#gives me a similar sense of awe and deconstructing time & space as some of those big famous pieces

[anachronistic-cat]

i really love this. it reminds me of cubism & deconstructivism with the angles and layering. really very cool

Tried something new with the wonderful Mumbo K Jumbo

I was inspired by two things - his wonderful graphic design endeavours which are SOOOOO cool, and this one viktor fanart that's got like equations n stuff on it!!

Anyways, give me your opinions i need them. i NEEEEEED them

<3

[spamzineglasgow]

SPAM Digest #1 (Sept 2018)

A quick list of the editors’ current favourite critical essays, post-internet think pieces, and literature reviews that have influenced the way we think about contemporary poetics, technology and storytelling.

 ‘Human Sacrifice’, by Alexandra Molotkow, Real Life Mag 

A brief moral genealogy of reality TV spectatorship sketched through the short life of The Anna Nicole Show (2002-2004); Moloktow reflects on the hatred of the talentless and contempt for the desperate as a ultimate re-inscription of class dynamics; on the erotic appeal of the fallen beauty; on how the lines between compassion and cruelty come blurred, when those between life and entertainment seem to be disappearing.

‘Reality television remade spectatorship in the likeness of a relationship: You loved your favorite contestants like friends and hated your least favorite like enemies — the thrill of a reality villain was the permission to hate a “real” person and not just a character in fiction.’

‘What many of us are looking for, at least sometimes, is a quick hit of relatability, the ambient sense that other people exist. This isn’t necessarily bad. It cuts to the chase of what we so often ask of art, and people are just as interesting as anything they might produce — a personality itself can be read as a work of art, producing the same range of joys and intriguing discomforts. But real and imagined people demand different moral configurations, and observing a life as theater can create a narrative riptide on reality.’

D.B

‘Andrew Pekler charts imagined sounds on interactive atlas, Phantom Islands’, by Scott Wilson, Fact Mag

It was actually an ex-navy friend who recommended this article to me, and the nautical vibes seemed appropriate, given our current SPAM theme is CRUISE LINER. Wilson’s article glosses a recent project by Berlin-based sound artist Andrew Pekler: an ‘interactive online map called Phantom Islands, which combines the histories of islands that were once found on nautical maps with speculative sounds from each of the 27 locations’. These ‘Phantom Islands’, as Pekler puts it, were charted through history by ocean explorers, but their actual existence ‘has never been ultimately verified’.  

For anyone intrigued by ethnomusicology (soundscapes are here selected with an ethnographer’s ear and knowledge of island history), object-oriented ‘art’ (one could argue Pekler’s project enacts a form of tuning to nonhuman scales, scapes and ontologies) or simply wanting to play around with a synesthetically satisfying map, Phantom Islands is definitely worth your time.

There’s something seductive and ultimately metamodern about this project: its oscillation between fact and fiction; a New Aesthetic, intermedial playfulness and sincere commitment to probing the strange aporia of these places. A sort of sonic psychocartography, combining the analogue ‘hardware’ of the map with the interactive, ‘soft’ subtleties of scroll, click, veer and zoom. It recalls childhood afternoons consumed by the thalassic, open-world vistas of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (2002), where every cel-shaded island was mapped out on a gridded ‘Great Sea’, sparkling with unique music, sidequests, enemies and secret items. Browsing The Wind Waker’s world, or (in Cruise Mode), the clean white grids of Pekler’s map, you find yourself phasing in and out of the mirage-like isles of geologic and mythical history. I’m made nostalgic for the days when the internet was envisioned as a sort of frontier, this sprawling terrain to be ‘surfed’.

As well as pleasure, there’s a profound melancholy to the project: it doesn’t steer us towards the dramatic sublime but rather encourages an introspective, ‘slow’ experience of personal discovery, a glide over several haecceities. Maybe it’s because, as Malachy Tallack puts it in his 2016 book The Undiscovered Islands, ‘Islands [...] are perfect metaphors for other worlds and afterlives. They are separate and yet connected; they are distant and yet tangible. The sea of death is cluttered with imaginary islands’. I’ve never thought of webpages or online archives as islands until now, but something about that sense of myth or fiction pervading the ‘real’ of the present is oddly comforting. The narrative vignettes and sound clips which accompany the islands of Pekler’s map give the reassurance of presence, even in the space of speculation, in the lack of evidential presence. If, as Tallack puts it, ‘invention’ arises from our desire to fill a ‘terrifying’ absence, then ‘sometimes that desire gives us back the absences we sought to fill’. It seems to me he could be describing a phenomenology of the open internet, the para-reality of endless text and images still sloshing and jostling against the smooth interface of Web 2.0. The haunted archives of yesteryear, preserved on some ad-riddled, lost domain. The splintered archipelagos of our virtual identities, the desiring production of feedback loops.

As a form of ‘interactive’ geography, Phantom Islands reminds us that our conceptions of ‘world’, Other or ipseity itself are bound to slippage, the ambient addictions of browsing a set of imagined striations. Best to enjoy that, while we (physically) still can.  

The Phantom Islands project: http://andrewpekler.com/phantom-islands/

M.S.

‘Funks of Ambivalence: On Flarf’, by Andrew Epstein, LA Review of Books

Flarf’s controversy is no secret within the poetry world. What started as protest poetry, in the manner of pirate radio - a way of ‘hacking’ the internet by mining and reassembling its linguistic fragments - soon sank in a cesspool of suspicion about plagiarism, appropriation and writerly privilege. Well, not exactly ‘sank’, because sank implies a kind of closure, when actually flarf still floats around - the poetic plastic that won’t quite biodegrade, even in these times of lyric revival.

Having recently published, Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture (2016), Epstein is well-versed in tracing how poetic form variously attempts to render, illumine or escape the experiential debris of daily life. Here reviewing a recent anthology, published by Edge Books in 2017 (Flarf: An Anthology of Flarf), Epstein maps out the emergence of flarf in the context of both the poetry establishment and the internet’s structural history, honing in on the use of search engines and data trawling as modes of playful aesthetic resistance. He quotes Gary Sullivan (a founding flarfer), who describes ‘flarf’ as both a neologism for ‘a kind of corrosive, cute, or cloying, awfulness’ and verb, meaning ‘to bring out the inherent awfulness, etc., of some pre-existing text’.

A good review perhaps brings something extra to the text it feeds on, and Epstein succeeds in supplementing Flarf: An Anthology of Flarf’s lack in the critical department. As Epstein puts it, the anthology is ‘completely devoid of scholarly apparatus’. What might be ‘more a bid for canonization, an enshrinement of a now-defunct avant-garde’ nevertheless requires a bit of aesthetic and political contextualisation, which Epstein’s piece usefully gestures towards. As post-internet poets, self-identified or otherwise, we’re all guilty of getting a little too flarfy at times, fooling around with discursive detritus online. It’s commentary like Epstein’s that sets all this appropriation in its necessary social contexts - from gender to race, ethnicity, class and sexuality.

Epstein’s upshot is that the ‘antics’ of flarf retain the potential for cultural resistance, but that flarf should not be considered solely in a dematerialised junkspace of recycled ‘play’. Rather, we should be reading flarf alongside certain contemporary poets (Epstein names a few), who digest its playful ‘tactics’ for a more substantial sociopolitical aesthetics, and what’s more acknowledge the extent to which flarf has become the condition of all information dissemination, both online and IRL. As he puts it, paraphrasing Man Ray’s chiastic assessment of Dada’s survival: ‘Flarf cannot live in America. All America is Flarf, and will not tolerate a rival’. In an era of reality-breakdown and disorientating news dissemination, conducted over the famously elliptical medium of Twitter, presided upon by the US President himself, this seems about right.   

M.S.

‘The Irrelevant and the Contemporary’ by DannyPenny, The New Enquiry

‘Post-Internet Poetry Comes of Age’, by Kenneth Goldsmith, The New Yorker

So why is post-internet poetry #trending?

Over the past few years, the art world has been throwing around the term “post-Internet” to describe the practices of artists who use the Web as the basis for their work but don’t make a big deal about it. For these artists, unlike those of previous generations, the Web is just another medium, like painting or sculpture. We’re beginning to see a similar turn in poetry.

Is it fair to say that successful post-internet poems should not merely “update confessional poetry for the age of mass surveillance"? That Poems that want to mirror or deconstruct the experience of living on the internet need a poetics that address that experience on a structural and material rather than semantic level? What is the result of such poetry? Poems that are "boring to be around"? Or poems that are at once organic and mechanical, personal and, in a sense, objective? Why is it that a mining, massaging, and reworking of found online texts into something personal appears to be fuelling some of the more adventurous poetry being written today? See what Kenneth Goldsmith and Danny Penny have to say.

M.P.

[intro2filmbitterrootcollege]

Top Autumn Films

I watch certain films to compliment the seasons. Holiday movies in early winter, westerns and teen ‘90s flicks during the summer, and horror films or those with a fall aesthetic during this time of year. Autumn is a nostalgic swoon of leaf-dappled weeks and also one rich with visual splendor. That’s probably why I’ve assembled a combination of nostalgia picks and those with striking cinematography. Because, as Jessica Kiang of theplaylist.net feature “15 Visually Stunning Horror Films” says:

Through meticulous production design and foreboding cinematography, the imagery in a horror film illuminates the fear of the unknown and the psychological tremors felt by the humans (or non-humans) to a level that can make us whimper just that bit louder or feel our blood run just that bit colder. At its core, an effective image reflects the narrative’s message and externalizes characters’ innermost demons. Perhaps more than any other genre, horror films rely on these techniques to create the atmosphere that animates these movies. Without them, no amount of spooky music and scary sound effects will do the experience justice.

Many of these titles were released outside of the fall but, in their orbit around my life, each settled on a recurrence during the weeks from late September to just before Thanksgiving. This list isn’t etched in (a grave)stone. In fact, my 2017 titles changed from those appearing on a similar list last year.

Familiar but different. Much like the return of this season itself.

5. “The Lost Boys” (1987) & “The Monster Squad” (1987)

Despite asking us to take characters with hall-of-fame mullets (somewhat) seriously, The Lost Boys remains absurdly watchable. Once, on a road trip, my father recited the entire plot like a human audiobook. I want to say it was in the early 90’s and the fall. I heard a story of adolescents fighting vampires and had to see it. Like, begging-your-parents-into-a-nervous-breakdown “had to see it”. When my brother and I finally convinced him to rent if for us (on VHS from a video store—sigh), the thrill was akin to eating a quart of cookie dough before dinner. There’s a young Kiefer Sutherland with the most glorious of said mullets, a famous final line from grandpa, and the Frog Brothers. But it was a surprise to me to learn as an adult that cinematographer Michael Chapman was Oscar nominated for his work on “Raging Bull” and photographed “Taxi Driver”. This explains the dolly zoom shot of a driveway, its leaves spiraling in wind and foreboding the coming of night with eeriness that no shot of a driveway has any right have. Also there’s, “Death by stereo.”

On a gloomy fall day, I will turn to The Monster Squad and take a vacation back several decades. Perhaps no other VHS tape found its way into my childhood rental history more than this movie. It captures the 80s vibe because it was a product of that decade (something stories like Stranger Things work to emulate). While time has revealed to me the film’s senseless plot mechanics regarding the villains, the script as co-written by Shane Black is noteworthy for the small moments, like the pilots on the plane discussing their jobs before Dracula escapes, that other films wouldn’t consider, and the jokes still land. It also uses visuals and editing to give us exposition in an admirably economical way. No over-reliance on CGI here.

All the faux-intellectualizing aside, “Wolfman has nards!” still makes me giggle.

4.  “Scream” (1996)

Ah, that vestige of American cinema known as the Drive-In Theater. The last time I went to a Drive-In was on a balmy October night in high school, and Scream played as part of a double-feature. While I wasn’t yet educated in the slasher film genre it takes to task, and the phrase “subversive deconstruction” was not within light years of my lexicon as a teenager, Kevin Williamson’s clever script still achieved a balance between mocking itself and providing the very thrill more serious-minded movies of its ilk often blunder. Director Wes Craven doesn’t get enough credit for his subtle use of camera movement, especially in the opening scene, one that narratively announces a shredding of the rule book. 

3.  “Good Will Hunting” (1997)

Nostalgia and golden photography commingle to elevate some of the better written and performed dialogue of the 90’s, an era known for affected cinematic talking. The theme of healing from past trauma becomes shrewdly symbolized by the season of autumn in the backdrop. And even though watching Robin Williams doing career best work now results in a little heartbreak, the film thankfully remains hopeful in its raw honesty.

2.  “Se7en” (1995)

David Fincher’s misanthropic inheritor to The Silence of the Lambs looks like it was shot on the most advanced camera in use today despite being over twenty years old. The timelessness is achieved because Fincher’s production design used purposefully anachronistic items for a mythological sense of human frailty repeating in a tragic endless cycle. Cinematographer Darius Kohdnji makes flashlights in dark spaces evoke dread and awe at their beauty, which becomes an appropriate way of viewing the film. Each damn frame is ripe with decay, as is the society it depicts. Its horror isn’t fun, and the film not for everyone, but the craft is a delight to admire. (Note: this may be the first time the word “delight” has been used in reference to this picture).

1.  “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991)

I don’t employ the label “masterpiece” often and even when I do it feels hyperbolic. But Jonathan Demme’s invention of the modern serial killer film strides into capital “M” territory. Lecter, as played by Hopkins, is impossible to label or understand for the morally sane, yet at turns is likeable in a way that causes me to question my perspective. Foster is just as strong while carrying the female empowerment theme with vulnerability and strength. She provides us with the empathy Dr. Lecter cannot. Demme’s technique throughout, most poignantly in his close-ups and the camera sliding toward Clarice after she first visits Lecter, its perceptible but elegant transition into her flashbacks, is supreme craft. So good as to be near invisible. There’s also that opening shot telling us all that we need but demanding intelligence in order to arrive at our own interpretations. Much like Clarice herself.

Honorable Mentions

Catch me on another day and most of these could end up on the list above:

Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Prisoners

The Thing

Sleepy Hollow

The Shining

Halloween

From Hell

Crimson Peak

Signs

The Village

Donnie Darko

Paranorman

[wrestinganew]

Sister chat- conversation with former Bennett Students

This audio clip (sent via canvas) is a series of excerpts obtained from an informal “sisterchat” or dialogue I had with some of my former students, graduates of Bennett College and Africana Women’s Studies (AWS) majors about their learning experiences in my courses and in other courses they took as a part of the program while attending Bennett College. The former students consented to the conversation being recorded and shared as part of my class assignment. I have cut out their names and the names of anyone they brought up (with the exception of myself and the director of the program) during our conversation. They are aware you and Shereese have access to the conversation and that I have not provided any identifying information to you. They understand their voices could potentially be identified but still consented to share their experiences via recorded conversation with me knowing this.

In the bits of the conversation I have mashed up and shared here you can hear the students talk about many of the things we have read about throughout our course. They express how AWS courses have given them the opportunity to engage learning in a way that allows them to move into their agency within and outside of school (Darder, 2002, pp. 96-97). In these classes they no longer felt they had to hold the position of passive recipient of knowledge that they were “socialized and conditioned into” (Darder, 2002, pp. 96-97). Instead, AWS courses engaged them as “active participants” (hooks, 1994, p. 14) and as such they experienced the classrooms in these courses as “participatory spaces for the sharing of knowledge” (hooks, 1994, p. 15), spaces that were “open, dynamic and interactive” (Grauerholz, 2001, p. 47).

From the students stories about AWS courses and the AWS educational community you can hear that they felt they were able to “respond to their learning environments simultaneously by way of the intellect, body, and emotions as well as spiritually” (Darder, 2002, p. 98). Whether engaging in exploratory writing in journals (Grauerholz, 2001, p. 47), or responding in class or in written assignments to “films, music, art, and other media” (Grauerholz, 2001, p. 47), the students felt they were holistically engaged and given the space and tools to fully and deeply, interdependently reflex “upon their own lives” (Grauerholz, 2001, p. 47), supported in making “connections between their personal problems and social issues” (holistic, p. 47). In these spaces they experienced learning as a process that could be “very exciting, painful, frustrating and joyful—all affective and physical responses” (Darder, 2002, p. 99). They all expressed being respected and treated “as a whole person” (Darder, 2002, p. 98) in AWS classes, something they did not experience as fully in other courses.

Another aspect of the pedagogy emphasized by everyone in the discussion was that AWS courses and the program as a whole allowed them to interact with professors, the director, their classmates and community members in deep and meaningful ways. Through take home exams (Grauerholz, 2001, p. 46), service learning and community engagement projects (Grauerholz, 2001, p. 46), student input in course readings and assignments (Grauerholz, 2001, p. 47), relationship and community building with classmates and professor self-disclosure (Grauerholz, 2001, p. 47) and students felt they could be vulnerable in the classroom and could learn ways that were meaningful and connected (Grauerholz, 2001, p. 45). They articulated feeling empowered by this kind of learning, what hooks (1994) terms an engaged pedagogy, a pedagogy in which students and teachers labor together (p. 14) and where the emphasis is on “wholeness, a union of mind, body, and spirit” (p. 14) within self and with others and within the project of employing Freirean praxis or “action and reflection upon the world in order to change it” (p. 14) in and outside of the classroom.

Similar to the participants in Brock’s (2005) research expressed, these students experienced AWS courses as a “sister chat” or “sista talk”, a space where “the freedom exists to explain self and others” (p. 109) and a space where they read the work of black women and women of color written for black women and women of color (pp. 97-98, 100). This space exposed them to “an ethic of caring” and through the program, particularly in engaging in class dialogue where they shared with others, they felt they were able to develop “a capacity for empathy” (Brock, 2005, p. 110). Reading and hearing the voices of women of color (at times as the program director, as a professor or through guest lecturers/facilitators/panel discussion members) the students felt, as China and Grace did, they felt that reading and hearing these voices helped give voice to their Blackness and womanness and to fortify their voice as black women (Brock, 2005, p. 107 & 114). At times they expressed the same social responsibility Brock’s (2005) participants/collaborators did, they stated that they felt compelled to, as a result of taking these courses, to foster “in Black children a positive sense of self” (p. 80), to make a difference in the lives of black girls and women (p. 116) whether those black girls or women were their younger siblings, young children they interact with as childcare providers, god sisters, friends or black women and girls they may work with later on in the professions they are pursuing. They did not leave these courses or our program “with disconnected bits of information” they instead left taking up a “commitment to teach what they had learned” (Brock, 2005, p. 111). The greatest take away that the students articulated was that through AWS courses and the AWS teacher/student community they experienced learning as a project where “the will to know” and “the will to become” were connected, where the knowledge they co-created was not just knowledge “in” or of “books” but was knowledge of “how to live” and move in the world (hooks, 1994, p. 15).

Lastly, while it was affirming to hear the students talk about the program, our courses and my teaching specifically in ways that mirror what hooks (1994), Brock (2005) and Darder (2001) discuss, I also learned a great deal in listening critically and reflexively to what they shared in this conversation about where I need to grow in my pedagogy. In the students responses you can hear some of the common rules deconstructed by Arao and Clemens in Landreman’s (2013) including “agree to disagree” (p. 143) and “respect” (p. 147). While I taught these students before I was even a student in this program I still think that many students walking away from my courses even in the last two years may repeat some of these “ground rules” whether I brought them into our course (explicitly or implicitly) or not. In having this conversation and using it to come back and reflex on the Arao and Clemens piece, the Boler (1999) piece and the Leonardo and Porter piece (2010) specifically, I plan to approach classroom commitments and class discussion differently, more directly discussing and challenging with my students these common “safe space” rules or tendencies that we learn and reinforce in educational settings. Moreover I want to incorporate, more aspects of the pedagogy of discomfort orientation to emotions that Boler (1999) discusses at length in her work so that students develop more of an analytical relationship to their emotions and others. I need to make fertile ground for the students and myself to move more directly and consciously past “passive empathy” towards “mutual responsibility” to others and the world around with regard to anti-oppressive work, taking up critical examinations of “emotional reactions” or “emotional habits” in classroom discussion in order for us to bring more awareness to how emotions and our stories/experiences “may be informed or shaped by hegemonic values” (p.121). This I think will help move students and myself beyond “spectating” and towards “collective witnessing” (Boler, 1999, p. 177).