Wednesday, 31 December 2008

Happy Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment!

I pray neither you nor yours hear the squeak before having the opportunity to wear one for a few decades.

Dec 31, 2008 7:02:50 PM

2 Comments

Meeg

Your post is giving me the howling fantods.

Posted by: Meeg | Sunday, 04 January 2009 at 09:39 PM

Trevor J

Oddly enough, I decided to re-read that this year and noticed this time around that 2009 probably is YDAU. Can't wait for the Year of Glad. Ending Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office, Or Mobile (sic) can't be beat, though.

Posted by: Trevor J | Wednesday, 14 January 2009 at 10:35 AM

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Things I've learned at the MLA I The most cogent justification of the discipline to those outside the discipline is pedagogical. Easily transmissable forms of inquiry should be the foundation both of undergraduate teaching and graduate professionalization. Charismatic arguments are compelling because they are reproducible. All compelling arguments are not charismatic. ("No school of Fish.") Time robs Peters ("the moment of Theory has passed") to pay Pauls ("the moment of Theory has passed, but Agamben is damn charismatic"). Doctoral institutions should require all graduate students to publish four articles before awarding them a Ph.D. Similarly: Ph.D. candidates should submit required coursework by the third week of graduate seminars. A conference in which participants only present what's "in the longer version of this paper" is a fantastic idea. The most efficient way to test the mettle of a candidate who has written seven books is a twenty-minute Q&A session before a potentially hostile audience. Adorno said that? Theory allows people to adopt a quick, quasi-sophisticated detachment from texts. What quick, quasi-sophisticated students of Theory thought about texts last week is perpetually naive and stupid. These thoughts are naive and stupid because they address a) the surface of the text before discovering what was beneath it, b) the new surface of the text discovered beneath the former, then c) discovering the new surface is no further beneath anything than the former, necessitating the discovery of another new surface beneath the formerly new one ... Even when presenters insist there are no necessary connections between the panelists presentations, some people insist on finding them anyway. (These ideas are brought to you in one form or another by Michael Bérubé and Amanda Anderson.)
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It's always already been the end of epic film. Whether he knows it or not—and "he" being Adam Kotsko, I'll bet he knows it—this Weblog post is less about the formal fit between epic and the television serial than the relation of film to the episodic form. I know that sounds backwards—what with MOVIES! being PRESENTED! on SCREENS! the SIZE! of WYOMING!—but the compounded facts of run time and the modern American attention span necessitate we consider film the proper realm of the self-contained episode. Even films which promise sequels announce their completion in terms of whatever -ology they embrace. Films should be about something in the original, locative sense of the word. They should surround some subject matter, be "on every side" "wholly or partially," as per the OED. They should be self-contained. Not that they shouldn't be sweeping—you can frame Guernica or a sublimely panoramic view of the Hudson River and slap it on a gallery wall without robbing them of sweep—but they should recognize their formal limitations. Films can only intimate narrative epicness. They can't achieve it. "But!" "But But But!" Try me. Start listing epic films and I'll start listing films with grandiose tableaux. The Lord of the Rings? Shot in that sewer of New Zealand. Blade Runner? The Lord himself envies Ridley Scott's matte painters. With film we confuse the formal qualities of narrative epic for the GIANT! SCALE! presented by the movie screen. Cases in point: Iron Man and The Dark Knight. Both were hailed as epic upon release, and yet both are far superior films on the small screen. Before you ask: I do remember what I wrote about The Dark Knight on IMAX, and inasmuch as it relates the experience of watching an obscenely high-quality image projected on the side of an eight-story building, I stand by it. Watching the film on a small screen—one on which a bug of a Batman glides between five-inch tall skyscrapers while Heath Ledger's Joker licks human-sized lips and establishes human-sized eye-contact—it's impossible to deny that this supposedly epic performance is better suited to the televisual medium. (This goes doubly for Iron Man, which barely passes for "good" on the big screen but shines when we connect with Robert Downey Jr. as a human actor in corporate world.) Not that I think we should deny that the serial drama is also better served on the small screen. A solidly written, solidly acted television show can be a better film than most films. To wit: having finished the first four episodes of the blogosphere's own Leverage, I can't help but wonder what went so terribly wrong with Ocean's Twelve and Thirteen. (x-posted about.)

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