of masculinity means that boys often have to suppress the part(s) of them that are sensitive, tender, loving, affectionate, in order to "become a man". And when you notice how it becomes a requirement for boys to hurt others in order to achieve this ideal—then you truly realise how men are made. Hurting others is part of the deal; it is how men are defined as men. To put others in their place and to claim their space as yours. And it hurts to watch young boys who have been taught not to hurt others struggle with the full force of societal expectations that makes it (implicitly or explicitly) known that they will have to hurt others in order to become men.
The eternal problem: We need to talk about sons/we're always talking about sons.
There has been "unrest" in Sabah for the last few weeks. Property is the problem. Who "owns" Sulu?
The Malaysian twitterati, its bourgeois heart ever in its proper place, is grieving over the death of Malaysia's policemen involved in the "clashes" with "armed militants". Malaysian policemen have died while trying to take out these intruders/militants/insurgents (i.e. they were protecting the nation). What's interesting about the nation that is protected is that we still don't want to think about how some of us are more protected than others. Sabah, on the East Coast, is one of the poorest states in Malaysia; there is no protection, it seems, from economic impoverishment. But there are tweets from the West Malaysian public thanking the "security forces" for their service to this country. There are tweets praying for their souls in heaven or wherever they might be. Everywhere on Twitter people seem to be simultaneously praying and wishing violence upon the enemy. This ritual is meant to keep the good ones, we the citizens, safe.
The police. The soldiers. Law and order. There are self-proclaimed Progressive Activists ™ who bring the MILF into the picture and cry out "the militants are everywhere in Sabah!" with every tweet. The macho politicians and lovers of Malaysia who cheer on a "military offensive" with encouraging, optimistic tweets like, "Kill or be killed" or "Just gas and smoke 'em".
Malaysian Defence Minister, Zahid Hamidi, tweets about the military assault as a "clean-up operation". (Tweet is in Malay.)
People might be of a land, but there are false borders now demarcating different nations and these borders may not be trespassed.
Meanwhile: "Kiram's people are demanding Malaysia recognize the sultanate owns Sabah and share profits from economic development in the state."
Profits. Economic development. Who "owns" Sulu and who profits? Malaysians don't really care, but "we" are here now, and "they" are not; property is for those who claim it by any means possible. And perhaps the Sulu sultanate is also flexing its muscles. As for the people who are put to work on these lands?
"Filipinos living in the tension-gripped Sabah territory in Northern Borneo said they have been segregated according to tribe and that their movements have been limited and closely monitored by Malaysian authorities."
"A farmer who tried to enter the tight security cordon surrounding the heavily armed men was turned back by the police early on Monday.
Police feared the food supplies he was carrying could fall into the hands of the gunmen.
The farmer, who wanted to be known only as Ghafur, said he was trying to get to his oil palm farm for his twice-a-month harvest."
According to them, the violent encounters in Sabah villages have been displacing some of the 600,000 Filipinos quietly living and working there, forcing them to flee to ARMM or causing them to be deported. But the region may not have enough resources to feed and house them.
At the same time, the conflict has been affecting the people in ARMM by driving up the prices of commodities, usually sourced from nearby Sabah, they said.
The Malaysian twitterati is not impressed with how our government for its soft-handed approach. They have ideas, these Malaysians, and it involves Malaysia flexing its military might. We must let the intruders know that "they" are on "our" soil, and the military will convey this message. Men on Twitter berate our ineffectual Prime Minister, exhort him to "be a man" and protect this country, take action. I have no interest in defending our Prime Minister, and as much as I might want to write a separate 3,000 word essay on gender performance and construction, this is not the point (although it's part of the point). But this demand of a Prime Minister to be a man, a father figure, to exercise force and violence if he must, to defend his property is so chilling precisely because these demands are not self-aware. Malaysians on Twitter—a good number of them of the upwardly mobile, "educated" and comfortable, their lives mediated by gadgets and social media, are okay with owning property and being property—tweet about the stupidity of feudalism and think capitalist democracies are the best thing, the ultimate manifestation of human progress. Yet, they want to be protected by a violent patriarch. They want a "man" in charge, not in form necessarily, but in spirit.
They have no time for history, or maybe it's just an inconvenience in a time when we have to be militarily efficient. Improve border control. Prioritise domestic security. Stamp out terrorist activity. Enemies are everywhere. We must smoke 'em out.
So the Prime Minister demonstrates his manhood. Or maybe the postcolonial nation performs its masculinity.
Be a man. This land is your land.
[i] Marshall McLuhan, "The Gadget Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis" in Understanding Media
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Bookmarklets on the iPad are a great tool that is not easily understood. This brief presentation introduces what bookmarklets are, why you want to use them and shows you how to get started. This presentation will eliminate the confusion!
Clipping is a handy way to collect important slides you want to go back to later.


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all this republicanism ,its everywhere :(
Daily MailShared publicly -
'I'm sure the royals put maximum pressure on this woman': Anti-monarchist Morrissey blames KATE for death of hoax call nurse
11 comments
It's about right. It's one thing to gain publicity by being controversial but he doesn't manage it without being thick. But why is the Mail obliging him?
cant stand the man or his music and why is kate to blame it was just a rotten stupid joke that went wrong and some people of diffent culture feel shame in a ways us in uk dont
I just like to add he's not doing this for publicity, it's just the way he is. Watch some of his interviews, he's very political.
+Richard Brown So what makes you think it isn't for publicity. Do you know him that well? as for loving him, that's a bit strong
Jesus Christ! Firstly I love him, but I'm not stupid enough to agree with everything he says. But also said he's over stepped the mark. So what is your point? Try reading the whole thread in future!
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It looks like Canon has dropped retail prices on all of its first generation Cinema EOS cameras. Check out the breakdown of the new/old prices below. [Read more…]
Major Canon 1D C Price Drop Coming?
Canon Hong Kong appears to have dropped the price of the Canon EOS 1D C by a about $8,000 HKD from $61,999 HKD to $54,000 HKD, which is equivalent to roughly $7,000 USD. These reports come from local Canon dealers who are supposedly legitimately selling the camera at the new retail price. There has been no corresponding drop in the US – yet. [Read more…]
Canon EOS C100 Mark II Unveiled
Canon has announced the EOS C100 Mark II cinema camera with 1080/60p recording, several design enhancements and standard Dual Pixel CMOS AF. [Read more…]
Canon CINE-SERVO 17-120mm T2.95 Lens Unveiled for EOS Cinema Cameras
The Canon CINE-SERVO 17-120mm T2.95 lens is a new servo zoom lens for Cinema EOS cameras like the C500, C300 and C100. It covers a Super35 image circle an remains T2.95 through 91mm and achieves a max iris of T3.6 at the full 120mm zoom end. [Read more…]
Canon EOS Cinema Servo Zoom Lens Coming to NAB?
NAB is just over a week away and there have been no reliable rumors or leaks of new cameras from Canon yet. It's looking like we won't see a new Canon EOS Cinema camera at NAB 2014. However, a new screenshot has surfaced showing off what appears to be a new lens for the Canon EOS Cinema line – this one with a servo zoom ring. [Read more…]
Canon EOS Cinema Cameras Get ISO 80,000 via Firmware Updates
Canon has issued firmware updates for its C100, C300 and C500 cinema cameras that expand the sensitivity range to ISO 80,000, along with several other feature additions and enhancements.
The EOS C100 and C300 firmware updates will be available from Canon in November 2013, while the C500 firmware update will be available in December 2013.
Check out the feature excerpts for each of the cameras below. [Read more…]


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Activity from poll results
Poll Round-Up – Week of December 1, 2012
Posted by Team Swagbucks on Mon, December 10th, 2012 at 3:00 pm
Oh my goodness, Swaggernauts, are you as overwhelmed with the holidays as I am? So much to do, so little time. But no matter how busy I am, I still start my day with answering the Daily Poll. Let's see what Swag Nation had to say this past week.
If we took all the poll results from last week and combined them into one Swaggernaut we would have someone who will most miss Twinkies, occasionally honks their car horn, saves all their Swag Bucks for themselves, is going to check out the new Discounts & Savings section under the Redeem menu, believes in love at first sight, doesn't watch boxing and every once in a while can be found washing their pot holders. Does this sound like you?
Want to see the results from individual days? Go to the Daily Polls page and click on the Previous Polls area. If you have a suggestion for an upcoming poll send them to firstname.lastname@example.com
As I've said, I start my day with the Daily Poll. What is the first thing you do on Swagbucks on an average day?
Poll Round-Up – Week of 1/31
Posted by Team Swagbucks on Mon, February 7th, 2011 at 7:00 am
It's Monday morning – time for our weekly poll round-up! It's almost tax season, and it seems that a lot of you have different methods when it comes to filing your federal tax documents. I personally use TurboTax to file mine, and I pretty much dread it every year. It looks like a lot of […]
Survivor Predictive Poll Results
Posted by Team Swagbucks on Fri, April 30th, 2010 at 11:00 am
Last night was definitely a doozy of an episode, with the recently merged tribe still engaged in a power struggle. Jerri won her first ever immunity idol, and Russell found the hidden immunity idol and played it in what turned out to be his biggest misstep playing the game so far. Ultimately Amanda of the […]
American Idol Predictive Poll Results!
Posted by Team Swagbucks on Thu, April 15th, 2010 at 7:00 am
The American Idol Results Show is over, and now we're down to 7 contestants, having sent home Andrew Garcia and Katie Stevens; Michael Lynche remained safe. I'm sure you remember that TSG decided to put you psychic powers to the test – if the Swag Nation correctly predicted both the Bottom 3 AND the two […]
Geo-Caching Update
Posted by Team Swagbucks on Wed, April 7th, 2010 at 7:00 am
Wow. TSG is floored. The feedback about Swagbucks maybe getting involved in Geo-Cachingwas absolutely astounding. 113 comments?! You guys love your Geo-Caching. Judging from the comments and the results of our poll, it seems that a lot of you are interested in Geo-Cachingfor Swag Bucks. Here's how the poll results look: Clearly, if we were […]
NCAA Final Four Predictive Poll Update
Posted by Team Swagbucks on Mon, April 5th, 2010 at 1:00 pm
Hey Swaggernauts, last week I put it to you to predict the outcome of the two Final Four games this past weekend as well as the total number of points scored. You correctly predicted that Duke would roll to the championship game tonight, but unfortunately you didn't pick Butler to defeat Michigan State. Don't feel […]
Poll Round Up – 3/8
Posted by Team Swagbucks on Mon, March 8th, 2010 at 11:49 am
Monday is here again and I know a lot of you dread it. But, we've got new polls every Monday! That should take some of the sting out of another school/work week beginning. And if that doesn't…well Spring Break is coming up. That said, there are 6 new polls on the polls page for you […]
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Are there any surround sound settings on your receiver that are turned on? If so, try turning them off.
Also, are you using the optical out? If so, try using the RCA jacks instead. It could be that the changes in the feeds you talk about might be causing a switch from 5.1 surround to 2 channel stereo, or some other type of glitch in the audio stream on the optical out, confusing the receiver. (Something that might be interesting to try, get the TV in it's echo mode, then turn the receiver off and back on (or change sources on the receiver) and see if it fixes the issue.)
Also, make sure you don't have any "entertainment" mode set (menu, setup, entertainment), although I don't think it would have any affect on the sound when you the the internal speakers off).
This sound crazy, but it is absolutely true.
(My system consists of the TV (LN46A550), and a Panasonic DVD recorder, and Panasonic Home Theater in a Box. The Samsung TV is the only change to the system)
I have the on board speaker turned off on the TV so that I can use the much better sound from my Panasonic HTIB. That is how it has always been, with two previous TVs.
I have no cable. Just rabbit ears. I get all local channels without much problem, other than tweaking the antenna occasionally.
BUT I have a very strange audio problem with my TV (LN46A550).
On two channels, both major network affiliates, and only on those channels, the sound switches to an echo chamber effect under very specific circumstances.
When the broadcast goes to commercial, or switches between local and network broadcast the sound is like an echo chamber. If I momentarily click to another channel, and then back, the sound it restored to normal.
If I watch programs using the DVD recorder's tuner, this does not happen.
I called Tech Support, and was told that unless the problem was on all Channels, it was not the fault of the TV. I asked whether or not there might be a software update for my TV, and the tech said that if I updated the software I would void my TV's Warrantee!!! He was NOT helpful at all.
Anyone have a clue what might be causing this? All feedback gratefully recieved