slanderous

slanderous @ 2008-09-24T17:51:00

2008-09-24T22:51:59Z

Pitchfork is streaming The Gits documentary for free all week!

Turtlist Media: Asian American Media Production

2008-09-09T00:29:10Z

My student Jason Lee started this fabulous project to distribute his films and also to support independent Asian American media makers called Turtlist Media. Please visit his site and consider making a donation by purchasing his series of short films called Chains of Attraction on DVD!

LJ Appeals!

2008-02-21T17:35:06Z

Does anyone have The Brat's "Swift Moves," "Attitudes," and "Starry Night" in MP3 form, and can upload it for me to download? Fiona needs it for class, but our university internet connection seems to be blocking our, er, efforts.

What I Am Doing This Weekend in LA

2007-09-18T23:40:59Z

The second weekend of Jordan Crandall's exhibition "Showing" brings Mimi Nguyen from Chicago and John Paul Ricco from Toronto, along with a selection of videos curated by Robert Summers called "Showing Shame: Shameless Showing." Mimi's talk focuses on the circuit between star and fan, using the work of JJ Chinois; John will give a performance with Eleanor Kaufman and then a theoretical presentation about the event of mutually shared exposure between bodies.

Please visit the online catalog for "Showing" at http://www.telic.info/catalogs/showing for more information and an upcoming schedule.

Saturday, 9/22
Noon - 4pm
"Showing Shame: Shameless Showing" screening program curated by Robert Summers (see description below)
4pm
JJ Chinois music video and selections by Mimi Nguyen
5pm
Presentation by Mimi Nguyen (see description below)
7pm
Performance by Eleanor Kaufman and John Paul Ricco
Presentation by John Paul Ricco (see description below)

On Friday, September 21, a screening program called "Identity Masquerades" will run during the normal gallery hours of 12-6pm, including clips from Busby Berkeley, Gold Diggers of 1933 and 42nd St (1933); Kenneth Anger, Puce Moment (1949) and Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965); Alan Calpe, Perfidia (2006); Jack Smith, Flaming Creatures (1963); and Paul Morrissey/Andy Warhol, Flesh (1968).

TELIC Arts Exchange
975 Chung King Road
Los Angeles, CA 90012
T: 213.344.6137
http://www.telic.info
info@telic.info

SHOWING SHAME: SHAMELESS SHOWING
curated by Robert Summers
Artists/Videos:
Lee Adams, Porca Miseria (2007)
Hoang Tan Nguyen, Forever Bottom (1999)
Vaginal Davis & Billy MIller, Tom Cruise Loves Women (2005)
SUPERM (Slava Mogutin & Brian Kenny), "TBA" (2007)
(New video by SUPERM will be its US premiere)

The selected videos show various enactments of the artists and/or their friends performing themselves in acts of shame. With regard to "queer" subjectivity and shame, I draw on the work of Eve Sedgwick who argues that shame can be understood in relation to "queer" - as she pointedly states, "queer" is a term that "might usefully be thought of as referring in the first place to [persons who are tied to shame] ... those whose sense of identity is for some reason tuned most durably to the note of shame". But, I argue that even though there is shame there is also the shameless, it is never far behind, which I think is important to examine in relation to "queer/-ness" - which would push Sedgwick's argument. Indeed, I see no reason to disconnect shame from shameless - after all they are but a suffix apart. All in all, I hope these films show something valuable: I hope they show something shame/less.

MIMI NGUYEN's presentation will focus on technologies of the self and of the star (assembling a desirable commodity body), using the work of JJ Chinois - the transgendered persona of artist Lynne Chan. As an aspirant to celebrity, JJ Chinois critiques and appropriates the pleasures of pop stardom in global culture in the early 21st century and does so by sexing up Bruce Lee's star image in ways that we haven't seen before. Overall Nguyen's presentation will explore the circuits between star and fan, and issues of performance, embodiment, and identity.

Mimi Thi Nguyen is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women's Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Previously, she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Rackham School of Graduate Studies and Assistant Professor in Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. She earned her PhD. in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, with a Designated Emphasis on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is currently completing her first book, Representing Refugees, which examines the historical production and mobilization of refugee affect for varied political and cultural projects (such as commemoration, humanitarianism, consumption and multicultural nationalism).

She continues to situate her work within transnational feminist cultural studies with her next project, focusing on fashion, citizenship and transnationality. She is co-editor with Thuy Linh Tu of Alien Encounters: Pop Culture in Asian America (Duke University Press, 2007) and author of multiple essays on Asian American, queer, and punk subcultures, digital technologies, and Vietnamese diasporic culture, published in academic collections, on-line publications and popular magazines.

JOHN PAUL RICCO's presentation will draw from Jean-Luc Nancy, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler, and Leo Bersani, to focus on "the event of mutually-shared exposure": the separating-connecting spacing that exists between, amongst, and around any one or more bodies, in varying degrees of intimacy or closeness. He will look at the ethical and political questions this provokes, involving social bonds formulated through a "non-identitarian narcissism": a space, cutting transversally across the circuit of voyeurism and exhibitionism, in which one performs neither solely for oneself nor for some objectified other, but for any number of other ones in the virtual-corporeal networks of distance and connection.

John Paul Ricco is a theorist, curator and performance artist, and is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art, Media Theory, and Criticism at the University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada. He is the author of The Logic of the Lure, and a number of essays on contemporary artists. Currently, he is organizing a three-part exhibition of contemporary queer video, to open at V-Tape in Toronto in January 2008, and working on his next book: The Decision Between Us: aporetic aesthetics and the unbecoming community. For "Showing," Ricco is premiering a body-based performance installation and artist talk, on narcissism and the space of bare naked exposure.
TELIC Arts Exchange is a platform for events and discussion.
With an emphasis on social exchange, interactivity, and public participation,
we set out to produce a critical engagement with new media and culture.

TELIC Arts Exchange is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization.

slanderous @ 2007-08-16T11:44:00

2007-08-16T16:45:36Z

A friend of mine wants to actually download videos from YouTube.com for her class (so that access is not contingent on the videos staying up on YouTube.com or internet access). Is that possible?

New Project!

2007-08-07T02:31:15Z

My good friend and colleague Minh-ha Pham (a postdoctoral fellow in the Asian Pacific American studies program in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University) have started a new fashion commentary blog, Threadbared! Come check us out. So far, Minh-ha is on a roll and I'm, well, not, but hopefully I'll be contributing very, very soon!

Lyra! Iorek!

2007-05-04T23:48:25Z

slanderous @ 2007-02-01T11:37:00

2007-02-01T17:39:30Z

Today's semi-related tangent in Intro to Feminist Theory was about 1980s hair metal, and how to think about men with big hair and spandex shorts.

slanderous @ 2006-11-12T22:37:00

2006-11-13T04:37:00Z

I love this closing dedication in Ann Laura Stoler's edited collection Haunted by Empire:

This book is dedicated to my children, Tessa and Bruno, who enter adulthood at a moment when U.S. empire continues to bear down deftly and crudely, in so many places, with enduring force. Let us hope that their generation recognizes the rhetorical and material forms in which U.S. empire sustains itself, that they don't confuse imperial stretch for compassion, that their understandings of empire's intimacies confront its tortures, and that their working vocabularies can identity those gradations of intervention and sovereignty that call themselves by so many nonimperial names.

Not my best title, but they wanted a short one!

2006-11-07T03:51:53Z

MCRTW SEMINAR SERIES
FALL 2006

The McGill Centre for Research and Teaching on Women is pleased to present:

MIMI THI NGUYEN
Assistant Professor, Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies,
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

who will speak on

“BEAUTY AND THE BURKA: MAKEOVERS AND GLOBAL FEMINISMS”

Thursday, November 9, 2006
4:00 P.M.
Wilson Hall, Room 103
3506 University Street

Pat Benetar- Invincible

2006-11-03T03:48:02Z

I love YouTube for giving me the video to my most favorite song ever.

slanderous @ 2006-10-30T23:12:00

2006-10-31T05:12:25Z

I want to eat all the Halloween candy I bought for the children.

JOB AD

2006-10-16T01:45:21Z

AMERICAN INDIAN STUDIES/GENDER & WOMEN STUDIES, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
JOINT TENURE LINE--ASSISTANT PROFESSOR

The American Indian Studies (AIS) and Gender and Women Studies (GWS) programs at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign invite applications for a joint full-time tenure track faculty position at the rank of assistant professor. The successful candidate will hold a tenure track percentage position in both units with the tenure home in either AIS or GWS. This position demonstrates an exciting collaboration between AIS and GWS. We seek colleagues whose teaching, research, and scholarship will contribute to curricular and program development in both units and whose work provides critical perspectives on the intersections of gender, race, sexuality, and indigeneity – including American Indian, First Nations, Indigenous, and Hawaii/ Pacific perspectives—in a global/transnational context. Field open: Applicants in fine arts, humanities, and social sciences are encouraged to apply. Special consideration will be given to candidates whose work is clearly centered within indigenous and feminist studies. Applicants will hold a PhD by start date of August 2007. (ABD applicants with PhD completion by August 2007 will be considered.)

To ensure full consideration, applications must be received by December 1, 2006. Salary is competitive.

Applicants should submit application letter, C.V., two writing samples, and three reference letters to: Professor Wanda Pillow, Director AIS/NAH Professor Cris Mayo, Director GWS Native American House University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 1204 W. Nevada Urbana, IL 61801 (217) 265-9870

The University of Illinois is an Affirmative Action, Equal Opportunity Employer.

slanderous @ 2006-08-09T15:36:00

2006-08-09T20:39:12Z

Wendy Brown's latest monograph, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire is going to be electrifying.

Tolerance is generally regarded as an unqualified achievement of the modern West. Emerging in early modern Europe to defuse violent religious conflict and reduce persecution, tolerance today is hailed as a key to decreasing conflict across a wide range of other dividing lines-- cultural, racial, ethnic, and sexual. But, as political theorist Wendy Brown argues in Regulating Aversion, tolerance also has dark and troubling undercurrents.

Dislike, disapproval, and regulation lurk at the heart of tolerance. To tolerate is not to affirm but to conditionally allow what is unwanted or deviant. And, although presented as an alternative to violence, tolerance can play a part in justifying violence--dramatically so in the war in Iraq and the War on Terror. Wielded, especially since 9/11, as a way of distinguishing a civilized West from a barbaric Islam, tolerance is paradoxically underwriting Western imperialism.

Brown's analysis of the history and contemporary life of tolerance reveals it in a startlingly unfamiliar guise. Heavy with norms and consolidating the dominance of the powerful, tolerance sustains the abjection of the tolerated and equates the intolerant with the barbaric. Examining the operation of tolerance in contexts as different as the War on Terror, campaigns for gay rights, and the Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance, Brown traces the operation of tolerance in contemporary struggles over identity, citizenship, and civilization.

slanderous @ 2006-08-09T14:55:00

2006-08-09T19:56:53Z

For the nerds, listen to a recent lecture by Wendy Brown, Professor of Political Science, at UC Berkeley, called, “American Nightmare: Neoconservatism, Neoliberalism, and De-democratization.” ("Abstract: The lecture explores convergences between American neo-conservatism--a fierce political and moral program--and neo-liberalism--an economic and political rationality formally free of moral dress. It explores how these convergences extend the clear-cutting of liberal democratic institutions and the transformation of democratic subjectivity already underway from other sources in the past half century.")

slanderous @ 2006-05-08T17:52:00

2006-05-08T21:54:17Z

I thought I was leaving Wednesday, but no, I'm leaving tomorrow for the Bay Area! I don't know what to wear! Eep! In any case, I'll be in town for a week, and will be giving a talk on Monday at UC Santa Cruz. Hopefully I'll get to see everyone I missed last time!

slanderous @ 2006-05-07T23:34:00

2006-05-08T03:42:28Z

icki is selling a set of postcards of live band shots! Featuring The Kills, The Hives, Miami, Supersnazz, Thee Mighty Ceasars, Teengenerate and more! Help him save for my birthday present and buy a set or, if live band shots aren't your thing, a print of one of his other photographs found at either his website (http://www.ickibod.com/action), his blog (http://icki.blogspot.com), or his flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/icki/). I happen to think he's a genius, so buy a print from him before he becomes uber-famous. He has other postcard series in mind, too, so give him feedback on what you might like to see!

slanderous @ 2006-04-26T13:03:00

2006-04-26T17:07:04Z

As a part of the UC Santa Cruz sociology colloquium series on "Social Justice, Social Movements, Social Science," I will be presenting "Napalmed Girls Go to Washington City: Image, Affect, and Historical Justice in Transnational Feminist Critical Practices." Come check me out on May 15, 12:30-2 p.m., College Eight Red Room!

slanderous @ 2006-04-05T01:56:00

2006-04-05T05:57:39Z

Oh my god, I remember the song but I never saw the video until now -- Kate Bush's 1980 hit "Babooshka." What's with the Red Sonja outfit?

slanderous @ 2006-04-01T21:09:00

2006-04-02T02:14:05Z

Has anyone else been following the efforts of the Council of Fashion Designers of America to petition Washington for intellectual property controls on design? While European Union law already contains similar provisions, the CFDA proposal would prevent anyone from copying an original clothing design in the United States and give designers the exclusive right to make, import, distribute, and sell clothes based on their designs. See, for instance, this recent New York Times' article (subscription only), called "O.K., Knockoffs, This Is War:"

Designers like Diane Von Furstenberg, Narciso Rodriguez and Zac Posen have been journeying there to lobby for copyright protections like those governing books, music and other creative arts. Mr. Posen was in Washington on Tuesday with Steven Kolb, the executive director of the council, who said a bill could be introduced in Congress as early as today by Representative Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican.

Mr. Rodriguez designed the white slip wedding gown worn by Caroline Bessette Kennedy in 1996, a style that inspired innumerable brides to don copies, and Ms. Von Furstenberg's signature wrap dresses have been copied so many times that she may no longer wish to be associated with them. They are asking lawmakers to support a proposed fashion design anti-piracy act.

If passed, it could change the retail landscape in ways merchants and designers are only beginning to absorb. Major department stores with private labels, which often include close copies of designer looks, are divided on the proposed law because they also do business with the offended designers.

At the same time a prohibition on copying dresses, coats and the like would seem to open an impossibly murky debate over how to separate a duplicate garment from one simply inspired by someone else's work and part of a fashion trend.

This is absurd. Is someone going to copyright the cowl neck or the corset? (Diane von Furstenberg, you can't possibly believe that you "own" the wrap dress.) Grecian pleats or Victorian mutton sleeves? And I can't imagine that retailers are going to be on board with this anti-copying campaign. It seems economically and practically unviable. Would H&M and Forever 21 be prevented from offering their own versions of "formal" shorts or obi-styled belts? I'd like to see the CFDA and the feds enforce this proposal.

And it seems like only yesterday that this earlier article in the Christian Science Monitor was praising the fashion industry for its approach to copyright against the recent anti-piracy panics in the US music and film industries:

For virtually all players in fashion, some form of derivation, recombination, imitation, revival of old styles, and outright knockoff is the norm. Few denounce, let alone sue, the appropriator for "creative theft" They're too busy trying to stay ahead of the competition through the sheer power of their design and marketing prowess.

The fashion world understands that creativity is a collaborative and community affair. It's far too big, robust, and evolving for any one player to "own" as a legal entitlement. Long lineages of couturiers from Balenciaga to Ungaro, Chanel to Lagerfield, and Gucci to Tom Ford have shown that designers necessarily must learn, adopt, and adapt from those who have blazed previous trails. If one were to deconstruct their work, an evolutionary chain of distinct themes, references, design nuances, and outright appropriations could be discerned.

...

Through fashion we have a ringside seat on the ecology of creativity in a world of networked communication. Ideas arise, evolve through collaboration, gain currency through exposure, mutate in new directions, and diffuse through imitation. The constant borrowing, repurposing, and transformation of prior work are as integral to creativity in music and film as they are to fashion.

Although the music and film industries acknowledge the cultural commons as a source of inspiration, they then turn around and try to claim exclusive ownership of the results. The Disney Company, for example, has "taken private" dozens of folk stories and literary classics while contributing nothing to the public domain. Such one-way privatization of our culture makes it difficult for new creators to build from works that were themselves derivative at an earlier point.

ETA: Here's a Slate editorial about the anti-piracy proposal, and the blog of a lawyer who works on fashion and intellectual property, called Counterfeit Chic.

slanderous @ 2006-03-28T18:20:00

2006-03-28T23:21:51Z

Most of the posts on this LJ are friends only. Today I noticed that there are all these people with me on their lists. So please comment (introducing yourself) and I might add you too!

A great op-ed on the new ABC show "Miracle Workers"

2006-03-24T02:59:48Z

"'Miracle' T.V. show lacks reality"

How can you tell when your nation's health care system has collapsed?

One sure sign is the creation of a television program that offers access to health care to the desperately ill as a prize. The show has now materialized on American TV screens. Everything about it shows just how badly broken health care in America truly is.

"Miracle Workers," which appears Monday nights on ABC, offers the services of "miracle doctors" to people with horrible medical problems. The show's Web site says that the program is an example of the network's "tradition of developing reality programming that makes impossible dreams come true."

In a nutshell, the show finds people with serious medical problems who nonetheless have the right stuff to be appealing as well as suitably grateful to their television benefactors. The program matches them up with teams of doctors and nurses who have been selected for their buccaneering style, willingness to push the envelope and good looks.

So how exactly does a show that hooks up desperate patients with hospitals falling over one another for the free publicity their best and brightest docs can create square with our health care system? Watch the show and you will know that if you are lucky, comb your hair and are willing to dispense with any semblance of privacy, a TV producer and his medical advisers may show up at your house and direct you to a team of well-scrubbed young health care professionals with loads of time to spend with you.

These benefactors will smooth the way to your treatment and follow-up care by picking up whatever part of the tab you cannot pay. That is health care reality-TV style.

In reality, a quarter of us have either no health insurance or lousy coverage. No one has a doctor who isn't using much of the time once spent on patients talking to bureaucrats on the telephone to try and get approval for a prescription or a diagnostic test. A large number of us spend forever in emergency rooms to get basic care. There are many children who get no medical or dental care. The waiting times to see the doctor grow and grow.

We are bombarded with ads telling us to buy drugs because a man can throw a football through a tire in his backyard thereby arousing his mate or a butterfly will alight on our pillow if we swallow a capsule when we cannot sleep.

No one has any idea why anything costs what it does, but it would be dangerous to go to another country to get the same drug at a much lower price. The strategy of the payers hired to look out for our health is to routinely turn down requests for reimbursement in the hopes that we will simply give up.

Oh, almost forgot, the cost of this pathetic mishmash of a bloated, inefficient and sometimes dangerous health care system continues to grow right alongside the numbers of people losing insurance coverage or benefits. That is the harsh reality.

What is really irritating about "Miracle Workers" is that the show makes health care seem a privilege, something you are lucky to get, rather than something you should have as a matter of right.

It suggests that what is most exciting about medicine occurs on the frontier, as if having your migraines treated, your alcoholism rehabilitated, your back pain relieved, your wheelchair properly sized or your congestive heart failure managed would not be miraculous if they happened today for everyone with these problems.

Worse still, the show sends out the message minute after phony minute that there is hope. Well, if you have a lot of money there is. If you don't, then this show is about as close as you are going to get to cutting-edge health care.

What "Miracle Workers" should make us do is shut off our televisions and sit down and write a letter or an e-mail to our congressional representatives and those who aspire to this office.

Point out that the rising cost of health care is crushing American business, leaving children in pain or disabled, forcing families to choose between eating and seeing a doctor, and creating a huge underclass of people who have a shrinking number of hospitals and doctors who will treat them.

Then note that if they want your vote, they had better be prepared with a plan to fix these problems. If they aren't, then in the real world of health care where you live, it will be a miracle if they get elected.

Arthur Caplan is director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Glenn McGee is director of the Alden March Bioethics Institute at Albany Medical Center.

Mary Weiss (Shangri-Las) to Record with the Reigning Sound

2006-03-21T16:23:20Z

Oh my god, this is the best news! Stolen from icki.

MARY WEISS TO RECORD WITH THE REIGNING SOUND ON NORTON RECORDS!

Norton Records is proud to announce the signing of Mary Weiss, lead singer of the SHANGRI-LAS, to the Norton cavalcade of stars... Mary is set for a spring NYC recording date with THE REIGNING SOUND... Billy Miller and Greg Cartwright to produce ... Mary is selecting from a batch of great new comps from today's most talked-about songwriters including Greg Cartwright, John Felice, Andy Shernoff, Jackie DeShannon and others TBA... Mary's first album of new material since 1965... Mary is geared up for her return to the studio and STAGE... and so are we!

Mary was fifteen years old when she and her sister Elizabeth (Betty) began singing with identical twins Margie and Mary Ann Ganser in their Cambria Heights neighborhood of Queens, New York, as students at Andrew Jackson High School. They soon came to the attention of George "Shadow" Morton and shot into the charts with massive hits on the Red bird label including Remember (Walking In The Sand), Leader Of The Pack, Give Him A Great Big Kiss, I Can Never Go Home Anymore, Give Us Your Blessings and Out In The Streets. The Shangri-Las gave a voice to real teenagers, with Mary's explosive lead vocals delivering emotion packed melodramas that made them one of the most consistently exciting groups of the day.

Look for our interview with Mary on the Norton website in April, when you will learn where she's been and where she's going, setting the record straight about her days as a teenage rock n' roll star.

Says Mary: "I'm excited by the opportunity to work with Billy, Miriam, some great writers and a kick ass rock n' roll band!" Hail, Mary Weiss, ultimate cultural icon!

slanderous @ 2006-03-06T22:20:00

2006-03-07T03:21:17Z

I made my graduate students go, "Awwww!" today when I told them about Joaquin Phoenix mouthing, "I love you, River," to the camera during the reading of Best Actor nominees.

slanderous @ 2006-02-17T22:52:00

2006-02-18T03:53:44Z

For the nerds -- UC Press is having a book sale! Lots of scholarly books under ten bucks! Time for you to add to your collection, bklyndispatch!

P.S. The press server is moving veeery slowly.