The Yes Men: Culture Jamming or Tactical Media

See the Rachel Maddow report on yet another wildly successful Yes Men hoax this time involving the US Chamber of Commerce and the revelation that the CoC was reversing its position on climate change policy and was promising to immediately cease lobbying against the Kerry-Boxer bill.The fake news conference was preceded by a fake on-line press release (Find that here.)

Note that the url to the press release is www.chamber-of-commerce.us while the real CoC website is at www.uschamber.com. Look around and you can see how The Yes Men operate in setting up fake corporate and government agency websites as part of their jamming tactics.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

More media repercussions. Here's FoxNews giving the news live on the air and then immediately retracting the story. Who said Fox does not fact-check?

Third Cinema, Third Theory?

Of all African film directors, Sembene is the first to confer value to images."
--Med Hondo

Fernando Solanas & Octavio Getino, Towards a Third Cinema
Med Hondo, What is Cinema for us?

If you are interested in reading a brief outline of the life, ideas and struggles of Ousmane Sembene: OUSMANE SEMBENE: THE LIFE OF A REVOLUTIONARY ARTIST


The assignment for your second and final paper will be handed out during class.

Documentary and Reality TV

Rodney King Video

Final article on the intersection of documentary film and Reality TV (Susan Murray, "I Think We Need A New Name For It: The Meeting of Documentary and Reality TV") here. Enjoy.

I Need That Record

ONE WEEK ONLY on Pitchfork.TV: Pitchfork TV will be streaming for one week only the documentary 'I Need That Record, a film released on Record Store Day this year concentrating on the decline of record stores. A part from the nostalgia factor this is a very good starting point to think through the issues that the music industry and popular music cultures have encountered in the past 15 years. The sections concerning the consequences of the 1996 Telecommunications Act signed by Bill Clinton as well as the post-Napster environment will allow you to complement the readings. Watch it NOW before it's taken off the site. The clip embedded below is the 'Telecom Act' bit. Find the entire film divided in chapters here.

The Democratic Right To Know

McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto (Ver. 4.0)

James Boyle from The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind
Link above is for the whole book which Boyle made available through the Creative Commons License. You should read Chapter 6: I Got A Mashup.
If you don't want to download the whole book you can find a link to the annotatable online version of the chapter here.

Matt Mason - We Invented The Remix

Henry Jenkins - Interactive Audiences? The 'Collective Intelligence' of Media Fans

Aoki, Boyle and Jenkins - Bound By Law?
This is a comic book on copyright. Don't be fooled by it's form: it's a great read and I strongly encourage you to read at least the first 15 pages.
You can also find it free on-line from its publisher --crazy, huh?-- Duke University and The Center for the Study of the Public Domain in a variety of formats. You can also 'remix' it and you're encouraged to translate it. It's all here.

From The Cultural Resistance Reader: please have the articles in Section Seven read. The following articles from Section 8 are also required: Jordan on 'Reclaim the Streets'; Jason Grote on 'Revered Billy' and Ricardo Dominguez's 'Electronic Disturbance'

Bonus:

This is an old post from the blog where you can find a link to download Girl Talk's latest work, Feed The Animals.

Bonus reading for those interested in reading more on Jamaican music:
Dick Hebdige - from Cut'N'Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music

The Problem of Speaking for Others

Linda Alcoff, The Problem of Speaking for Others

Sheila Petty, Silence and Its Opposite: Expressions of Race in Tongues Untied

Julia Lesage, Feminist Documentary: Aesthetics and Politics


Jack Waters, Truth or Dare/Paris is Burning: Truth or Realness (from Jump Cut, no. 37, July 1992, pp. 72-73)

As promised, here's the article on This Is Spinal Tap and the satire on masculinity:
Carl Plantinga, Gender, Power, and a Cucumber: Satirizing Masculinity in This Is Spinal Tap

From Jack C. Ellis & Betsy McLane's A New History of Documentary Film
English-Language Documentary in the 1980s: Video Arrives
English-Language Documentary in the 1990s and Beyond: Reality Bytes

(Almost) Final Readings for Pop Music

Assuming that at this point you are (basically) all done with the Garofalo textbook, here are the reading assignments up to the end of the semester:

On 'co-optation':
Thomas Frank's "Commodify Your Dissent" here.

On Jamaican Music:
from Dick Hebdige, Cut'n'Mix here.

On Gender:
Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie, "Rock and Sexuality"
Simon Frith, "Afterthoughts
"Richard Dyer, "In Defense of Disco"
Find these articles here as a single PDF file.



On 'sub-cultures':
Here are the Dick Hebdige chapters from Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Refer back to the Punk: Attitude film screening.


On sampling, mash-ups and the 'postmodern turn':
Andrew Goodwin, "Sample and Hold"
E Ann Kaplan, "A Postmodern Play of the Signifier?"
Negativland, "from Wired: Negativland Interviews U2's The Edge"

Also, to clarify (or further obscure) 'postmodernism' please help yourself --in case you have not encountered it in your other studies-- to Fredric Jameson's "Postmodernism and Consumer Society"

There will be two further articles specifically on hip-hop culture and post-Napster music industry.

Feminist Film Theory

To accompany Welles' The Lady From Shanghai as well as Akerman's Je Tu Il Elle:

Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
You can also find it in html format here.

Roger & Me: Ethics, Mixed Modes & Documentaphobia

Three articles to accompany your reflections on the formal and ethical aspects of Roger & Me including Pauline Kael's notorious trashing of Moore.

Pauline Kael, Melodrama/Cartoon/Mess from The New Yorker
Miles Orvell, Documentary Film and the Power of Interrogation
Matthew Bernstein, Documentaphobia and Mixed Modes: Michael Moore's Roger & Me

Co-optation and The Implosion of Meaning: Slackers

Every single commodity you produce is a piece of your own death.

From Section Seven on "Commodities and Co-optation" please read:

Theodor Adorno, "On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression in Listening"
Richard Hoggart from The Uses of Literacy
Malcolm Cowley from Exile's Return
Thomas Frank, "Why Johnny Can't Dissent"

The Hoffman ("Revolution for the Hell of It") and Rubin ("Do It!") you can read 'for the Hell of it'.

Return to Section Three, "A Politics That Doesn't Look Like Politics" please (re)read:

Adolph Reed, Jr., "Why Is There No Black Political Movement?"
Jean Baudrillard, "The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media"
Hakim Bey from TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone
Simon Reynolds from Generation Ecstasy
+ the account of 'a lynching in 1920'

The complete version of Baudrillard's "The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media" is here.

Additional Recommended Baudrillard Readings:

Jean Baudrillard, Requiem for the Media
Jean Baudrillard, The Implosion of Meaning in the Media from Simulacra and Simulation

Also, and finally, here's the chapter from Cold World: The Aesthetics of Dejection and the Politics of Militant Dysphoria by Dominic Fox on Black/Death Metal: "A Sermon in the Name of Death"

For Those About To Rock

Frank Zappa & Captain Beefheart

Here are a couple of articles to integrate Keightley's Reconsidering Rock article. The first Frith article is required; the second article is a highly recommended read. Enjoy the Lester Bangs reviews from Creem and Garofalo's article on Soul.

Simon Frith - "Rock and Popular Culture"
Simon Frith - "The Magic The Can Set You Free": The Ideology of Folk and the Myth of the Rock Community
Paul Clarke - "'A Magic Science': Rock Music as a Recording Art"
Lester Bangs - Various Record Reviews from Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung
Reebee Garofalo - Popular Music and the Civil Rights Movement

Also, here is Andrew Chester's "For A Rock Aesthetic", Richard Merton's response, "Comments" and Chester's response to the response, "Second Thoughts on a Rock Aesthetic: The Band". It's all here at this link --the whole epochal exchange in one handy location.

Please read in 'Rocking Out' up to and including Chapter 8.


AC/DC, Let There Be Rock (1977) : Let Reverend Bon tell you all about it. As you can see the 'aura' is back around Angus' head.

Letter To Jane

Find here Chapter 6 from Nichols' Intro to Documentary. This is where he lays out his taxonomy of documentary film in a more concise form. You have already encountered this in the early articles by Nichols you read at the beginning of the semester (here) however this is a good review for you.
At this point you should also be done reading the Ellis/McLane book up to and including Chapter 15: English Language Documentary in the 1970s. At this point and in view of the midterm our run through the main post-war documentary forms should be complete up to the 1980s and the advent of video and you should be familiar with it all: Television Docs, Social Realism and British Free Cinema, Cinema Veritè/Direct Cinema, the Deconstructed Structural documentary of the Dziga Vertov Group and the militant documentary movements of the 'newsreel collectives' of the late sixties and early seventies in the US.
Please watch the interview with Jean-Luc Godard below. It is a good introduction to his way of thinking in the early sixties and in the procedures of the work he did with Jean-Pierre Gorin and the Dziga Vertov Group. He speaks of Tout Va Bien, a 'fiction' film he made with Jane Fonda and Yves Montand, as a more politically effective reflection on the political struggles in France compared to a straight documentary film like Coup Pour Coup by Marin Karmitz. Tout Va Bien is the film at the origin of the short Letter To Jane which we will be screening and discussing in class.

Doc Film and Pop Music Study Guides

Pop Music Midterm Study Guide here.
Documentary Film Study Guide here.
Enjoy.

2 or 3 Things I Know About Reality

"2 or 3 Things: a machine that morphs the colliding meanings of words and objects with dazzling speed, and generates an astonishing array of metaphors, paradoxes, digressions, and, above all, dialectical relationships, between idea and action, word and image, sound and picture, interior and exterior, microcosm and macrocosm. The swirling surface of a cup of coffee is transformed into the primordial ooze and also the infinite universe; two women in a café look at a magazine from different angles, but the collaged and cartooned female faces and bodies on its pages are degrading from any perspective."

Barthes, "The Reality Effect"
McCabe, "Realism and the Cinema: Notes on Some Brechtian Theses"
McCabe, "Theory and Film: Principles of Realism and Pleasure"

Abercrombie, Lash & Longhurst, "Popular Representation: Recasting Realism"

The In-Between Years

The Folk Revival:

The Kingston Trio - Tom Dooley
Pete Seeger - Turn Turn Turn!
Joan Baez - Silver Dagger
Bob Dylan - Masters of War
Lyrics here.

Surf & Hot Rod Combos:

The Beach Boys - Surfin USA
Dick Dale & The Del-Tones - Miserlou
Link Wray & His Ray Men - Rumble (Outtake)
The Stingers (Jack Cole) - Mustang

Uptown R&B from Motown/All songs by Holland-Dozier-Holland:

Martha & The Vandellas - Nowhere To Run
The Four Tops - Reach Out I'll Be There
The Supremes - You Can't Hurry Love
Marvin Gaye - How Sweet It Is

Girl Groups/Phil Spector Wall of Sound/Songs by Weill & Mann:

The Ronettes - Be My Baby
The Crystals - Then He Kissed Me
The Crystals - Da Doo Ron Ron

Cynthia Weill & Barry Mann songs NOT produced by Phil Spector:

Lesley Gore - It's My Party

The Wall of Sound in full-effect:

Ike & Tina Turner - River Deep, Mountain High
The Righteous Brothers - You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling