#my theory is web comic announcement

[marlypso]

oh my god guys rockabye literally posted this in the instagram podcast channel and i decoded it …. WHATS HAPPENINF MAY 10th IM SCAREDDDD

[recentanimenews]

One Piece Celebrates 1000th Chapter with Global Character Popularity Poll, Message from Eiichiro Oda, and More

  The legend actually did it; Eiichiro Oda has officially crossed the 1000th chapter mark for his long-running One Piece manga, and publisher Shueisha has been building up to it with the ONE PIECE 1000 LOGS project. The latest part of that project is a big one, too, as Shueisha kicks off a global character popularity poll to commemorate the milestone.

  The World Top 100 campaign is officially live right now, with the worldwide poll to be open until February 28 at 6:59am Pacific Time. During that period, fans will be able to vote on the best One Piece character through the homepage and by mail-in postcards, and will even be eligible to win prizes for participating. 

  Once it comes to an end on February 28, the final results will be tallied and we'll finally know the answer to who RULES One Piece in popularity. If you plan on casting a vote yourself, you get one vote per day while the poll is running. Prizes include a random AR model of a character from the series for your own unique One Piece photo ops. 

  The AR character models given away as prizes will be updated throughout the campaign with new characters. Here's a sample: 

    Shueisha is going all out with this announcement, which will include a full-page color ad in The New York Times promoting the campaign. The ad will be published on January 4, and here's what it looks like: 

    As for that ONE PIECE 1000 LOGS project, the homepage has a bunch of content in store beyond this poll. New trailers and a live-action teaser looking back at the series' history are on the way. There will also be collaborations with other magazines, the largest release of free One Piece manga volumes to date, and more.

  The cover art for Weekly Shonen Jump combined issues #3 and #4 and combined issues #5 and #6 will create a special double-sized image when combined. The art features Luffy surrounded by the characters drawn by other artists, including My Hero Academia author Kohei Horikoshi's take on Don Krieg, Dr. STONE artist Boichi's take on Ace, JUJUTSU KAISEN creator Gege Akutami's version of Arlong, and more. 

    The posters within both issues can combine, too, forming the biggest poster insert in the history of Shonen Jump. On the front of the poster there's new art by Eiichiro Oda, and on the back are all the memorable moments from the first 1000 chapters. 

    Here's Oda's full letter about the 1000th chapter:

  "1000 Chapters!!

  I, uh, wow…Words pretty much fail to describe the whirlwind these past 23 years have been. Literally half of my life has revolved around the almighty ‘WEEKLY SERIALIZATION’ hehe. But it’s not just me, Luffy and the Strawhats have navigated themselves to so many different islands and found themselves caught up in so many adventures. At this point, even I’m not sure how many lives they’ve touched along the way! But it’s thanks to them that so many special people have entered my own life; first and foremost among them being my family. All of these people have supported me through the years and I am deeply indebted to each of them. Meanwhile, my readers have been leading their own bustling lives. There’s a certain theory that exists for long-term readership in the entertainment world that states, “A given pool of readers will rotate out of a series after five years.” And so for a while now, I’ve avoided calling my readers, ‘fans’. It’s like they say, “Pride cometh before a fall.” I convinced myself that I shouldn’t get too full of myself because my readers would eventually leave the series and move on with their lives. Let me say that all of you have put me to shame for thinking such a thing. Your belief in Luffy has led me to believe in all of you, and that is what allows me to continue drawing exactly the kind of manga I want to draw. So here we are, ready to dip our toes into the final stages of the story. It’s taken us a long time to reach one thousand chapters. However, it’s because I’ve completed a thousand chapters that you must believe I’ll take us to the end. The story waiting for you will defy expectations! I mean it!!

  I have a favor to ask. This is for everyone with whom —by some means or another— I’ve managed to create a bond, in other words, the ONE PIECE FANS of the world! My story is a long one. But for just a while longer, please watch over Luffy and his crew as they continue their adventure!

  January 2021 Eiichiro Oda”

    Fittingly, the new slogan Shueisha is launching with this is "We Are One," which hopes to unify the world as one in fandom, while showing the diverse nature of One Piece fans through each region's Top 100 characters.

  Now, go on and cast your vote for your favorite One Piece character, and let us know who you chose! 

  Source: Press release

    -------

Joseph Luster is the Games and Web editor at Otaku USA Magazine. You can read his brand new comic, MONSTER FLIGHT, at subhumanzoids. Follow him on Twitter @Moldilox.

By: Joseph Luster

[griffinwho]

Time Lord Victorious - BF Update

Master Thief by Sophie Iles (BF) - Ainley and/or Delgado Master

The Master wants to plunder one of the most secure vaults in the universe, the Repository. He’s got a plan, and a deadly new weapon to assist him. However, as the Master quickly discovers, getting in might be easy, but getting away with it might cost him everything.

Lesser Evils by Simon Guerrier (BF) Ainley and/or Delgado Master

The Kotturuh have arrived on the planet Alexis to distribute the gift of the death to its inhabitants. The only person standing in their way is a renegade Time Lord, who has sworn to protect the locals. A Time Lord called the Master...

The hooded chap is presumably a Kotturuh (going by the other covers). They seem to be a major driving force if not antagonist of this event. It’ll be intresting to see if the Master will play a larger role in proceedings, and if so any other incarnations than these two? Or the Masters involvement could be limited to these short trips.

He Kills me, He kills me not by Carrie Thompson (BF) - 8th Doctor

On the desert world of Atharna, the Doctor’s life is about to be changed forever.

Looking to visit one of the Seven Hundred Wonders of the Universe, he’s quickly embroiled in a web of deceit. Worse than that, this Wonder of the Universe is missing, and the Doctor is about to encounter one of his most dangerous and duplicitous adversaries.

The Doctor is about to meet Brian.

Given Silas Carson is credited as him Brian is presumably the Ood.

The Enemy of My Enemy by Tracy Ann Baines (BF) - 8th Doctor

The people of Wrax are happy to begin peaceful negotiations with the Dalek Empire. The two species are preparing to engage in an alliance that will last throughout the ages.

The only one who seems to object to this happy union is the Doctor. He knows that you can never trust the Daleks.

But more than that, he knows that the Wraxians should never have existed…

Hmm, I assume the Wraxians have been saved/brought into exsistence by the actions of the 10th Doctor. Perhaps it’s these events that get the daleks involved in the whole event too.

Mutually Assured Destruction by Lizzie Hopley (BF) - 8th Doctor

The fallout of the great battle.

Outnumbered and alone, on a Dalek time-ship careering through the vortex, the Doctor must use all his cunning to survive. As the saucer disintegrates around them, the Doctor is trapped with a crew of increasingly desperate Daleks.

Or are the Daleks trapped with him?

Possibly of note, Samantha Béart who plays Tiska in this is credited as a security guard in The Enemy of My Enemy. She’s probably just playing two roles, but it could be a connection I suppose.

The Knight, The Fool and The Dead by Steve Cole (BBC Books) - 10th Doctor / Brian

We live forever, barring accidents. Just like everyone else in the universe.

The Doctor travels back to the Dark Times, an era where life flourishes and death is barely known...

Then come the Kotturuh – creatures who spread through the cosmos dispensing mortality. They judge each and every species and decree its allotted time to live. For the first time, living things know the fear of ending. And they will go to any lengths to escape this grim new spectre, death.

The Doctor is an old hand at cheating death. Now, at last, he can stop it at source. He is coming for the Kotturuh, ready to change everything so that life wins from the start.

Not just the last of the Time Lords. The Time Lord Victorious.

This is presuambly where things kick off for the event then, and Brian is involved somehow. People were speculating that the ood would be related to the liberated ood from series 4/Ood Sigma (which is logical given the placement for the 10th Doctor, but that might not be the case. He’s very sharply dressed, maybe he’ll turn out to be the master, no rule the master can’t be an ood.

All flesh is Grass by Una McCormak (BBC Books) 8th/9th/10th Doctors

Even a Time Lord can’t change the past.

A wasteland. A dead world… No, there is a biodome rising from the ashes. Here, life teems and flourishes, with strange, lush plants and many-winged insects with bright carapaces – and one solitary sentient creature, who spends its days talking to the insects and tending this lonely garden. This is Inyit, the Last of the Kotturuh.

In All Flesh is Grass we are transported back to The Dark Times. The Tenth Doctor has sworn to stop the Kotturuh, ending death and bringing life to the universe. But his plan is unravelling – instead of bringing life, nothing has changed and all around him people are dying. Death is everywhere. Now he must confront his former selves – one in league with their greatest nemesis and the other manning a ship of the undead…

This sounds like the finale, though given they’ve said that you should be able to follow one medium and still get a complete picture who knows. Now, which Doctor is in league with their greatest nemesis and wich isr manning a ship of the undead. The 8th Doctor could be arrivng here on the back off Mutually Assured Destruction, perhaps.

So, that’s BBC Books and Big Finish annoucements done. Only one story with the ninth so far, so perhaps he’s going to feature more in the comics side of things. It’s not unexpected that most of BFs stuff involves McGann, though I must say it’s a bit dissapointing there’s no multi-doctor happenings there. I hope All flesh is Grass isn't the only one.

Also, it’s curious that Rose Tyler (or any Billie Piper based character) is yet to appear in a cover or synopsis. I wonder how she’ll factor into this. The obvious would be as the 9th Doctors companion, but it’s not a certainty.

Anyway, there’s still Penguin Random House, Doctor Who Magazine, Titan Comics, Escape Hunt, , Eaglemoss Hero Collector, Immersive Everywhere, Maze Theory, and BBC Audio content to be announced. It’s exciting!

[davidmann95]

Since you just announced it on Twitter, what did you think of Kraven’s Last Hunt?

May not be contemporary in the broader sense, but I suppose it’s contemporary for me, and that’s good enough. Short answer: I liked it quite a bit and like it more the longer I sit on it.

On a certain conceptual level, this initially reminded me of Dark Phoenix Saga, in that like that I felt (as reinforced by DeMatteis originally conceiving of this as Wonder Man and then Batman stories) this was a template that could have fit for essentially any character that simply happened to be attached to this one, albeit benefiting from Spider-Man’s vulnerability, and with the critical difference that it’s good. A very different manner of good from the other Very Good Major Comics Of 1986-1987, all symbol and emotion and impressionistic interpretations of what’s in theory a rather straightforward - if necessarily intense and intimate - supervillain plot to humiliate and break a superhero. And Zeck walks that fine line of solid, tangible ‘realism’ and stylized, frenetic, overblown excess necessary for a book this simultaneously ground-level and psychedelic; a perfect Spider-Man artist, when I put it like that. There are elements that necessarily eluded me on Kraven’s end, lacking as I am in a meaningful grounding in either the Russian Revolution or the works of William Blake, but at the end of the day they’re simply incredibly good, even if the nature of its incarnation was something of happenstance.

But the truth is, that this project ended up a Spider-Man story is crucial to how it ultimately works, far beyond Peter’s inherent ability to rightfully freak the fuck out at his circumstances in a way Bruce Wayne could never entirely pull off (though that element, and how well it works here, really does make this the genesis of the particular breed of Serious Spider-Man Stories that I’ve always loved, even as I know they shouldn’t constitute Pete’s bread and butter). As an artifact unto itself, as a singular ‘graphic novel’ thesis on Parker, it’s the ultimate statement against, and ultimately redemption of, the concept of him as a larger-than-life figure. Kraven’s modeled his entire life around refusing to accept the humble Earthliness of things in search of a greater purpose, casting himself the noble scion of a lost kingdom of glory, turned champion against the great monsters of the world, because the alternative is that he’s a 70 year old man with likely undiagnosed mental illness who hunts down and shoots a college dropout in the face before getting in a wrestling match with an overgrown sewer rat to try and get over his midlife crisis. And he so nearly pushes Peter into that same mindset with drugs and isolation and savagery, but in the end, no; just like the supposed Vermin who stalks the corners of the piece, he’s just a dude. So profoundly just a dude that even a lifetime of pathology and self-delusion can’t stop Kraven from recognizing it in the end. Yet even as he brings his own story to an end, satisfied and unable to see another purpose in life, Sergei sees the greater truth: Peter may not have been The Spider, but Spider-Man was his Spider, just as he has been to so many others, and that battle and that story truly is something miraculous and worth taking pride in.

Outside its isolated context however, at least for me, it takes the role of climax to a greater narrative arc of Spider-Man vs. Depression. See, the form I happened to read this in was “The Amazing Spider-Man Epic Collection Vol. 17″, which also includes Amazing Spider-Man #289-292 + annuals 20 & 21, Spider-Man Versus Wolverine, and Web of Spider-Man #29-30. And what they consistently present in the unwitting leadup to this is a Peter Parker whose life isn’t rocked by constant disaster and upheaval, but is just believably shitty and mundane and empty, made up of unrewarding routines, drab surroundings and a handful of compromised half-formed relationships. He’s thinking hard about giving up as Spider-Man again, consciously wondering at one point why he isn’t happy with his life as things stand, and most of all he’s reeling from his encounter with Wolverine. An encounter that not only resulted in the death of an acquaintance, but threw him into a narrative space where he as a traditional superhero simply doesn’t function, rendered emasculated and ineffectual in the face of a very different model of superheroic realism culminating in blood on his own hands. He wanders through the aftermath in a daze, even as he primarily (and as I know you discuss on your blog Fearful Symmetry - which I’m finally reading now that I’ve read this - crucially) focuses on Ned’s loss rather than taking a life himself, his sole meaningful respite his love and ultimately marriage to* Mary Jane. But just as the haze seems to be lifting and life feels real and meaningful again, the hammer comes down when the darkness is over him again for a moment in the wake of another death, sending him spiraling into a hallucinatory nervous breakdown. It’s only by readmitting his vulnerability to himself, by holding on to the single emotional tether he’s permitted himself in his wife, and by in the end refusing to succumb to the panic and hate threatening to take him over, that he literally crawls up out of the ground twice, once out of the ground and the second time back into the light.

It’s not as good as the Kraven arc in Squirrel Girl though. But still pretty good.

* Speaking as a fan of the Spider-Marriage, and having just read it and the context around it for the first time:Holy SHIT that did not work and I don’t blame creators throwing fits behind the scenes. The annual itself is great, but in the leadup - literally the issue before the proposal - Peter and MJ are kinda unofficially seeing each other and also he’s still clearly hooking up with Black Cat. And then in one issue he decides “something feels incomplete, I should get my life as Peter sorted out” and pops the question out of fucking NOWHERE. MJ is understandably like “um???” but then accepts a couple issues later and that’s that.It’s UNBELIEVABLY weird. Not that Peter Fuckin’ Parker couldn’t do something that stupid if he’d had a bad enough time of things recently to fry his head (which he most definitely had), but that it in any way works out.

[onlymexico]

Guillermo del Toro Gómez born October 9, 1964, is a Mexican American film director, screenwriter, producer and novelist. In his filmmaking career, del Toro has alternated between Spanish-language dark fantasy pieces, such as the gothic horror film The Devil's Backbone (2001), and Pan's Labyrinth (2006), and more mainstream American action movies, such as the vampire superhero action film Blade II (2002), the supernatural superhero film Hellboy (2004), its sequel Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008), and the science fiction monster film Pacific Rim (2013). His latest film, The Shape of Water, won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and is scheduled for an American release on December 8, 2017.

In addition to his directing works, del Toro is a prolific producer, his producing works including acclaimed and successful films such as The Orphanage (2007), Julia's Eyes (2010), Biutiful (2010), Kung Fu Panda 2 (2011), Puss in Boots (2011), and Mama (2013). He was originally chosen by Peter Jackson to direct The Hobbit films; he left the project due to production problems but was still credited as co-writer for his numerous contributions to the script.

Del Toro's work is characterised by a strong connection to fairy tales and horror, with an effort to infuse visual or poetic beauty.  He has a lifelong fascination with monsters, which he considers symbols of great power.[3] Del Toro is known for his use of insectile and religious imagery, the themes of Catholicism and celebrating imperfection, underworld and clockwork motifs, practical special effects, dominant amber lighting, and his frequent collaborations with actors Ron Perlman and Doug Jones. He is also friends with fellow Mexican directors Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro González Iñárritu, collectively known as "The Three Amigos of Cinema”.

When del Toro was about eight years old, he began experimenting with his father's Super 8 camera, making short films with Planet of the Apes toys and other objects. One short focused on a "serial killer potato" with ambitions of world domination; it murdered del Toro's mother and brothers before stepping outside and being crushed by a car. Del Toro made about 10 short films before his first feature, including one titled Matilde, but only the last two, Doña Lupe and Geometria, have been made available. He also wrote four and directed five episodes of the cult series La Hora Marcada, along with other Mexican filmmakers such as Emmanuel Lubezki and Alfonso Cuarón.

Del Toro studied special effects and make-up with special-effects artist Dick Smith. He spent 10 years as a special-effects make-up designer and formed his own company, Necropia. He also co-founded the Guadalajara International Film Festival. Later in his directing career, he formed his own production company, the Tequila Gang.

In 1997, at the age of 33, Guillermo was given a $30 million budget from Miramax Films to shoot another film, Mimic. During this time, his father, automotive entrepreneur Federico del Toro, was kidnapped in Guadalajara. Del Toro's family had to pay twice the amount originally asked. The event prompted del Toro, his parents, and his siblings to move abroad. In an interview with Time magazine, he said this about the kidnapping of his father: "Every day, every week, something happens that reminds me that I am an involuntary exile [from my country]

Del Toro has directed a wide variety of films, from comic book adaptations (Blade II, Hellboy) to historical fantasy and horror films, two of which are set in Spain in the context of the Spanish Civil War under the authoritarian rule of Francisco Franco. These two films, The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth, are among his most critically acclaimed works. They share similar settings, protagonists and themes with the 1973 Spanish film The Spirit of the Beehive, widely considered to be the finest Spanish film of the 1970s.

Del Toro views the horror genre as inherently political, explaining, "Much like fairy tales, there are two facets of horror. One is pro-institution, which is the most reprehensible type of fairy tale: Don't wander into the woods, and always obey your parents. The other type of fairy tale is completely anarchic and antiestablishment."

He is close friends with two other prominent and critically praised Mexican filmmakers Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro González Iñárritu.[15] The three often influence each other's directorial decisions, and have been interviewed together by Charlie Rose. Cuarón was one of the producers of Pan's Labyrinth, while Iñárritu assisted in editing the film.

Del Toro has also contributed to the web series Trailers From Hell.

In April 2008, del Toro was hired by Peter Jackson to direct the live-action film adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. On May 30, 2010, del Toro left the project due to extend delays brought on by MGM's financial troubles. Although he did not direct the films, he is credited as co-writer in An Unexpected Journey, The Desolation of Smaug and The Battle of the Five Armies.

On June 2, 2009, del Toro's first novel, The Strain, was released. It is the first part of an apocalyptic vampire trilogy co-authored by del Toro and Chuck Hogan. The second volume, The Fall, was released on September 21, 2010. The final installment, The Night Eternal, followed in October 2011. Del Toro cites writings of Antoine Augustin Calmet, Montague Summers and Bernhardt J. Hurwood among his favourites in the non-literary form about vampires.

On December 9, 2010, del Toro launched Mirada Studios with his long-time cinematographer Guillermo Navarro, director Mathew Cullen and executive producer Javier Jimenez. Mirada was formed in Los Angeles, California to be a collaborative space where they and other filmmakers can work with Mirada's artists to create and produce projects that span digital production and content for film, television, advertising, interactive and other media. Mirada launched as a sister company to production company Motion Theory.[19]

Del Toro directed Pacific Rim, a science fiction film based on a screenplay by del Toro and Travis Beacham. In the film, giant monsters rise from the Pacific Ocean and attack major cities, leading humans to retaliate with gigantic mecha suits called Jaegers. Del Toro commented, "This is my most un-modest film, this has everything. The scale is enormous and I'm just a big kid having fun." The film was released on July 12, 2013 and grossed $411 million at the box office.

Del Toro directed "Night Zero", the pilot episode of The Strain, a vampire horror television series based on the novel trilogy of the same name by del Toro and Chuck Hogan. FX has commissioned the pilot episode, which del Toro scripted with Hogan and was filmed in Toronto in September 2013. FX ordered a thirteen-episode first season for the series on November 19, 2013, and series premiered on July 13, 2014.

After The Strain's pilot episode, del Toro directed Crimson Peak, a gothic horror film he co-wrote with Matthew Robbins and Lucinda Cox. Del Toro has described the film as "a very set-oriented, classical but at the same time modern take on the ghost story", citing The Omen, The Exorcist and The Shining as influences. Del Toro also stated, "I think people are getting used to horror subjects done as found footage or B-value budgets. I wanted this to feel like a throwback." Jessica Chastain, Tom Hiddleston, Mia Wasikowska, and Charlie Hunnam starred in the film. Production began February 2014 in Toronto, with an April 2015 release date initially planned. The studio later pushed the date back to October 2015, to coincide with the Halloween season.[

He was selected to be on the jury for the main competition section of the 2015 Cannes Film Festival.

Del Toro directed the cold-war drama film The Shape of Water, starring Sally Hawkins, Octavia Spencer, and Michael Shannon.[29] Filming was set to begin on August 1, 2016 in Toronto,[30][31] but del Toro confirmed on his personal Twitter account that filming would begin on August 15, 2016.[32] Production was officially announced to have begun on that day and wrapped twelve weeks later, the film is currently in post-production.[33] On August 31, 2017 the movie was screened and premiered in the main competition section of the 74th Venice International Film Festival where it was awarded the Golden Lion for best film, making Del Toro the first mexican director to win the award[34][35].

On July 21, 2016, it was reported that del Toro will retire from producing for projects that he isn't creating or directing himself.

At the D23 Expo in 2009, his Double Dare You production company and Disney announced a production deal for a line of darker animated films. The label was announced with one original animated project, Trollhunters. However, del Toro moved his deal to DreamWorks in late 2010. Trollhunters was released to great acclaim on Netflix and "is tracking to be its most-watched kids original ever

[bluewatsons]

Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick, 43 Crit Inq 466 (2017)

1. Labor-Saving Device

What are we as subjects of capitalist lifeworlds implicitly saying when we call something a gimmick, regardless of the inevitably varying objects to which the evaluation is applied and varying identities of those applying it? What is being registered about a shared world, perhaps without the speaker entirely knowing she or he is registering it, in this ambivalent, if mostly negative aesthetic judgment? That is, in the fascinatingly complex but also ordinary speech act—a demand for universal agreement based on feelings rather than concepts—spontaneously elicited by a perception of form?

We can start by putting the question differently: why are gimmicks almost comically irritating? Even the word seems to grate on Ivor Brown, who nonetheless devotes an entire essay to lovingly exploring his distaste for it in Words in Our Time (1958). “Comedians have their gimmicks, either as catch-phrase, theme-song, or bit of ‘business,’ which they exploit in … their appearances.”1 Gimmicks seem to provoke contempt simply in part because they are job related: bits of business for performing aesthetic operations that we somehow become distracted into regarding as aesthetic objects in their own right. Here the much vaunted concept of aesthetic autonomy turns into an undesirable feature for once, when asserted not by the work as a whole but illicitly by an instrumental part-object. More significantly, we see that in addition to being what Brown calls a “poor kind of artifice,” the gimmick irritates because it “abbreviates” work and time. As Brown writes, “I remember an old music-hall comedian called Phil Ray who began his turn by announcing, ‘I always abbriev. It’s my hab.’ Never to finish a word was his (not wildly diverting) gimmick” (W, p. 48).

Repulsive if also in an important way attractive, maintaining a degree of charm we often acknowledge grudgingly, if at all, labor and time-saving gimmicks are of course not exclusive to comedy or the arts. We find them in shoes and cars, appliances and food, politics and advertising, journalism and pedagogy, and virtually every object made and sold in the capitalist system. But comedy, and especially what David Flusfeder calls the “comedy of procedure,” is especially suited for bringing out the uniqueness of the gimmick as an aesthetic category—that is, as a form linked in a specific way to a judgment based on the feelings our perception of the form elicits.2 As with the “operational aesthetic,” described by Neil Harris in Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum, the comedy of procedure turns modern rationality in general into an aesthetic experience, encouraging the reader’s “fascination with the ways things come together”3 and the “visualization of cause and effect.”4 This incitement of pleasure in “information and technique,” which Harris locates in a range of nineteenth-century objects “expos[ing] their processes of action,” from newspaper hoaxes to sea novels, was also central to early film comedy (H, p. 57). As we learn from Tom Gunning, the invitation to visualize causality becomes especially noticeable in comic films featuring a “device gag” or “apparatus”: the sausage machine, in which animals herded into one end come out as links from the other; or the webs of string with which children join buckets, blankets, and other commodities to unsuspecting adults who thus become parts of an elaborate “connection device”—one which the living beings absorbed into it cannot fully see (“CM,” p. 100).5

With this image of an apparatus binding together agents who otherwise seem to be acting independently (connecting them “behind [their] backs,” as Karl Marx likes to say), we may begin to suspect that the gimmick form, like the comedy of procedure that puts it so ostentatiously on display, emerges explicitly as a phenomenon of industrial capitalism, not just of a rationalized modernity.6 Today this mode of production continues to subtend and coexist with its postindustrial or deindustrialized aftermath, in which financial instruments like CDSs and CDOs, ways of dividing and moving values created in the immediate production process, give older gimmicks like the tontine and Ponzi scheme a new lease on life. The gimmick, this essay argues, is a specifically capitalist aesthetic phenomenon. Tellingly, the word that finally consolidates the concept of this not-so-marvelous marvel does not appear in print until the late 1920s, a moment of both euphoria as well as radical disenchantment with a host of capitalist techniques (industrial and commercial as well as financial).7

To be sure, there are marvelous devices centuries before these economic developments that we might be tempted to call gimmicks today. Describing the “mechanical apparatuses, restored and painted by Melchior Broederlam, that sprayed the guests of Philip the Good with water and dust,” Giorgio Agamben notes that prior to the seventeenth century European sensibility did not recognize a significant difference between “works of sacred art” and elaborate contraptions such as those in the castle of Hesdin, where “in a hall decorated with a series of paintings representing the story of Jason, a series of machines was installed which, in addition to imitating Medea’s spells, produced lightning, thunder, snow, and rain, to obtain a more realistic effect.”8 Gimmicky as we might think them now, these precapitalist devices made no particular claim to abbreviating work on which they could henceforth renege. More significantly, such devices were objects of admiration only, unmixed with suspicion or contempt. It is only today that the deus ex machina, the machine or crane used to transport gods to the stage in ancient Greek tragedy, has become the name for a cheap or aesthetically unconvincing contrivance for achieving narrative closure.9

Devices like these were wonders only and not in any way equivocal or funny to their ancient and feudal contemporaries. The capitalist gimmick, however, is both a wonder and a trick.10 It is a form we marvel at and distrust, admire and disdain, whose affective intensity for us increases precisely because of this ambivalence.11 Indeed, the gimmick is the very slippage between these positive and negative judgments—wonder and trick—in a way that gives it a special relation to comedy, opening a window onto the genre in a way that the unequivocally appreciated precapitalist device does not.

As I suggest above, the “connection device” Gunning singles out as an example of the classic gimmick or gag and also of early film comedy’s operational aesthetic might be read as the emblem of an entire mode of production. Could our experience of the gimmick’s compromised aesthetic form, illuminated for us in a special way by the comedy of procedure, be related in an even deeper way to the methods and devices of capitalism? And in a way that has something to do with the gimmick’s special relation to time (its saving), to labor (its reduction), and to value (its cheapening)?

As already glimpsed in Brown’s comments about comedians, there is clearly a connection between our negative evaluation of the gimmick’s aesthetic integrity and our negative relation to the abbreviation of labor it appears to encode. Take “Notes on Comedy” by L. C. Knights (1933). Knights opens with a complaint about literary criticism, invoking the domestic appliance—vacuum cleaner, dishwasher, coffeemaker—to underscore the contempt that the gimmick’s promise of reducing labor elicits therein: “Labor-saving devices are common in criticism. Like the goods advertised in women’s journals they do the work, or appear to do it, leaving the mind free for the more narcotic forms of enjoyment. Generalizations and formulae are devices of this kind.”12

Note how the very idea of a “labor-saving device” seems suspicious to Knights and in a way underscored by its association with machines and women, regardless of whether such devices merely appear to or really do save labor. There is thus a real social insight in what might otherwise seem like fussing on the part of someone not wanting to succumb to the lure of gimmicks in his or her own line of work. In what circumstances might the reduction of labor by way of a device—the simplest promise of all technology—become regarded, even when not illusory, as a contemptible, untrustworthy, or generally negative thing? When, due to the structurally compelled pursuit of maximum profits by capitalists solely capable of reuniting what capitalism fundamentally separates—means of production and labor power—labor-saving machines proliferate in tandem with rising proportions of machines to workers. What Marx calls the increasing “organic composition of capital” in turn produces a tendency toward falling rates of profit, leading to flights of capital into nonproductive sectors and rising levels of unemployment, while also driving the capitalist to devise new, increasingly nuanced ways to squeeze increasingly small increments of surplus labor from workers in the immediate production process on which the entire system continues to depend.13 While we would not be wrong to hear it in Knights’s comment as well, indignation on behalf of a violated Protestant work ethic is thus only part of the story. It cannot by itself account for this more fundamental distrust of the labor-saving device, which relates not only to the “spirit” of capitalism but its most basic operations. Here the very concept of labor saving comes to be profoundly ambivalent. Whether in the form of an idea (“generalizations and formulae”) or thing (“goods advertised in women’s journals”), the device that “saves” human labor contributes to both its intensification and elimination in the long run.14

The gimmick is the objective correlative of this ambivalence, translating a source of increased economic productivity and material wealth, the reduction of human labor through progressively advanced machines and techniques of production, into a sign of impoverishment in the aesthetic realm. For gimmicks register as deficient in aesthetic value even when their appeal is obliquely acknowledged. Calling something a gimmick is a distancing judgment, a way to apotropaically ward off, by publicly proclaiming ourselves unconvinced by, or impervious to, the capitalist device’s claims and attractions. At the same time the gimmick enables us to indirectly acknowledge this power to enchant, as one to which others, if not ourselves, are susceptible.15 In this elliptical fashion, gimmicks can be found amusing or even cute (indeed, the gimmick often takes the form of a charmingly miniaturized machine). Yet it is our feeling of suspicion, followed closely by contempt, that defines the aesthetic judgment/experience of the gimmick as such. A device cannot be a gimmick—it would just neutrally be a device—without this moment of distrust and aversion, which seems to respond directly to or even correct our initial euphoria in the image of something promising to lessen human toil. This is again what separates the capitalist gimmick proper from ancient or feudal machines that might call attention to their ability to make work more efficient, because the compound crank or water mill’s promise of enhanced productivity does not elicit (potentially comic) feelings of misgiving or fraudulence. Always enchanting and repulsive at once, and never simply one or the other, the gimmick is once again fundamentally a capitalist phenomenon—what the poet George Oppen calls a “sad marvel.”16

This ambivalence comes forth most strongly in the aspect of the gimmick which I think irritates and charms us the most: the way in which it seems both to work too hard and work too little. The self-described inventions of former vaudevillian and mining engineer Rube Goldberg, explorations in his own words of “man’s capacity for exerting maximum effort to accomplish minimal results,” highlight this contradiction in a memorable way (fig. 1).17

In these tongue-in-cheek designs for fictional machines, first appearing as newspaper cartoons in the early twentieth century and living on today in examples ranging from engineering contests to Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s art film The Way Things Go (1987), a stunning variety of inanimate devices are combined with animal or human agents in painstakingly elaborate ways, if also in ultimately simple chains of linear cause and effect, to perform anticlimactically ordinary tasks: emptying ashtrays, buttoning a collar, sharpening a pencil (fig. 2).18

Reminiscent of the gag film’s “connection device,” the Rube Goldberg perfectly captures how what the gimmick does to achieve its intended effect seems at once excessively laborious but also strangely too easy. This is why we can refer to it both admiringly as a labor-saving “trick” and also disparagingly as a labor-avoiding “dodge.”19

Figure 1. Rube Goldberg. Copyright heirs of Rube Goldberg / Courtesy Abrams Books. Source: www.cbsnews.com/pictures/the-wacky-inventions-of-rube-goldberg.

Figure 2. Pencil Sharpener. Copyright heirs of Rube Goldberg / Courtesy Abrams Books. Source: www.cbsnews.com/pictures/the-wacky-inventions-of-rube-goldberg.

Mirrored in this appearance of both overperforming and underperforming, the equivocal saving of labor that the gimmick’s form encodes is the main reason for why it both attracts and repels us. Because the capitalist seeks state-of-the-art machinery at costs lower than those at which new technologies are introduced, his or her mode of production requires a constant negotiation with the social aging of productive devices. If we speak of outdated equipment as working too hard, below a standard of productivity continually being reset at higher levels, expensive new technology adopted too early might be described as working too well, performing above standard, but unprofitably. And so the ambiguous reduction of labor by productive devices whose timeliness greatly matters is reflected in another closely related contradiction on the part of the gimmick qua compromised aesthetic form: that of seeming either too old or too new.20 Being out of synch with “the times” as defined by their productivity, whether by lagging behind or hubristically advancing too far ahead, is another reason why the gimmick irritates us, and all the more so given how aggressively it insists on its contemporaneity with its audience.21 It is moreover in this insistence, one against which the gimmick’s anachronisms become apparent in the first place (and one significantly shared by advertising), in which something about the gimmick seems too revealing of its aim: that of giving its addressee what it says it knows we want. It is from this interpellation that we recoil, not because the gimmick’s claim to knowing us is wrong but because it so often isn’t.

Comedy shares the gimmick’s insistence on its contemporaneity, according to some critics, because of its special relation to appraisals of worth (and to the meta-appraisal of those appraisals). Due to a commitment to “exhibiting current evaluations in light of their shortcomings,” James Feibleman argues, comedy’s “specific points bear always upon the contemporary world.” The “contemporaneity of comedy” is thus “one of its essential features” and directly linked to its critique of idealization.22 Alenka Zupančič makes a similar argument, albeit from a point of view explicitly countering the humanist one tacitly underpinning Feibleman’s argument about comedy’s metaevaluative correction of overevaluations. Rejecting the thesis that comedy brings us down to earth from our identification with abstract ideals by exposing the universal’s contamination by particularity, returning us with joy to our embodiment and the knowledge that we are only human, comedy is rather understood as a finitude compromised by universals—as a finitude that leaks.23 In making this argument about the inherently comical contamination of particularity by universality (and of its corollary image, the walking abstraction or idea in the flesh), Zupančič expands on Agnes Heller’s claims about the genre’s “preeminent involvement with the present” (O, p. 177). Heller points out that in contrast to the centrality of mourning in tragedy, no past-oriented emotion seems equally central to comic experience. We see comedy’s unusual attachment to the present reflected also in the fact that live improvisation on the stage is the exclusive métier of comic actors: “there is no tragedia dell’arte, only comedia dell’arte,” Heller writes.24 To these insights Zupančič adds the following: comedy is “extremely adept at showing how something functions—that is to say, it is adept at showing the mechanisms, in the present, that allow its functioning and perpetuation.”25 Here it is not the project of metaevaluation that accounts for comedy’s special tie to the present but rather the way in which it shares the gimmick’s operational aesthetic, its interest in showcasing how things are done. What is interestingly suggested is that this focus on procedure might not just define one species of comedy among others but comedy in general.

Toggling between wonder and trick, overvaluation and correction, the gimmick thus draws into sharper relief something about the workings of comedy, just as comedy reveals the gimmick as aesthetic form. Yet gimmicks also belong to a world of practical and industrial inventions.26 In twentieth-century engineering manuals and popular science magazines, we see the term used as technical slang to refer to the working part, often a unit enclosing or comprised of many smaller parts, of a larger machine.27 Here gimmick seems descriptive instead of evaluative—a generic term, like gadget, thingamabob, or doohickey, for any functional device.28 Yet it is this explicitly industrial as opposed to aesthetic version of the labor-saving gimmick that best reflects the way some notable early-twentieth-century aesthetic theorists regard comedy. For Theodor Lipps, for example, the “feeling of the comical” is what results when the mind’s preparation for grasping something it thinks will be challenging is revealed as being in excess of the actual amount of effort required. 29 What was anticipated as being strenuous suddenly turns out to be “easily comprehended and mastered” in a kind of paradoxically uplifting deflation (“CRL,” p. 395). At the same time, for Lipps the “feeling of the comical” produced through this reduction of mental exertion is interestingly one that does not “gratify” even as it “arouses joy” (“CRL,” p. 394). Rather, it remains a complex, ambivalent pleasure that never forgets the initial moment of strain, retaining an unease akin to that which the gimmick’s promise of saving labor elicits. Freud makes this connection between comedy and the reduction of work even more explicit, though in his case mental exertion is not the problem but the cure: “By raising our intellectual expenditure we can achieve the same result with a diminished expenditure on our movements. Evidence of this cultural success is provided by our machines.”30

There is an emphasis on the “intellectual” in these theories of comedy as a “diminished expenditure” of work that comes to a head in the comedy of capitalist procedure as a fetishization of the idea. “If you’re an ideas man you don’t just stop having ideas because cash flow is not a problem,” thinks the personification of capital who is the protagonist of Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods (much more on this novel soon). “You go right on having new ideas, and when you have an idea you want to see that idea in action.”31 In a way that might explain why the conceptual artwork remains such a prominent stereotype of a gimmicky artifact, in capitalist culture idea and gimmick often become synonymous. We see this slippage in the Oxford English Dictionary‘s definition: “gimmick, n. A gadget; spec. a contrivance for dishonestly regulating a gambling game, or an article used in a conjuring trick; now usu. a tricky or ingenious device, gadget, idea, etc., esp. one adopted for the purpose of attracting attention or publicity.”32 If, as Zupančič suggests, the materialism of comedy resides not in the rejection of abstractions but rather in their enticization, something similar seems to happen in the form of the gimmick. The gimmick is both an idea and also its thingly materialization in a “gadget,” “article,” or “contrivance”; it is more precisely the transformation of idea into thing in a way that charms but also disturbs us. It is worth lingering on the negative element of this affectively mixed response. Is not the realization of supposedly abstract ideas in supposedly concrete things regarded as desirable by pretty much everyone, skeptics and proponents of capitalism alike? And is not the capitalist gimmick a trivial and merely symptomatic form and/or judgment, incapable of critical reflection on the mode of production for which it is merely a synecdoche? Yet in this aesthetic experience the well-nigh universally celebrated transformation of ideas into things becomes an object of rare misgiving—as if to underscore just how little distance separates realization from reification in a system of generalized commodity production.

This is of course a system in which the production of commodities increasingly encompasses the production of the specific way in which they will be consumed. Here, to cite the main idea of one post-Fordist “business bible” designed to look like a bro-friendly cookbook, the reception of a commodity is not something organized after the fact of production by a separate division of workers.33 Rather, the marketing is to be “baked” into the commodity during the process of production itself. The male authors of Baked In: Creating Products and Businesses That Market Themselves attempt to market this conflation of production and reception as a cutting-edge capitalist technique (if also, interestingly, as a cutesy domestic one). Yet it is a conflation already central to the gimmick as a historical phenomenon coinciding with the birth of mass advertising, when methods for realizing the values of otherwise unsalable commodities by creating unprecedented kinds of demand were codified in response to one of the first waves of visible overaccumulation of industrially produced goods. Mirroring the unity of production and exchange distinctive to capitalism—beginning with the worker’s sale of labor power to the capitalist, these activities mediate one other at every point—in the gimmick making and selling always seem to happen at once.

We are given a detailed demonstration of how this “classic” version of the gimmick works in “The Glory Machine” (1883) by symbolist writer Villiers de l’Isle-Adam.34 The device at the heart of this late nineteenth-century story, narrated in the blustery tone of a market still difficult to separate from theatre, is a “machine” for insuring French playwrights against ruin by guaranteeing that their aesthetic productions will be met with an unequivocally positive response. “In the future, [such] risks will be completely ruled out” (“GM,” p. 62).35 The punch line of Villiers’s laying bare of the gimmick form—the story’s metagimmick, if you like—is that the “sublime mechanism” for generating Glory proves to be nothing other than the physical building of the theatre. The output of the “The Glory Machine” is thus a paradoxically glorious deflation akin to that at work in Lipps’s and Freud’s theories of comedy. For we quickly discover that the Machine is not a scientifically advanced marvel difficult for us to understand but just an ordinary amphitheater modified with hundreds of mechanical devices and controlled by a hidden central operator on a giant “Keyboard” for generating a simulation of collective aesthetic pleasure. Even more than the theatrical production for which it is simultaneously produced as both a response and a work to be aesthetically consumed in its own right, the artificial reception is an elaborately orchestrated Gesamtkunstwerk. In addition to “laughing and lachrymatory gases” pumped out at the appropriate moments from pipes, automated cane ends to thump on floors, and the installation under every seat of a folded “pair of very shapely hands, in oak” (the narrator archly notes, “It would be superfluous here to indicate their function”), its devices include “tiny bellows … operated by electricity” placed in “phonographic machines” hidden in the mouths of the proscenium cupids. At appropriate moments these phonographic machines play the prerecorded sounds of aesthetic reactions—”Bellowings, Chokings, ‘Encores,’ Recalls, Silent Tears, Recalls-with-Bellowings-extra, Sighs of Approbation, Opinions Proffered, Wreaths, Principles, Convictions, Moral Tendencies, Epileptic Seizures, Sudden Childbirths, Blows, Suicides”—said to exceed the variety already offered by any “well-organized Claque,” the paid human applauders who represent what the Machine technologically supersedes. The Glory Machine’s much vaster repertoire extends even further to “Ideas” and “Noises of Discussion (art for art’s sake, Form and Idea)” and even to full-blown “Critical Articles,” churned out while the play under review is still in process of being performed (“GM,” p. 65).36

The seemingly exotic futuristic device for securing the ideal reception for an aesthetic commodity ends up being nothing other than the ordinary present-day apparatus for the commodity’s production. The final joke is that the Machine’s production of an unambiguously positive aesthetic reception ends up producing an unfeigned pleasure for the audience in the world of the story. “Whence it comes—and here is the solution of the problem of a physical means attaining an intellectual end—that success becomes a reality—that Glory does veritably pass into the auditorium! And the illusory side of the … Apparatus vanishes, fusing itself, positively, in the glow of the True!” (“GM,” p. 63). With this moment of metaphysical triumph, the emergence of the “real thing” from its simulation, which Robert Pfaller claims defines the essence of comedy, the tale completes its comedic act of generic self-deflation, as the speculative allegory or philosophical parable we may have thought we were reading—which begins with a series of pseudo-Hegelian reflections on the “common point” between substance and idea, or matter and thought—devolves as it were into a satire on the pettiness of contemporary French dramatists and the mediocrity of their drama.37 In accordance with the disappointment specific to the overworking/underworking, too laborious/too easy gimmick, this deflation cleverly takes place in tandem with the story’s demonstration of how its eponymous aesthetic machine works.

Yet there is disappointment precisely because euphoria comes before. The gimmick lets us down—self-corrects our overestimation of its abilities—only because it has also managed to pump us up. We express contempt for it as a labor-saving trick because our attention was in fact initially caught by its promises of saving labor; we describe it as cheap or aesthetically impoverished only because something about it seemed so truly shiny with value. Even if the gimmick is fundamentally an aesthetic failure, our irritation by it has everything to do with the fact that it also partially succeeds. One wonders if we find gimmicks repulsive insofar as we find them attractive, as if in a reevaluation of the initial evaluation (here, reversing the order of the sublime’s two affective phases, our negative response overrides the positive one). In an almost homeopathic as well as autocorrecting way, the gimmick qua device of capitalist production, as well as distinctively capitalist aesthetic form and judgment, deflates the claims to value or hype it initially excites.

This prompts us to ask: is it production per se that irritates us in our aesthetic experience of the gimmick or something about the specific way in which the gimmick comes to index it? Why is the gimmick’s operational or procedural aesthetic not a source of simple pleasure, as it is in the practical jokes and how-to-do-it books Harris describes in Humbug, the “task films” and “device films” analyzed by Trahair and Gunning, or today’s Discovery Science Channel television show How Is It Made? Given that all involve revealing and inviting audiences to take pleasure in learning about methods of production, why are we charmed in these instances but not entirely so in the experience of the gimmick? Even if the literary archive from which he builds his argument lies at the opposite end of the cultural spectrum from these popular entertainments, a similar question could be asked about Viktor Shklovsky’s concepts of “art-as-device” and as “exposing the device,” in which the elucidation of the procedures by which an aesthetic effect is achieved contributes to the salutary project of art as ostranenie or making-strange, a formalist idea subsequently politicized in Bertholt Brecht’s epic theater and high modernist Verfremdungseffekt.38 For Brecht and Shklovsky, whose privileged example is Lawrence Sterne, the making visible of methods of production adds pleasure, adds aesthetic value, whereas in the gimmick it directly detracts from both our enjoyment and esteem. What accounts for this difference in our relation to the exact same maneuver of calling attention to the process of making by way of the aesthetic device? It can only be the fact that the capitalist gimmick seems to make promises about the reduction of labor in a way that Shklovsky’s literary device does not—promises that, interestingly, we distrust from the start.39

Ambiguities surrounding labor and value in capitalism are also ambiguities about time. We will take a much closer look at this aspect of the gimmick below, which will return us in a direct way to the issue of comedy.

2. Timing

Consider this display of comic devices in E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1974): scaled-down versions of the spectacular products made in the fireworks factory that symbolically dominates this satire of capitalist life in the early twentieth-century United States:

There were exploding cigars, rubber roses for the lapel that squirted water, boxes of sneezing powder, telescopes that left black eyes, exploding card decks, sound bladders for placing under chair cushions, glass paperweights with winter scenes on which snow fell when you shook them, exploding matches, punch-boards, little lead liberty bells and statues of liberty, magic rings, exploding fountain pens, books that told you the meaning of dreams, rubber Egyptian belly dancers, exploding watches, exploding eggs.40

This passage is curiously static, even though every gimmick featured in it—a good many of them simulations of luxury items, designed to self-destruct for the entertainment of the nonrich—seems to be a kind of action.41

Each device is presented in or as a tiny blast of text, but with no sense of momentum due to the cordoning of each successive squirt, sneeze, and flash from its neighbors by commas. In this manner the possibility of the explosions affecting one another or accumulating into something larger is blocked, highlighting their disconnection even while packed into the same discursive space.

Popped off like tiny, nonreusable fireworks, the gimmick here in its specifically comedic form looks a lot like what Fredric Jameson calls a “singularity,” a “pure present without a past or a future.”42 This is exactly how Gunning describes the film gag: as an “essentially discontinuous” comic action. Simply adding one gag to another will not a narrative make, Gunning argues, because of a tractionless surface that keeps the form’s action inherently self-contained: “Each gag ends in such a way that the gag machine must be started all over again to produce an additional one. Rather than a flow, longer gag films are structured as a series of explosions. After an explosion there is little to do” (“CM,” p. 96). The ultimate gag that is the explosion, an event that can happen only once, epitomizes the gimmick’s status as a device for producing a quick but immediately vanishing aesthetic payoff, one that cannot begin a project or sustain a tradition (see “CM,” p. 96). It is this very unrepeatability, we might say, that the series of exploding devices in Ragtime repeats.

There is thus a sense in which the gimmick confronts us with a kind of bad contemporaneity, one akin to the “elongated present,” “endless present,” or “perpetual present” strikingly diverse theorists use to account for the peculiar feel and situation of our contemporary moment.43 It is Jameson, however, who makes an argument about the reduction of time to the present in a way that hints at its special relevance for a theory of the gimmick as a capitalist and especially late-capitalist aesthetic form. In “The Aesthetics of Singularity” (2015), his reassessment of postmodernism and postmodernity as “indispensable” periodizing concepts, Jameson returns to the action film as example, noting how “nowadays they are reduced to a series of explosive presents of time, with the ostensible plot now little more than an excuse and a filler, a string on which to thread these pearls which are the exclusive center of our interest: at that point the trailer or preview is often enough, as it offers the high points of films which are essentially nothing but high points” (“AS,” p. 105).44 Arguing that the temporal form of this “singularity-event” dominates every semiautonomous “level” of late capitalism (economics, technology, politics, and so on), Jameson singles out two high-cultural examples of its characteristic “reduction to the present or the reduction to the body”: Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, where a man who has lost his past from a head injury pays people to re-create isolated memory fragments he can repeatedly reexperience in the present; and the installation art of Xu Bing, whose Book from the Sky is based on what looks like but isn’t writing. For Jameson, postmodern works “soaked in theory” like these are to be distinguished from an older modernist conceptualism, in which ideas are “universal forms” used to “put a contradiction through its paces” or “flex mental categories” in a way that actively sustains or energizes thought (“AS,” pp. 114, 113). By contrast, the idea in the gimmicky neoconceptual works is no longer a universal but rather nominalist form and as such is no longer generative. Rather, it assumes the form of a one-off or mere “technical discovery,” the “single bright idea” that leads to the “contraptions of the lonely crackpot inventors or obsessives” (“AS,” p. 112).

This argument about the postmodern transformation of the idea in art from universal concept to historically isolated contrivance leads Jameson to note the following:

Both these works are one-time unrepeatable formal events (in their own pure present as it were). They do not involve the invention of a form that can then be used over and over again, like the novel of naturalism for example. Nor is there any guarantee that their maker will ever do anything else as good or even as worthwhile (no slur on either of these illustrious artists is intended): the point being that these works are not in a personal style, nor are they the building blocks of a whole oeuvre. The dictionary tells us that the word ‘gimmick’ means ‘any small device used secretly by a magician in performing a trick’: so this is not the best characterization either, even though it is the one-time invention of a device that strikes one in such works. It is, however, a one-time device which must be thrown away once the trick—a singularity—has been performed. [“AS,” p. 113; my emphasis]

At the same time, gimmicks are used over (and over) again. They are in this sense less like “one-time unrepeatable formal events” than equipment whose essence is to endure across multiple operations. Indeed, the perpetual reuse of an otherwise neutral device for producing a specific aesthetic effect is often exactly what transforms it into an irritating impoverished gimmick. Such reuse inevitably weakens the impact of the aesthetic effect itself in a way that might explain how, in our experience of the gimmick, the effect often seems collapsed back into the device that produces it. Like the checkerboard wipe and other special effects in PowerPoint, the term gimmick describes both the effect and the procedure used to generate it, conflating two ostensibly discrete moments in the same way it conflates idea and thing. The ease with which any technique can turn into a gimmick is thus internal to the gimmick. Its historical but also more fundamental temporal instability is essential to what the gimmick is; nothing if not the magical trick we dismiss out of overfamiliarity with its deployment.

This is one of the reasons why another highly paradigmatic instance of a gimmick is the overrepeated joke, such as the one compulsively retold in Mark Twain’s time-travel comedy A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). Hank Morgan’s complaint about the unfunniness of the Round Table’s class clown, Sir Dinadan the Humorist (“I never heard so many old played-out jokes strung together in my life”) not only inadvertently perpetuates the Humorist’s unfunniness (to demonstrate the badness of his repertoire Hank must repeat it) but ends up being as discursive as the aptly named Dinadan. Hank reports the comedian’s joke that has somehow managed to circulate even in Hank’s century, while running on repeat there long enough to get stale. If Dinadan’s joke is thus at once too contemporary and not contemporary enough, it is worth noting that similar criticisms have been directed at Connecticut Yankee from its moment of publication. For this is a novel, if there ever was one, with an obvious shtick—the juxtaposition of two historical eras and modes of production—that many readers have found as irritating as Hank finds the Humorist’s joke.

This comically indestructible joke is about a “humorous lecturer” whose jokes fail not because they are unfunny but because the provincial members of the performer’s audience prove not to be his real contemporaries. The audience is unable to recognize the modern genre of comedic performance—Twain’s specialty, the humorous lecture—to which the laughter they suppress is the correct and intended response, thinking instead that they have attended a sermon:

While Sir Dinadan was waiting for his turn to enter the lists, he came in there and sat down and began to talk; for he was always making up to me, because I was a stranger and he liked to have a fresh market for his jokes, the most of them having reached that stage of wear where the teller has to do the laughing himself while the other person looks sick. I had always responded to his efforts as well as I could, and felt a very deep and real kindness for him, too, for the reason that if by malice of fate he knew the one particular anecdote which I had most hated and most loathed all my life, he had at least spared it me. It was one which I had heard attributed to every humorous person who had ever stood on American soil, from Columbus down to Artemus Ward. It was about a humorous lecturer who flooded an ignorant audience with the killingest jokes for an hour and never got a laugh; and then when he was leaving, some grey simpletons wrung him gratefully by the hand and said it had been the funniest thing they had ever heard, and “it was all they could do to keep from laughin’ right out in meetin’.” The anecdote never saw the day it was worth telling; and yet I had sat under the telling of it hundreds and thousands and millions and billions of times, and cried and cursed all the way through. Then who can hope to know what my feelings were, to hear this armor-plated ass start in on it again, in the murky twilight of tradition, before the dawn of history, while even Lactantius might be referred to as “the late Lactantius,” and the Crusades wouldn’t be born for five hundred years yet?45

The gimmick is nothing if not a device used “hundreds and thousands and millions and billions of times.” Yet Jameson is also clearly not wrong in noting its presentism, which is what the Humorist’s joke is also about. This bad joke about how good joke-telling goes bad when it fails to be contemporary endlessly repeats in every present; what turns it into a gimmick is not just its re-use but also its perpetual present tense, and these now start to look less like opposites than versions of the same thing.We now have the last of the several temporal ambiguities specific to the gimmick as form. At once dynamic (like an action) and also inert (like a thing), at once like a cause but also its effect, the gimmick is both a singular event and the proverbial old saw. As Jameson rightly argues, it is a novelty with no consequences beyond its immediately vanishing moment. The gimmick is also, as Twain suggests, the device that refuses to die.46

As this paradoxical unity of discrepant temporalities—instantaneity and duration, disruption and continuity, singularity and repetition—the gimmick embodies one of the most significant temporal contradictions of capitalism overall: the way in which its organization of production enables the “ongoing transformation of social life—of the nature, structure, and interrelations of social classes and other groupings, as well as the nature of production, transportation, circulation, patterns of living, the form of the family,” but also “the ongoing reconstitution of its own fundamental condition as an unchanging feature of social life—namely, that social mediation ultimately is effected by labor” (TLS, p. 300). For Moishe Postone, this contradiction is reflected in the emergence of two distinctly capitalist kinds of time, the first involving “changes in concrete time effected by increased productivity,” what Postone calls historical time, and the second the abstract time involved in the labor-based production of value (Marx’s socially necessary labor time).47

A discord that becomes “increasingly perceptible” then arises between the production of material wealth made possible by the accumulation of past knowledge or historical time (increasingly the case for production over time) and the production of value based on the expenditure of abstract time, which takes place only in a present tense. This is the case even as the very dynamism of capitalism depends on the “constant translation of historical time into the framework of the present, thereby reinforcing that present” (TLS, p. 300; my emphasis). Postone’s language is technical but his point bears directly on the gimmick’s temporal contradictions and is therefore worth the time it takes to digest:

Changes in concrete time effected by increased productivity are mediated by the social totality in a way that transforms them into new norms of abstract time (socially necessary labor time) that, in turn, redetermine the constant social labor hour. Note that inasmuch as the development of productivity redetermines the social labor hour, this development reconstitutes, rather than supersedes, the form of necessity associated with that abstract temporal unit. Each new level of productivity is structurally transformed into the concrete presupposition of the social labor hour—and the amount of value produced per unit time remains constant. In this sense, the movement of time is continually converted into present time. In Marx’s analysis, the basic structure of capitalism’s social forms is such, then, that the accumulation of historical time does not, in and of itself, undermine the necessity represented by value, that is, the necessity of the present; rather, it changes the concrete presupposition of that present, thereby constituting its necessity anew. Present necessity is not “automatically” negated but paradoxically reinforced; it is impelled forward in time as a perpetual present, an apparently eternal necessity.[TLS, p. 299; my emphasis]

A perpetual present (Jameson’s singularity) and a relentlessly ongoing historical continuity (Twain’s joke). Postone refers to the interaction between these two kinds of time generated by capitalist labor as capitalism’s “treadmill effect,” and it is what we register in the gimmick’s own peculiarly “alienated interaction of past and present” (TLS, pp. 289, 300).Twain’s comedy about the Colt Arms factory foreman who attempts to impose his century’s mode of production onto a mythical precapitalist England was written when Twain was falling into bankruptcy after years of financial hemorrhaging through his ill-fated investment in an all too new-fangled technology (figs. 3–4). The infamous Paige contraption with which Twain’s novel came to have a “strange identification” was a capitalist machine that failed the test of proper timing in its quest for social uptake, rendered obsolete by the Linotype typesetter before its technical problems could be corrected.48

Questions about capitalist timing were thus at the forefront of Twain’s mind while writing a novel in which we see the gimmick’s temporal contradictions played out at virtually every level and in a way highlighted as much by the novel’s comedic failures as by its successes. Excoriated by reviewers from the 1890s up to as recently as 2010 as a one-joke production, memorable primarily for a title communicating the novel’s gist so efficiently that one feels released from any obligation to read it, the novel is essentially a series of fast-acting but ultimately inert gags.49

These gags are in turn nothing but simple anachronisms: knights with tabards painted with advertisements for soap, a bowing and praying hermit harnessed to a sewing machine for the automated fabrication of linen shirts; newspapers and telephones in Camelot; and so on. Even Twain’s contemporaries saw these palimpsests as an overfamiliar contrivance. “The conceit of taking a Yankee of this generation of telephones and the electric light back to King Arthur’s Court may please some minds, if presented in a story of moderate length,” the Boston Literary World noted, “but there can be few who will really enjoy it when long-drawn out to the extent of nearly six hundred pages.” 50

“No doubt there is one element of wit—incongruity—in bringing a Yankee from Connecticut face to face with feudal knights,” wrote the London Daily Telegraph, “but sharp contrast between vulgar facts and antique ideas is not the only thing necessary for humor.” Twain’s take on the “alienated interaction between past and present” at the heart of capitalist production thus seemed strangely out of sync with the author’s own present. 51

His time-travel device was already a gimmick—a compromised form for which the funnily unfunny, all-too contemporaneously noncontemporaneous humor of the humorist comes to serve as an inadvertent mise en abyme.

Figure 3. Paige compositor. Scientific American (1901). Source: Wikipedia.

Figure 4. Paige compositor blueprint. Source: innovationprinciples.blogspot.com/2012/01/failed-invention-of-day-paige.

At the same time, much in the spirit of P. T. Barnum’s exhibitions, which as Harris argues deliberately invited audience suspicion in order to activate the pleasures of judgment, Connecticut Yankee puts the capitalist gimmick as aesthetic trickery on self-conscious display; the series of “effects” ostensibly showcases Hank’s historical advantage as the novel’s officially designated contemporary.52 But so much so, James Cox points out, that as the novel moves forward and the “effects” of the “compulsive showman” accumulate (“MSP,” p. 401), the target of Twain’s satire becomes increasingly unclear and, with a remarkable “waste of energy,” the narrative disintegrates into a “mere sequence” of gags (or anachronisms).53 The plot manages to obtain closure out from this bad infinity only through the gimmickiest of literary devices: the deus ex machina of Merlin’s suddenly revived powers of magic, ineffectual for the majority of the novel but now inexplicably effective at restoring Hank neatly back to the nineteenth century. At the same time, commentators repeatedly describe the novel’s form as machinelike, a description that counterbalances this all-too-subjective assertion of authorial will and in a way that testifies further to Connecticut Yankee‘s overarching identification with the unsuccessful, promise-breaking capitalist “contraption.” The novel is said to lean overheavily on “a fairly mechanical proliferation of burlesque ‘contrasts’“; on “stock devices” and “clichés of travelogue nostalgia” that become “mere parts of the machinery of this mechanical novel”; and on a protagonist “more mechanical than any of the gadgets in which he specializes, [who] grinds laboriously through his ‘acts,’ his only means of attracting attention being to run faster and faster, to do bigger and bigger things, until the mechanism of his character flies apart.”54

Both the obtrusive surge of authorial subjectivity, tellingly coinciding with the revival of supernatural magic in the diegesis, and the all-too-mechanical literary contrivance are gimmicks that simultaneously constitute and undercut the novel’s comedy. Not surprisingly, the novel seems only half-heartedly committed to the illumination of capitalist procedure in spite of it being repeatedly pointed up in the discourse. We are told that “at the great arms factory,” Hank Morgan “learned to make everything; guns, revolvers, cannon, boilers, engines, all sorts of labor-saving machinery,” as well as how to become “head superintendent” of a “couple of thousand men.” Hank brags: “Why, I could make anything a body wanted—anything in the world, it didn’t make a difference what; and if there wasn’t any quick new-fangled way to make a thing, I could invent one—and do it as easy as rolling off a log” (CY, p. 8). Yet as Henry Nash Smith reminds us, Hank “actually performs no constructive feat except the restoration of the holy well; and it will be recalled that the technology in this episode does not go into repairing the well, but into the fraudulent display of fireworks with which he awes the populace.”55 Twain’s novel never delivers on the operational aesthetic to which it initially seems so enthusiastically to subscribe.

This brings us to one final contradiction. On the one hand, the gimmick seems to make certain capitalist operations transparent, in a curiously not entirely pleasurable way. On the other hand, something about it seems to make these capitalist operations obscure. In “The Glory Machine” the device exposes its own process of action, laying bare how it achieves its intended effect, but in Connecticut Yankee the gimmick takes the form of the engineer’s classic black box: an opaque input/output structure actors can implement without knowledge of its internal workings.

We can now add this to the list of the gimmick’s other antinomies—contrary propositions that are equally true—that together go a long way toward explaining both the obtrusiveness of the aesthetic form and the peculiarly intense form of irritation it elicits:The gimmick saves us labor.The gimmick does not save labor (in fact, it intensifies or even eliminates it).The gimmick is a device that strikes us as working too hard.The gimmick is a device that strikes us as working too little.The gimmick is outdated, backwards.The gimmick is newfangled, futuristic.The gimmick is a dynamic event.The gimmick is a static thing.The gimmick is an unrepeatable “one-time invention” (Jameson’s singularity)The gimmick is a device used “hundreds and thousands and millions and billions of times” (Twain’s joke).The gimmick makes something about capitalist production transparent.The gimmick makes something about capitalist production obscure.

It is not accidental that these antinomies are each about labor, time, and value—elements capitalism makes impossible to separate. To single out one is necessarily to perceive or think the others, and this is what sets the features of the gimmick in such a close relation, with each seeming to imply or be implied by the others.56 As it compels us to oscillate between the poles of each pair of conflicting, yet partially true observations, the gimmick points to a “situation which encompasses the opposed terms but which neither side can grasp on its own,” one “we can only allude to in the oscillation itself.” Drawing on the work of Kojin Karatani, Michael Wayne refers to this as a “parallax,” a “constant shuttling between perspectives that cannot be synthesized.”57 In this manner, through the perception of an everyday form and the judgment it spontaneously elicits, the gimmick’s antinomies index the most fundamental contradictions of capitalism: proliferation of labor-saving devices in tandem with an intensification of human labor in the immediate production process; increase of labor productivity in tandem with lesser availability of secure work; planned obsolescence and routinized innovation; overproduction of commodities in conjunction with the creation of “surplus populations” unable to buy goods. It is the parallax between the aesthetic and economic overall that obtrudes in our everyday experience of the gimmick, which more than any other capitalist aesthetic experience demands that we “hold multiple registers of value in sight at once.”58

There is another way in which the gimmick demands this. Gimmicks are fundamentally cheap even when they look or really are expensive.59 In the case of the gimmick, moreover, the economic concept of cheap designates the spectator’s sense of a specifically aesthetic fraudulence in which value is judged as not being what or where we expect it to be. Here we arrive at a feature that for all its simplicity remarkably distinguishes the gimmick from other aesthetic categories and even from other capitalist ones like cute or cool: the way in which its judgment of negative aesthetic worth aligns almost exactly with a judgment of negative economic worth. What is cheap is that whose price is lower than its cost of production. What the gimmick brings out is how inextricable this theoretically neutral idea of a lowered production cost is, like that of the reduced labor that usually lowers it, from connotations of illegitimacy and deception in capitalist culture. Brown’s meditation on the labor and time-saving devices of comedy in Words in Our Time thus fittingly ends with him noting the derivation of gimmick from gimcrack, an initially neutral description of the inlay work of a craftsman that eventually flips into a synonym for the cheap and the fake with the development of mechanized methods of production.60

Under conditions in which the production of value systematically coincides with the appropriation of surplus value and surplus labor, the promises of saved time and work made and broken by the capitalist gimmick are also promises made and broken about value. The economic measurement of cheapness—already in an interestingly gray zone between the qualitative and quantitative—is embedded inside the aesthetic judgment of the gimmick and in an odd way worth underscoring. For as we all know, aesthetic evaluations typically sit at a vast distance from economic ones, even in the case of a commodity aesthetic like cute (which does not call up anything so explicit like a price or cost). The beautiful with its deeper spiritual claims relies especially on seeming radically disconnected from a sphere in which value must be expressed in/as money. By contrast, one cannot think or even perceive a gimmick without a judgment of cheapness immediately attending that perception; that is, without a gestalt of a commodity’s cost of production based on a rapid synthesis of sensory and conceptual cues (materials, design, location of manufacture).61 Note how usually polarized registers of value converge in this appraisal.62 However implicitly or obliquely, nothing seems less likely to factor into our aesthetic experience than a production cost! Yet our everyday spontaneous judgment of things as gimmicky and therefore implicitly cheap involves precisely this qualitative relation to the quantitative, linking a world of judgments based on feelings to a world of values necessarily expressed as money after being created in production and realized in exchange. The gimmick, like the concept of cheap at its center, is in this sense a catachresis, involving an illogical, if also utterly normal or ordinary, reevaluation of value defined in one universe in terms of value defined in another.

We have already seen comedy regarded as fundamentally about evaluation: an art of judgment about judgment and of contemporary judgments in particular. Some theorists suggest that comedy more specifically turns on the minimization of claims to value: on a “strained expectation suddenly reduced to nothing,” as Immanuel Kant argues, anticipating Lipps and Freud;63 or, for William Hazlitt, on a pleasure we take in disappointment, which becomes possible and no longer paradoxical when the object that disappoints us is suddenly revealed to be a “trifle.”64 Elder Olson makes this argument most explicitly. If tragedy involves the belated bestowal of worth on the right objects, comedy involves a timely devaluation of overvalued goods, not unlike the periodic crises that violently reset the relation of prices to values. And if tragedy bestows value in part through katharsis, the characteristic technique of comedy is by contrast katastasis, which Olson describes as a “special kind of relaxation of concern.” This “annihilation of the concern itself” happens not through the displacement of one emotion by another, “not by the substitution for desire of its opposite, aversion, [or] of fear … by the contrary emotion of hope,” but rather through a rational process of “conver[ting] the grounds of concern into absolutely nothing.”65 Such minimization or reduction by reason however often involves fairly elaborate affective-aesthetic procedures, sometimes taking up the length of an entire novel, as we are now about to see.

3. Guné ex machina

Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods (2011) is a comedy about Joe, a white male heterosexual American personification of capital, and his gimmick. While masturbating to his favorite sexual fantasy—a woman visually “divided in half” does office work in front of others as if nothing unusual is happening while being fucked by a man from behind—Joe comes up with the perfect idea for increasing the profits and protecting the assets of American corporations (LR, p. 12). The key lies in enhancing the productivity of a select group of “high-performing” heterosexual male employees while simultaneously indemnifying firms against the risk of sexual harassment lawsuits from their female coworkers. How exactly does this all transpire? Showing us in a way that encourages enjoyment in “information and technique” is what makes for the novel’s procedural comedy. We are thus taken carefully through the steps by which Joe turns his idée fixe into a device and then a service around which he in turn builds a firm and then a vast corporation. The first of these consists of an apparatus that transports the anonymous “naked bottom half” of a woman through a hidden door into a bathroom stall for the male user, discretely retreating back through the same door after the conclusion of his purgative act (LR, p. 9).66

The productivity-enhancing, profit-guarding device at the heart of the novel’s larger story of capitalist poesis is a gunéex machina. But the Lightning Rod is not only a machine. Founded on a classic principle of repressive desublimation—dispensing sex at work to desexualize and increase the efficiency of work—it is also a service, embedded in a temp agency also called Lightning Rods that initially serves as its front but eventually becomes entirely and openly coextensive with its backend operations. The complex Rube Goldberg of a commodity comprised of these interlocking parts (female body, machine, sex service, temp agency) enables the firms in the story to provide straight male employees with a hygienic way to get rid of distracting sexual tensions, increasing the productivity of this core of permanent workers, while conveniently reducing risks of sexual harassment litigation on the side (reducing actual sexual harassment comes only as an afterthought).67

The novel’s productivity-enhancing gimmick—a woman embedded in a machine embedded in a sex service embedded in a temp agency—is thus finally a product for protecting firms against employee-related liabilities and, by implication, from what the novel depicts as the ultimate employee-related liability that is simply a full-time employee. Used to justify layoffs even at times of high profits, we see this “liability theory of labor,” of the employee as a drain on rather than a creator of value and thus an inherent risk to her or his employer’s financial well-being, reflected in DeWitt’s extra comic flourish of making all of her novel’s characters either sexual harassment litigants or litigators in waiting.68 By the end of the novel, through nothing other than the initial advantage gained by Joe’s “bifunctional personnel” gimmick and the basic laws of capitalist competition, Lightning Rods has evolved into the largest company in the global temp industry. Its superior position has moreover enabled it to revolutionize temping by compelling all its competitors to adopt its innovation, which eventually becomes the industrial status quo.

In the spirit of the novel’s operational aesthetic or explicit invitation to us to take pleasure in analyzing cause and effect, how exactly does the sex business that is Lightning Rods come to be embedded in and eventually coextensive with a temp agency? As Joe makes clear in his spiel to both his prospective male clients and prospective female employees, the distinguishing feature of Lightning Rods is that it keeps identities (relatively) anonymous:

A notification would appear on a participant’s computer screen. It would be entirely up to the participants whether they took action or not. Administrators of the program would have no information as to uptake on the part of individuals. Participation or non-participation would be entirely confidential…. Should the participant choose to avail himself of the opportunity, he could either accept immediately or select the LATER option on the menu, in which case he would be allowed to either specify a later time, or simply wait until a convenient moment occurred and then click on the I’M READY NOW icon. [LR, pp. 67–68]

Male employees might suspect some of their female coworkers are sidelining as Lightning Rods but will never know for sure (a uniform of PVC tights slit at the crotch, an innovation introduced by Lucille, ensures that the one or two token Lightning Rods of color can remain anonymous, too).69

Lightning Rods will know some of their male coworkers are using the service but never the specific individuals. (Left out of the loop entirely are the female employees who are not Lightning Rods—a slot logically implied in the story but occupied by characters barely mentioned in the diegesis and fewer and fewer as the story and Joe’s product concomitantly develop.) This ambiguity implicitly turns all female workers in workplaces using Joe’s invention—and it is key that the novel ends with every workplace adopting a version of it—into possible sex workers. And it is the need to maintain this perpetual ambiguity (the essence of the product is “is she or isn’t she?”) that provides Joe with his rationale for convincing corporate clients to outsource all their temporary hiring exclusively to Lightning Rods:

Now it was Joe’s belief that in the long run a company that wanted to include lightning rods in its team for the twenty-first century had only one option: to outsource all personnel recruitment. Otherwise how are you going to guarantee anonymity? If you just outsource the lightning rods somebody in the company is going to know which employees are handled by personnel and which are handled by an outside firm, and if that person happens to know why the outside firm was taken on that person is going to be able to identify the members of staff who are providing an extra service for the company. The thing was, though, that there was no way in the world that he was going to persuade a company to hand over its entire personnel operations to an outsider. The actual service he was providing was radical enough without challenging received opinion on personnel. The important thing is not necessarily to persuade someone straight off the bat to do something in some totally different way; the important thing is that you need to be aware of what your ultimate aim is. What Joe did, anyway, was he left the whole question of personnel strictly out of bounds. He simply explained that, given the importance of anonymity, his company would have to handle all temporary personnel requirements. Some of the temps provided would be lightning rods; some would not. At the end of a six-month period they would review the success of the program. [LR, p. 58]All Lightning Rods must be temps, which means that when Joe’s innovation becomes the standard all temp agencies adopt, all temps become possible Lightning Rods. This is the moment when “bifunctional personnel” both ceases to be a gimmick (an isolated contraption of a crackpot inventor) but also truly becomes one (an endlessly repeated overfamiliar device).

The gimmick of DeWitt’s comedy is the Lightning Rod, which is also capital’s gimmick. This labor-saving device is a sex worker whose reverse image is that of the permanent temp, whose paradoxical synthesis of perpetuity and transience echoes the gimmick’s temporal contradictions. It is a synthesis perfected in the bizarre-sounding but entirely nonfictitious concept of “in-house outsourcing,” in which workers are staffed through a temp agency discreetly embedded inside the company for which such permanent nonemployees are specifically trained to work (as in Warwick University’s Unitemps and Bank of America’s B&A Temps).70 In this shift staged from seemingly exotic contraption to ordinary contemporary labor practice, DeWitt’s novel produces a comically elevating deflation akin to that of “The Glory Machine.” But there is a sense in which DeWitt’s anatomy of the gimmick downshifts things further, suggesting that, at bottom, capitalism’s ultimate labor-saving device is quite simply a woman.

The feminization of labor and the becoming contingent of labor: which is the presupposition and which is the result? In a world in which all Lightning Rods must be female and must be temps and in which all employers use Lightning Rods (in an interesting turn of events, the US government becomes Joe’s biggest client), the positions of temp and woman structurally coincide. And of course this diegetic situation is not fantastic but points to a familiar truth: still the world’s largest reserve army of labor, women continue to be, as they historically have been due to the gendering and subsequent devaluation of specific activities, capital’s most popular and longstanding profit-protecting device—permanently transient, cheaper labor used to further cheapen labor in general. It is worthwhile to note Zupančič on comedy’s reliance on the surprising absence of surprise, which echoes arguments by Feibleman and Olson on its function of corrective devaluation:

[Comedy] likes to unveil the veils, tear down the folding screens, and open the closets. Yet it does not usually claim directly that there is nothing behind. Rather the contrary: behind the veil there is always a naked bottom, behind the folding screen a scantily clad lady…. We could even say that in comedy, there is always something behind. Yet the comic point is that what is behind is—Surprise, surprise!—nothing but what we would expect (from the surface of things). [O, p. 209]

Comic art here is not so much defamiliarization as a kind of funnily irritating refamiliarization, constantly surprising us with things we already roughly expect. We see this principle worked out to the fullest in DeWitt’s story of capital/Joe, whose gimmick of “bifunctional personnel” simply literalizes the temp industry’s efforts at midcentury to recruit workers to temping and sell temping overall to businesses by explicitly feminizing and eroticizing temporary work (fig. 5). Such eroticization, as we learn from Hatton’s history of the industry, did not preclude comparisons of female temps to labor-saving household appliances (“Turn her loose on temporary workloads of any kind and watch the work disappear”) nor to office equipment, as in the case of one 1970 Manpower ad featuring a female typist inside a packing box.71

Figure 5. “The Never-Never Girl,” Kelly Services advertisement. Source: Erin Hatton, The Temp Economy:From Kelly Girls to Permatemps in Postwar America (Philadelphia, 2011), p. 51.

In laying bare the operations of a labor-saving gimmick that converts half the working population into nonproductive and permanently contingent labor (that is, sex workers and temps), DeWitt’s comedy is significantly telling a story about the standardization, not the innovation, of a capitalist technology. This focus makes her story of Joe stand out among other narratives about male American inventors on which it clearly also riffs.72 Amplifying this theme of normalization is the strikingly homogenous free indirect discourse in which the entire process is relayed. Here, due to the diegetic dominance of the verbal gimmick as medium of expression and thought (whether as slogan, platitude, maxim, jingle, or catchphrase), the style and tone of narration stays remarkably consistent regardless of which particular character’s subjectivity inflects it. The converging dictions of self-help and corporate management philosophy and the modular forms in which both are dispensed shape the rhythms of thinking and feeling in Lightning Rods to such a degree that all points of view seem to converge as well.

Thus evoking a world in which there seems to be a chronic deficit of language, the same stock phrases endlessly circulate among Joe, Steve, Mike, Ray, Al, Ed, Louise, Elaine, Renée, and Lucille,73 as if, strapped together into something like the mischief gag film’s “connection device,” they unknowingly constituted a single creature. DeWitt thus makes use of the language shared by pop psychology and business bibles as a sign of collectivity and alienation at once, part of a world in which, in spite of a heightened awareness of social differences in the workplace and their methodical functionalization by capital, every person—male or female, employer or employee, Lightning Rod or client, African American or white—talks and thinks in exactly the same modular forms and in the same limited repertoire of ways. These include addressing oneself in the second person (“You’re going to run into aggro whatever you do, so you might as well get paid for it” [Elaine]; “Suppose someone offered you the chance to go to Harvard Law School, and all you had to do was pick up a turd a couple of times a day, wearing plastic gloves, on top of your regular job” [Renée]); making generalizations from the perspective of “people” (“This is the kind of thing people want to hear from a role model” [Lucille]); and isolating the dominant traits of a type of person (LR, pp. 130, 176, 157). Famously central to comedy, which “puts aside all subtleties of a situation or character, ignoring their psychological depths and motives, reducing them all to a few ‘unary traits,’ which it then plays with and repeats indefinitely” (O, p. 176), this last way of thinking and speaking noticeably predominates in the novel and is significantly tied to occupation: “If you’re in accounting, it’s your job to be skeptical, and that’s not something you can just turn off” [Mike]; “a salesman has to see people as they are” [Joe]; “‘we’re businessmen, Al…. At the end of day, we’ve got to be realistic. We’ve got to deal with people the way they are, not the way we might like them to be’” [Steve] (LR, pp. 76, 21, 100). DeWitt’s doubling-down on the verbal gimmick thus does more than affect the novel at the level at which this experiment is deployed (that is, its discourse). It also affects the novel’s character system. Because all characters speak and think in the exact same way, even as their social differences matter enormously to the comedy’s plot (first as obstacles for Joe/capital to overcome, then as opportunities for him/it to harness), we get the impression of more than just a set of characters who are either personifications of capital or labor. As if to underscore the power of production as a socially binding activity, but one in which this sociality is created “behind the backs” of its agents, we get the impression of DeWitt’s novel having only one character distributed across a multiplicity of nodes.

In Lightning Rods, as in actual capitalism, the enhancement of productivity through labor-saving devices both presupposes and reinforces the permanence of temporary labor. And the link between higher levels of productivity and greater contingency of labor presupposes and reinforces contingent labor’s articulation with female labor. A woman, we are not allowed to forget, lies in the core of the elaborate (or is it simple?) capitalist apparatus DeWitt’s novel comically dissects for us. The innermost joke of Lightning Rods is thus one about the ambiguous temporality of capitalist development. At the beginning of the novel, female sex work implies or requires temping; by the end, female temping implies or requires sex work. This X suggests a fundamental stillness at the heart of capitalism’s dynamism. DeWitt’s implication is that regardless of the stage of technological development, and in a way that might explain why the novel’s exact historical moment is so hard to pin down, capitalism’s main productivity-enhancing device remains what it has always been: contingent-because-feminized, feminized-because-contingent labor.74

Labor, time, value: the contradictions that explain why the gimmick simultaneously annoys and attracts us explain why it permeates virtually every aspect of capitalist life. With this in mind, let’s conclude by noting one of the final comedic touches in DeWitt’s anatomy of this capitalist form. Even when Joe’s productivity-enhancing technology becomes standard for all workplaces, the laws of capitalist competition oblige him to continue innovating, differentiating his now generic product from all the others with specialty lines. So Joe is compelled to come up with one last new B2B commodity. It is a service designed for companies who know they must continue to make use of “bifunctional personnel,” while wanting the edge that comes from cornering ever smaller client niches. For these firms, the hope for a new market capture will lie in the expression of a new corporate subjectivity: declaring an adherence to family values in their hiring and business practices. This will in turn call for a product capable of eliminating Joe’s technology from the capitalist workplace, where it has become so ordinary as to be practically undetectable, infiltrating the pores of the entire system of production. Joe’s final innovation is thus a service designed to guarantee the new family-friendly corporations that their workforces will be “100% Lightning Rod free” (LR, p. 259)—even when still composed, as they must be to stay competitive, of a permanent ring of contingent labor. What is this new specialized service? A regular old-fashioned temp agency. Offered exclusively as a product of the Lightning Rods Corporation.

The gimmick is such a widely disseminated, all-encompassing capitalist phenomenon, DeWitt’s comedy of procedure finally suggests, that its form encompasses even this antigimmick: capital’s ability to turn the ultimate labor-saving device—a synthesis of the nonproductive and contingent worker—into its now finally desexualized, but still gendered and contradictory antithesis.

Notes

Ivor Brown, Words in Our Time (London, 1958), pp. 58–59; hereafter abbreviated as W.

David Flusfeder, introduction to Helen DeWitt, Lightning Rods (High Wycombe, Bucks, UK, 2013), p. ix. On the aesthetic category as a historically specific relation between a style and a judgment, between a form and a perlocutionary speech act, see Sianne Ngai; Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, Mass., 2012).

“The objects inside [Barnum’s American Museum], and Barnum’s activities outside, focused attention on their own structures and operations … and enabled—or at least invited—audiences and participants to learn how they worked. Adding an adjective to the label, one might term this an ‘operational aesthetic,’ an approach to experience that equated beauty with information and technique” (Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum [Chicago, 1973], p. 57; see also pp. 61–89; hereafter abbreviated H).

Tom Gunning, “Crazy Machines in the Garden of Forking Paths: Mischief Gags and the Origins of American Film Comedy,” in Classical Hollywood Comedy, ed. Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins (London, 1994), p. 100; hereafter abbreviated “CM.” For a discussion of these texts relating the operational aesthetic to the dialectic comedy of Buster Keaton, see Lisa Trahair, The Comedy of Philosophy: Sense and Nonsense in Early Cinematic Slapstick (Albany, N.Y., 2007), pp. 68–72.

We should however keep in mind that capitalist processes involve complicated kinds of causality less easy to visualize than the unidirectional, mechanical relations of cause and effect showcased in these films.

See, for example, this moment from Capital: The “division of labour is an organization of production which has grown up naturally, a web which has been, and continues to be, woven behind the backs of the producers of commodities” (Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, 3 vols. [New York, 1976], 1:201).

This according to the Oxford English Dictionary‘s surprisingly vague, even listless etymology (given such a idiosyncratic word), which, while citing another reference suggesting that gimmick might be an anagram of magic, finally lists its origin as “unknown” (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “gimmick”).

Giorgio Agamben, The Man without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford, Calif., 1999), p. 14.

Citing Frances Dunn, however, Rob Breton suggests that the “critique of the deus ex machina is as old as the device itself.” As Breton writes, “Dunn translates the comic poet Antiphanes, who complains that the device ‘covers up the incompetence of tragic poets’: ‘when they don’t know what to say / and have completely given up on a play / just like a finger they lift the machine / and the spectators are satisfied / There is none of this for us’” (Rob Breton, “Ghosts in the Machina: Plotting in Chartist and Working-Class Fiction,” Victorian Studies 47 [Summer 2005]: 557).

Thanks to Lauren Berlant for this particularly succinct formulation of my argument.

We thus move closer to the gimmick proper in Michel de Montaigne’s “On Vain Cunning Devices” (1580), in which he singles out with both contempt and amusement “those poets who compose entire works from lines all beginning with the same letter.” Comparing these literary feats to the stunts of a performer specializing in “throwing grains of millet so cleverly that they infallibly went through the eye of a needle,” Montaigne notes how they point backward as well as forward in time. On the one hand they hark back to “the ancient Greeks [who] would form poems of various shapes such as eggs, balls, wings, and axe-heads.” On the other they point forward to the art of Montaigne’s contemporaries, including one “who spent his time counting the number of ways in which he could arrange the letters of the alphabet and found that they came to that incredible number we can find in Plutarch.” Perhaps to deflect similar criticisms about his own highly stylized, often digressive experiments with the novel form of the essay (as the last self-reflexive paragraph suggests), he notes, “it is a wonderful testimony of the weakness of Man’s judgment that things which are neither good nor useful it values on account of their rarity, novelty, and even more, their difficulty” (Michel de Montaigne, “On Vain Cunning Devices,” The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech [New York, 1993], p. 348). Absent from the object of wonder, there is a negativity in this assessment of the cunning device that brings us closer to the gimmick’s ambivalence. Yet note how Montaigne still lacks a determinate concept for these overvalued aesthetic objects. At his historical moment, only a negation of positive terms (“neither good nor useful”) seems available to describe the mixed aesthetic experience he wants to describe. Missing here as well is the gimmick’s claim to saving labor. Far from promising to reduce or eliminate toil, the “vain cunning devices” of which Montaigne writes appear to increase it, putting the very laboriousness or “difficulty” of their achievement on display. On ambivalence as increasing the affective intensity of our attachments to an object overall, rather than involving a kind of averaging, in which the positive or negative feelings cancel each other out leaving us with a final “balance,” see Robert Pfaller, On the Pleasure Principle in Culture: Illusions without Owners, trans. Lisa Rosenblatt, Charlotte Eckler, and Camilla Nielsen (London, 2014), pp. 100–103.

L. C. Knights, “Notes on Comedy,” Scrutiny (Mar. 1933): 356–57.

Marx, Capital, 1:762.

Second-wave feminists were quick to notice this about domestic appliances, in particular, countering the optimistic claims of treatises in home economics such as Christine Frederick’s Efficient Housekeeping or Household Engineering: Scientific Management in the Home (Chicago, 1925). Betty Friedan, among others, noted that domestic appliances could indirectly lead to an increase of work for women in the household; see Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York, 2013), pp. 285–88. For a reading of the “device” comedies of American filmmaker Charley Bowers as a satire of Frederick and the Taylorization of housework, see William Solomon, “Slapstick Modernism: Charley Bowers and Industrial Modernity,” Modernist Cultures 2 (Winter 2006): 176.

This simultaneous act of repudiation and acknowledgment makes the gimmick an excellent example of what Robert Pfaller calls illusions without owners: beliefs like the superstitious rituals of the sports fan that in contemporary secular cultures “always belong to others, that are never anyone’s own [beliefs].” Knowledge of these illusions as illusions does nothing to dissipate our attachment to them; it may in fact strengthen their power. However, in contrast to the more passive form these suspended illusions take in, say, the horoscope (enjoyed by a possible majority of nonbelievers), the judgment of the gimmick enables subjects to actively distance themselves from the attractions of the capitalist device. Through it they performatively declare their resistance to being taken in by its false promises of saving labor, even as others elsewhere implicitly are (Pfaller, On the Pleasure Principle in Culture, p. 2). Snobbery is undeniably part of the story of this displacement or delegation of belief. Yet I do not think it finally tells us much about what the judgment of the gimmick means or about the critical work the affective speech act performs.

George Oppen, “Of Being Numerous (1–22),” New Collected Poems (2008), www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/53223

Maynard Frank Wolfe, Rube Goldberg: Inventions (New York, 2000), p. 53. Related to this extravagant expenditure of labor in art is Theodor Adorno on the subjects of what he calls “tour de force” or technical virtuosity and Thomas Mann’s idea of “art [as] a higher form of prank”: “Technological as well as aesthetic analyses become fruitful when they comprehend the tour de force in works. At the highest level of form the detested circus act is reenacted: the defeat of gravity, the manifest absurdity of the circus—Why all the effort?—is in nuce the aesthetic enigma” (Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor [London, 2013], p. 254).

To be clear, I take the Rube Goldberg (and the novel Lightning Rods, discussed below) as a representation of the capitalist gimmick, a meditation on or study of how its aesthetic operates through a mimetic enactment of its form and logic; whereas I take The Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (also discussed below) as both a representation and also an example. Since the Rube Goldberg is a mediation on the capitalist gimmick, it is worth remembering something often forgotten by its contemporary revivalists, which is the frequency which his contraptions combine their wide array of inanimate objects (dead labor—what we always remember) with living animals or small human beings (living labor). As Michael North notes, for all their “irrational complexity,” the Rube Goldberg devices ultimately rely on simple “organically generated” sources of energy, usually involving some kind of animal pain: “A jack-in-box scares a porcupine, a dish of hot chili scalds a porcupine, or a French poodle jumps for joy at seeing a German dachshund collapse, and the works begin to turn” (Michael North, Machine-Age Comedy [New York, 2009], p. 90; hereafter abbreviated as MC).

Goldberg’s cartoons, like the mischief gag films analyzed by Gunning, were part of early twentieth-century “New Humor,” a medium-crossing mode of popular comedy influenced predominantly by vaudeville, where comedians began to “favor striking, intense effects over the slow development of comic plots” (MC, p. 136). To both comedians and audiences, the stage routines, drawings, poems, and stories associated with New Humor seemed “alarmingly more ‘mechanical’ than the humor of the past” (MC, p. 8). Moreover, as gimmicks came to predominate over traditional storytelling, “the mechanics of comedy [came] to be treated almost as a science”; in the words of one early twentieth-century writer cited by North, as “a vocabulary of basic mechanical devices, insertable into any performance regardless of context, and calculated to produce an immediate and outward response” (MC, p. 8). New Humor was thus comedy redefined by techniques regarded as akin to those of industrial production, at roughly the same time as the use of gimmick expands beyond the world of entertainment, eventually describing devices (and effects) used in contexts ranging from mechanical engineering to politics.

Whether perceived as a device working too little or working too hard, as outdated or too advanced, our experience of the gimmick involves a judgment about the intensity of labor made in relation to an implicit norm (since any judgment of insufficiency or excess presupposes a standard from which deviations occur). This silent or implicit norm seems to be what Marx calls the historical standard of productivity, informed by and informing what he calls socially necessary labor time. The historical productivity of labor is thus the gimmick’s nonaesthetic shadow. Both use labor as a measure of contemporaneity and vice-versa. The gimmick is for this reason unique among other aesthetic categories, which however reflective of capital’s relations in other aspects, do not confront us with its social abstractions in such a concrete way. Note, however, how the gimmick points to this historical standard of productivity while letting it remain unspecified. We might think of it as affectively encircling its very resistance to quantitative measure.

As we will see in more detail below, the gimmick highlights contemporaneity as a problem of time, mediated by capitalist forms of sociality, and also as a problem of sociality, mediated by capitalist forms of time. And because both will prove central to the form of gimmick, it must be underscored here that the contemporary is of course not the same as the present, but rather a temporal concept that “performatively projects a [fictional] unity onto the disjunctive relation between coeval times,” as Peter Osborne puts it (Peter Osborne, “The Fiction of the Contemporary,” Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art [London, 2013], p. 23). It is also an equally speculative thesis about mutual belonging or collectivity: “belonging to the same time, age, or period; living, existing, or occurring together in time” (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “contemporary”).

James Feibleman, “The Meaning of Comedy,” Theories of Comedy, ed. Paul Lauter (New York, 1964), pp. 464, 465.

See Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In: On Comedy (Boston, 2008), p. 178.

Agnes Heller, Immortal Comedy:The Comic Phenomenon in Art, Literature, and Life (Lanham, Md., 2005), p. 13.

Zupančič, The Odd One In, p. 178; my emphasis. “Comic elements always react (to others) in the present, and although they usually give the impression that they … unavoidably react as they do, they also—since this always happens right before our eyes—display a radical contingency involved in this very necessity” (ibid.). [London, 2003], p. 18).

Though of course the border between aesthetic culture and practical invention will always be porous in an age of what Hal Foster calls “total design” (Hal Foster, Design and Crime(and Other Diatribes) [London, 2003], p. 18).

See, for just a few examples, John Francis Rider, Perpetual Trouble Shooter’s Manual (New York, 1947), pp. 86, 88, 89 and Successful Servicing (New York, 1951), pp. 2, 12, 31. Copious references to the “GIMMICK” abound in issues of Beechcraft Engineering Service, an aeronautics periodical. In The Proceedings of the Annual Convention of the National Association of Building Owners and Managers (Chicago, 1940), pp. 126–28, “gimmick” and “Gimmick Manufacturing Company” are playfully used as names for a generic commodity and manufacturing company in a hypothetical business scenario (and also as explicit substitutes for “widget”).

Though note how all these now primarily descriptive terms for working parts still retain a certain cuteness, which is to say an aesthetic and therefore evaluative dimension.

Theodor Lipps, “The Comical and Related Things,” trans. Lee Chadeayne, in Theories of Comedy, pp. 393–97, 394; hereafter abbreviated “CRL.”

Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York, 1989), p. 242.

DeWitt, Lightning Rods (New York, 2012), p. 223; hereafter abbreviated LR.

Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “gimmick”; my emphasis.

See Alex Bogusky and John Winsor, Baked In: Creating Products and Businesses That Market Themselves (New York, 2010).

See Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, “The Glory Machine,” Cruel Tales, trans. Robert Baldick (Oxford, 1985), pp. 48–63; hereafter abbreviated “GM.”

On the preindustrial imbrication of marketplace and the theater, see Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge, 1988).

Anticipating Villiers’s return to the same device in Tomorrow’s Eve, the Machine further comes equipped with “twenty Andreides, straight from the workshops of Edison,” which we are told can be dispersed among live members of the audience to “lend tone” to the aesthetic reception being produced and enjoyed in simultaneity with the performance (“GM,” p. 65).

In an interesting parallel to Zupančič’s claim about the centrality of plasticized abstraction to comedy, Pfaller argues that comedy is the emergence of a “cogent truth” from “something transparently fictive”; it is “based on a deception which fools no one while at the same time the performers come under its spell” (Pfaller, “Introduction,” Schluss mit der Komödie! Stop That Comedy! On the Subtle Hegemony of the Tragic in Our Culture, ed. Pfaller [Wien, 2005], pp. 170–71). In a similar vein, Mladen Dolar singles out “find[ing] of the Real in the very trade of appearances” as the one of the genre’s defining features (Dolar, “Comedy and Its Double,” in Schluss mit der Komödie! p. 182). This emergence of the real thing from its simulation in “The Glory Machine” recurs in Tomorrow’s Eve when Lord Ewald truly falls in love with Edison’s “stupefying machine for manufacturing the Ideal” (Hadaly the female Android) (Villers, Tomorrow’s Eve, trans. Robert Martin Adams [Champaign, Ill., 2001], p. 194).

Viktor Shklovsky, “The Novel as Parody,” in Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Champaign, Ill., 1991), p. 149; hereafter abbreviated “NP.” At times it is interestingly hard to separate Shklovsky’s “device,” the thing, from the action of “exposing the device,” in part because the device seems to perform this action to itself. This reflexivity throws in even greater relief the curious relationship between Shklovsky’s device and the capitalist gimmick, which performs a similar conflation of what it is/does with its own laying bare of what it is/does. I am grateful to Louis Cabri for initially drawing my attention to this comparison. On the relation between Shklovsky’s ostranenie and Brecht’s Verfremdung, see Stanley Mitchell, “From Shklovsky to Brecht: Some Preliminary Remarks towards a History of the Politicisation of Russian Formalism,” Screen 15, no. 2 (1974): 74–81.

The key difference being also that Shklovsky’s “art-as-device” and “exposing the device” (synonymous roughly in his writing with ostranenie) are meant to slow down aesthetic perception. The goal is to make aesthetic perception less instantaneous, to narrativize or turn it into a “step-by-step structure” (“NP,” p. 22), hence countering “automatization” or the “algebraic method of thinking” by which “objects are grasped spatially, in the blink of an eye.” This is why the main example of a “device” across Shklovsky’s essays is what he calls “the device of deceleration” (“NP,” p. 5). The labor-saving gimmick, on the other hand, is almost always a way of speeding things up, even when it participates in the operational aesthetic of calling attention to the process by which it achieves its effect, and of course especially when it takes the form of the black box. One might say that while the comedic gimmick is an (equivocal) way of reducing energy expenditure, Shklovsky’s “device” is a way of increasing it.

E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime (New York, 1996), p. 109.

Thanks to Joshua Clover for this observation.

Fredric Jameson, “The Aesthetics of Singularity,” New Left Review 92 (Mar.–Apr. 2015): 113; hereafter abbreviated “AS.”

In various ways and for differing reasons. See, for a few key examples, Jane Elliott, “The Problem of Static Time: Totalization, the End of History, and the End of the 1960s,” in Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory (New York, 2008), pp. 21–46; Gopal Balakrishnan, “The Stationary State,” New Left Review 59 (Sept.–Oct. 2009): 5–26; Jasper Bernes, “Logistics, Counterlogistics, and the Communist Prospect,” Endnotes 3 (Sept. 2013): endnotes.org.uk/issues/3; Hans Gumbrecht, Our Broad Present: Time and Contemporary Culture (New York, 2014); Paul Virilio, The Futurism of the Instant, trans. Julie Rose (London, 2010); Harry Harootunian, “Remembering the Historical Present,” Critical Inquiry 33 (Spring 2007): 471–94; Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, N.C., 2011); and Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge, 1996); hereafter abbreviated TLS.

Jameson is here recalling a point made in “The End of Temporality,” Critical Inquiry 29 (Summer 2003): 695–718.

Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Allison R. Ensor (New York, 1982), p. 49; my emphasis; hereafter abbreviated CY.

Hence the gimmick provokes impatience both for its overfamiliarity (as Brown complains, “not long ago it became impossible to read a notice of a film or play in which the word gimmick did not appear”) but also for its exaggerated claims to novelty (even the word is a trendy “vogue-word,” Brown also points out) (W, p. 58).

A key or especially tricky point to grasp here being that capitalist society generates not only a distinctive kind of abstract time but also a distinctive form of concrete time: “The dialectic of capitalist development is a dialectic of two kinds of time constituted in capitalist society and therefore cannot be understood simply in terms of the supersession by abstract time of all kinds of concrete time” (TLS, p. 216).

On the “strange identification” of Twain with the “Paige contraption,” see James M. Cox, “The Machinery of Self Preservation,” Yale Review 50 (1960): 89–102; rpt. in Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, p. 398; hereafter abbreviated “MSP.”

See Cushing Strout, “Crisis in Camelot: Mark Twain and the Idea of Progress,” Sewanee Review 129 (Spring 2012): 336. On Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court as a “one joke” novel, Strout refers to Adam Gopnik, “The Man in the White Suit: Why the Mark Twain Industry Keeps Growing,” Gopnik is in turn citing Van Wyck Brooks, who became famous in the nineteen-twenties with a book, “The Ordeal of Mark Twain,” arguing that Twain, despite outsized gifts, had produced a stunted body of work: a great novel (or at least two-thirds of one) in “Huck Finn,” one good book for boys in “Tom Sawyer,” a couple of chapters of memoir in “Life on the Mississippi,” and not much else worth keeping. There was “Innocents Abroad” and “Roughing It,” baggy and relentlessly facetious, and a couple of one-joke productions that are notable mostly for their titles, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” and “The Prince and the Pauper,” and whose sturdy high concepts—New England inventor time-travels to Camelot; rich and poor look-alikes change identities—can’t save their stodgy execution” [Adam Gopnik, “The Man in the White Suit,” The New Yorker, 29 Nov. 2010, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/11/29/the-man-in-the-white-suit]

Review of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Twain, Boston Literary World, 15 Feb. 1890, pp. 52–53; rpt. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, p. 334.

Review of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Twain, London Daily Telegraph, 13 Jan. 1890; rpt. Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, pp. 328, 398. As Louis Budd sums it up, Connecticut Yankee seemed to say “almost nothing new as it leaped back thirteen centuries to look forward”; “the very gimmick of bringing the past and present face to face [had become] common property” (Louis Budd, Mark Twain, Social Philosopher [Bloomington, Ind., 1962], p. 141).

As Harris writes, This delight in learning explains why the experience of deceit was enjoyable even after the hoax had been penetrated…. Barnum, Poe, Locke, and other hoaxers didn’t fear public suspicion; they invited it. They understood, most particularly Barnum understood, that the opportunity to debate the issue of falsity, to discover how deception had been practiced, was even more exciting than the discovery of fraud itself. The manipulation of a prank, after all, was as interesting a technique in its own right as the presentation of genuine curiosities. Therefore, when people paid to see frauds, thinking they were true, they paid again to see how the frauds were committed. Barnum reprinted his own ticket-seller’s analysis: “First he humbugs them, and then they pay to hear how he did it. I believe if he should swindle a man out of twenty dollars, the man would give a quarter to hear him tell about it.” [H, p. 77] “Effects” is Morgan’s own term for his spectacles (CY, pp. 124, 219).

“As Morgan assumes power in the Arthurian world the fantasy begins to rout the criticism and progression degenerates into mere sequence” (“MSP,” p. 392). At the same time, Paul Lauter suggests that there might be something fundamentally comedic (and thus, with regard to Twain’s novel, successful) about “mere sequence” or serial plots: Critics following his lead … assumed that Aristotelian strictures on the need for tragic plots to have an organic structure necessarily applied, and in the same way, to comedy. But if, as Schlegel argues, the comic world is not one of tragic necessity, a looser, more fantastic, indeed (to use the word most deplored by Aristotelian critics) “episodic” plot might be more proper to comedy. And as a matter of fact the best comic novels have often been picaresque—as many recent works, such as Bellow’s Augie March, Heller’s Catch-22, and Pynchon’s V., remind us. But critics have not yet had much to say about the comic character of the plotting in these novel. [Lauter, introduction, Theories of Comedy, p. xxii]

A “fairly mechanical proliferation of burlesque ‘contrasts’” (James D. Williams, “Revision and Intention in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee,” in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, p. 365); “stock devices” and “clichés of travelogue nostalgia” that become “mere parts of the machinery of this mechanical novel” (“MSP,” pp. 393, 394, 398); a protagonist “more mechanical than any of the gadgets in which he specializes, [who] grinds laboriously through his ‘acts,’ his only means of attracting attention being to run faster and faster, to do bigger and bigger things, until the mechanism of his character flies apart” (“MSP,” p. 392).

Henry Nash Smith, Mark Twain’s Fable of Progress: Political and Economic Ideas in “A Connecticut Yankee” (New Brunswick, N.J., 1964), p. 86; excerpted in Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, p. 413. All in all, after “emphasizing at the outside the protagonist’s ability to build or invent all kinds of machinery, Mark Twain seems strangely reluctant to make use of this power in the story” (ibid.). It is as if the novel’s operational aesthetic, or will to one, runs out of steam in tandem with Twain’s rapidly crashing hopes for his Paige machine. Indeed, as James D. Williams notes, Twain originally planned for The Boss to do even more than makes its way into the final version of Connecticut Yankee, including introducing “steam engines, fire companies, aluminum, vaccination, and lightning rods” (Williams, “Revision and Intention in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee,” p. 365). The fact that these plans were abandoned well into the writing of the novel (a good fourteen chapters in), suggests that Twain eventually felt something about the initial promise of the labor-saving capitalist machine—the novel’s shtick, its foundation—could no longer be sustained.

With, of course, the exception of the last antinomy, which could be read as a synthetic interpretation of all the preceding ones. It’s worth noting that the questions which the gimmick’s form introduces (overworking or underperforming? outmoded or too advanced? cheap or overvalued?) mirror, on an aesthetic plane, the questions an economist might ask when wanting to ascertain whether a capitalist machine or technique is productive of value (not just material wealth).

Michael Wayne, Red Kant: Aesthetics, Marxism, and the Third Critique (London, 2014), p. 23.

Daniel Spaulding and Nicole Demby, “Art, Value, and the Freedom Fetish,” Metamute, 28 May 2015, www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/art-value-and-freedom-fetish-0

It might be tempting here to collapse the gimmick into the broader concept of kitsch to which it is undeniably related, and into which so many other equivocal aesthetic categories have been for so long subsumed. Yet to do so would be to lose sight of the gimmick’s fascinating specificity. Certainly the commodity aesthetic of kitsch is as much a product of the capitalist mode of production. Yet its concept does not encompass the connotations of labor-saving technology that the gimmick does. The paradigmatic kitsch object that is the tchotchke, bibelot, or collectible—snow globes, cookie jars, fuzzy dice—makes no promise to save anyone time or effort; in fact, often just the opposite, signifying dilatory pleasures, a utopia of luxurious purposelessness or affordable waste. Most significantly, kitsch is an aesthetic of consumerism and does not call up the image of production or draw it into reception in the direct way that the gimmick qua technique or device does.

Other dictionaries suggest a different but equally trick-based etymology in magic, of which gimmick is an anagram. Even the word gimmick is thus a verbal trick of sorts.

Kitsch also connotes cheapness, but the cheap and the kitschy do not align so perfectly. Sometimes kitsch both looks and really is expensive, and the expensive look or cost of an object can often intensify its kitsch value, as in the case of a pink marbled mansion or a bejeweled candelabra. Cost of production is moreover a highly specific quantity that neither camp nor kitsch explicitly reference.

We could say that cheapness entails and expresses a nonquantifiable relation to the realm of the quantitative that becomes affectively and sensuously underscored in the aesthetic perception of the gimmick.

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith and Nicholas Walker (Oxford, 2007), p. 161.

William Hazlitt, “Lecture I—Introductory: On Wit and Humor,” Lectures on the Comic Writers, &c. of Great Britain (London, 1819), p. 1.

Elder Olson, The Theory of Comedy (Bloomington, Ind., 1968), p. 25.

The first stage involves a machine designed for the stall in men’s bathrooms for users with disabilities, mandatory in the United States only since the 1990 passage of the American Disabilities Act. Joe’s ability to extract profits from his “big idea” thus hinges on his ability to take advantage of “free” or commonly owned resources: public infrastructure and an existing culture of bathroom segregation by gender. There is much more to say than I can here, since my goal is a reading of the gimmick and not the novel per se, about the way DeWitt’s personification of capital finds ingenious way after way to capitalize on cultural and noneconomic factors, much of it based on civil rights legislation protecting the rights of women and minorities in the workplace. There is also much more to say about the novel’s use of disability and alignment of sex with disability in particular.

Litigation, as the novel makes clear, is the only real counterpower, significantly noneconomic, that women have against “aggro” in the male-dominated world that its story depicts; comically, the main Lightning Rods in the story, Lucille and Renée, all go on to have spectacular second careers as lawyers and judges after their retirement from Joe’s firm (LR, p. 27). Threats to the job performance of women from either sexual desire or harassment, meanwhile, do not factor into Joe’s scheme as significant enough to warrant countering (or inventing a profitable way of countering). Gay men are similarly excluded, on Joe’s premise that their sexual urges are always completely fulfilled and thus under control in the workplace; see LR, p. 26.

The phrase “liability model of work” is from Erin Hatton, The Temp Economy: From Kelly Girls to Permatemps in Postwar America (Philadelphia, 2011), pp. 4–18.

This, in turn, enables Joe to avoid the costly legal repercussions of violating the Equal Employment Opportunities Act—the real purpose of the PVC device. Prior to its adaptation, Lightning Rods exclusively hired white women, on the grounds that only their anonymity could be secured. See LR, pp. 178–85.

As Erin Hatton notes, “in-house outsourcing” presupposes a workforce already permanently composed of temporary labor. If one must hire temps in any case, why not hire one’s own? In tandem with practices like “payrolling,” firing long-term employees and asking them to join temp agencies in order to be rehired to perform the same job (which frees corporations from paying unemployment taxes, worker’s compensation, pensions, and benefits); and the outsourcing of entire departments of large businesses such as mailrooms, accounting, and customer service, “in-house outsourcing” has long become normal (Hatton, The Temp Economy, pp. 110, 74).

Ibid., pp. 59–60.

Benjamin Franklin’s Benjamin Franklin, Villiers’s Thomas Edison, Twain’s Hank Morgan, Ralph Ellison’s “thinker-tinkerer” Invisible, E. L. Doctorow’s Henry Ford, and Samantha Hunt’s Nikola Tesla, among others.

Another De Witty touch: the unifunctional personnel all have monosyllabic names (Joe, Steve, Ed, Mike, Pete, Al, Ray) while the bifunctional ones have bisyllabic ones (Elaine, Lucille, Renée, Louise).

Since comedy is all about timing, it is worth noting how the reader’s progressive understanding of the surprisingly ordinary “behind” to Joe’s labor-saving gimmick develops in synch with the progressive narration of its normalization. It is synced also with our dawning realization about the sort of time the novel represents. What at first seems to be a story about the future is a history of the present, but not a specific one like, say, the 1950s (as suggested by references to Joe’s first job selling vacuum cleaners door to door) or, say, the early 1990s (as suggested by references to accessible bathrooms, PC feminists, and the first appearance of blue M&Ms). Rather, and in a way that explains the novel’s historical indefiniteness overall, it seems more like a story of the “perpetual present” Postone associates with the “apparently eternal necessity” of the production of value. If the capitalist development of productivity changes the concrete presupposition of the social labor hour (for example, two hundred sweaters rather than twenty per hour) but in a way which leaves the amount of value produced per unit time constant—if it “reconstitutes, rather than supersedes, the form of necessity associated with that abstract temporal unit” such that “the movement of time is continually converted into present time“—DeWitt’s gimmick-driven comedy of capitalist procedure enacts a strikingly similar conversion.

[yeskraim]

Dungeons & Dragons had fallen on ‘troubled times.’ The role-playing game’s fifth edition changed everything

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Nathan Stewart had a tall task ahead of him when he and others first looked to revamp Dungeons & Dragons. A tarrasque-sized challenge, indeed.

Nearly eight years ago, the game’s accessibility had come into question ahead of the release of the fifth edition, its current iteration. When Stewart joined D&D publisher Wizards of the Coast, the strategy was to “reinvigorate the tabletop game.”

Their efforts have paid off in almost unimaginable ways. D&D’s fifth edition, released in 2014, isn’t just a success. It’s revivified the franchise, with 2018 and 2019 – the 45th anniversary of the game – consecutively marking the best years for D&D sales. 

That’s not all.

“Beyond the sales, there’s a lot of other ways to look at it, too,” Stewart told USA TODAY. “I think we’re seeing more players than ever. We’re seeing more mainstream mentions and more exposure, impressions, if you will, in terms of the number of references and times D&D comes up in a pop culture TV show or movie, or even just someone’s Twitter. 

“It used to be, ‘Oh hey, cool, D&D got mentioned.’ Now it’s like, ‘Yeah. It’s a weekday.’”

In an age where screen time is synonymous with free time, tabletop gaming surrounded by friends is making a comeback. 

At the forefront is D&D. Thanks to live-streaming services, celebrity endorsements, frequent pop culture references and – above all else – an accessible game, the D&D community is thriving and eager to roll initiative again. 

Dungeons & Dragons: Go on an adventure in a ‘safe, controlled space’

Dungeons & Dragons certainly isn’t new. The game’s first edition launched in 1974, and groups of friends have been led through adventures by storytelling Dungeon Masters (DMs) ever since.

At its heart, D&D is simple. DMs create and guide players through worlds filled with monsters, treasure and intrigue, with dice rolls deciding key outcomes. 

Some tables take on psychic fish-monsters from the dawn of time. Others prefer political debates.

Coming in 2020: ‘Dark Alliance’ video game features iconic Dungeons & Dragons characters, location

But, at its core, D&D is about collaborative storytelling with friends. That spirit was captured in the creation of the fifth edition following a slump brought on by previous editions that led to in-community fighting, Stewart said.

This time, he said, the team focused on cutting out “complexity for complexity’s sake.”

“I think everybody who works here at Dungeons and Dragons take the role of steward really seriously,” Stewart said. “It was such an old, beloved brand at the time, and it was kind of falling on some troubled times.”

Rules were added and scrapped and tweaked to make sure the game was approachable for newcomers but also engaging for longtime players. 

“Every time you put in a rule that took away from friends getting together and telling stories, we were kind of going against the core ethos,” Stewart said. “We play-tested the hell out of it and, also, when we were looking at things, we said, ‘Is this really making it more fun for everybody or this just for one group?’ 

“Whenever it was just for one group, we tried to find a better way to do it.”

D&D’s principal story designer Chris Perkins said D&D allows people to tap into the “human need to escape the confines of our reality and experience other worlds in a safe, controlled space.” D&D’s universe is vast, with pantheons of gods, devils and demons, established villains and heroes. 

And there are always DMs willing to create their own worlds while taking cues from D&D’s preexisting library. 

“The game allows us to be ourselves and someone else at the same time,” Perkins said in an email. “D&D is also a great creative outlet, allowing us to craft our own fictional characters, worlds, and adventures, and that’s very appealing when the real world is quickly burning to a cinder.”

Still, despite streamlining, D&D can be intimidating for new players. It’s not easy to pick up the fifth edition’s “Monster Manual” – a book that has a monstrous floating eye with teeth on its cover – and simply dive into the game. Not everyone can pick up the Player’s Handbook and immediately choose if they’re going to be a barbarian or a sorcerer, either.

That’s where the established community comes in. 

A ‘diverse’ community of players bolsters Dungeons & Dragons

D&D’s community is multifaceted.

There are new players and players who grew up with the game. Young players and old players. Parents teaching their children. Children teaching their classes. The list is endless.

Satine Phoenix, a storytelling consultant and founder of collaborative art studio Gilding Light in Los Angeles and a host of a popular series that provided tips for Dungeon Masters, said the community is more diverse than ever. She’s been playing D&D since 1988, when she found a beginner’s box in her parents’ basement at 8 years old.  

Phoenix is writing a book about how D&D helped her through PTSD and childhood trauma. 

“Throughout that trauma, I held on to my character, I held on to these stories, so D&D is in my veins,” Phoenix said. “It helps me understand the world differently. It helps me escape. It helps me attack problems.”

From Barbie to Matchbox cars: Here’s every toy in the Museum of Play’s Toy Hall of Fame

Eventually, Phoenix started a D&D group at Meltdown Comics, an iconic L.A. comic shop that closed in 2018. 

“People came out that I didn’t expect,” she said. “There were women and there were professionals. The fascinating thing was they thanked me for providing a space. Suddenly, we had Sundays with six tables and six to 10 people at each table. There wasn’t a space and, suddenly, there were people like me in all the major cities going, ‘I’m going to make a space,’ and people just flocked to it.” 

Humans are social creatures, Stewart said. D&D just provides an excuse to come together – like a poker game or a movie night, only with dice and maybe a few kobolds.

“These stories are the ones that stick with us,” Stewart said. “When you think about some of your best friends, at least in my world, half the people tell the story about their best friend and they met them playing D&D.”

David Price, store manager at Game Theory in Raleigh, North Carolina, told USA TODAY that D&D’s popularity has surged in the five years he’s been managing the store. There was a time when there are only two tables reserved each week for D&D.

Now, he said, there are “at least 15 to 20.” 

“If I had to pick a community that is the most diverse, it’s the role-playing community in general, and the D&D community specifically,” said Price, 47. “We have kids 10 years old and up, all the way to people who are close to retirement age – actually, we probably do have a few retirees.” 

The digital age has helped ‘demystify’ Dungeons & Dragons for new players

Some of the most recognizable players in D&D put their faces alongside the game on a regular basis. 

According to a D&D fact sheet, more than 7,500 unique broadcasters streamed live games for more than 475,000,000 minutes watched in 2017. And, D&D’s official Twitch channel streamed about 50 hours of content weekly. 

Shows like “Critical Role” – which recently raised more than $11 million on Kickstarter to back an animated television show – draw thousands of viewers per week. 

“What all of those are showing people is this game is for you,” Stewart said. “I look like you. My group is made up like you.”

The online shows – and in some cases, live shows played in front of sold-out theaters – lower the barrier of entry for D&D, Stewart said. Interested viewers get a chance to see what a game is like in real time – a table of friends goofing around – instead of worrying about the game’s complexities. 

“Technology has helped demystify the game by showing that you don’t need to be a rules expert to have a good time,” Perkins said, and added, “All you need are some dice, a good imagination and some friends.”

Outside of live broadcasts, the digital age has provided new ways for players to get involved with D&D. Meetup.com is a good place to start for anyone looking to join a game. DND Beyond is D&D’s web-based service that provides digital rulebooks and can even create a character for free. Looking for new content? Try the Dungeon Master’s Guild. 

What’s next for Dungeon & Dragons?

So, after back-to-back years of top-tier sales, what comes next? How does the D&D franchise build on its momentum? 

“I think if you just ask people what they want, you’re never going to get an answer that leads to the next product or the next popularity wave,” Stewart said. 

“But, if you’re asking all of the people and you’re really listening and you’re really triangulating in terms of the different ways they’re getting their opinions out there, whether it be on Reddit or Twitter or different surveys … then you can kind of stay ahead of the curve that way.”

“Dark Alliance,” a video game featuring one of the series’ most popular characters that’s set to launch this year on PC and consoles, is one project deemed integral to D&D’s future strategy.

Why?

“When someone comes in through a film or a video game or through a YA novel, they’re getting an experience of D&D, that whets their appetite and then they want to go search out more of the gaming experiences we have,” Stewart said.

This week, D&D also announced a new sourcebook in collaboration with “Critical Role,” which is set to release in March. 

“Dungeons & Dragons has had such a massive, positive impact on nearly my entire life, and I am ever inspired by the endless creativity I see it spark in so many others across the world,” Matt Mercer, DM for “Critical Role,” said in a press release.

Whatever comes next, the storytelling consultant Phoenix is excited for it. 

“Over the past 10 years, America has just embraced Dungeons & Dragons,” she said. “Over the past couple years, Europe has and so has Asia-Pacific, and it’s really going to make a huge difference when we can get all over the world playing together.

“That’s going to be one of the next big, positive changes, is going global and going global together.” 

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[thatsnotcanonpodcasts]

Experiments, Manga & Child Safety

WOW!!! This week’s episode is out of this world and filled with Lunatics, parks and just outright fun in the powder or snow. NASA is planning on sending people back to the moon and are starting to plan missions in advance with an eye to researching developments for future exploration. That’s right folks, it may not be 1999 but Moonbase Alpha is finally looking at becoming a reality. Plus there are going to be new buggies and other equipment being sent to the moon so the Astronauts will have something to play with when they arrive next. Wonder if they will find that hidden base full of Nazis on the dark side of the moon or transformers?

Next we look into why Manga sales are taking over the U.S comic sales. Could it be the fact that the subject matter is just so much cooler, fun and broad? Or is it part of some plot to take over the world and they are brain washing us all? Hmmm, if this was an anime episode we would now include a musical interlude. The scene, while our heroes wander the country looking for the answer our work on computers calculating and plotting what is happening. This is when the nutty and bumbling sidekick runs around in circles and makes a mess and eats lots of fried chicken. Jeepers, we are living in an anime, now I want my ramen and feel an overwhelming need to run down the street with my arms flung behind me screaming. Nope, not happening, oh well, such a shame.

In response to a request from a listener we have had the Professor look into child safety measures in gaming such as the new Harry Potter Wizards Unite. We have a number of articles linked in the notes that have information that can help parents develop strategies aimed at helping protect their dirt magnets, children or teenage food disposal units. There are some really good points and suggestions in this, but as we aren’t parents we are unable to offer any expert advice. This is a really huge topic and it is something we took extremely seriously. If you have any suggestions please feel free to post them on the page and share with each other.

Now, it is that time where we have the usual shout out, remembrances, birthdays, and special events. Be careful of those surprise mechanisms that try to loot you like a politician with eight arms. Take care of yourselves and look out for each other, stay hydrated and we will catch you next time. Cya!

EPISODE NOTES:

Experiments on the moon - https://www.space.com/science-technology-payloads-nasa-moon-artemis-program.html

Manga sales taking over U.S comic sales - https://comicbook.com/anime/2019/07/06/anime-executives-manga-taking-over-us-comic-sales-anime-expo/

Child Safety in mobile games

- https://aic.gov.au/publications/tandi/tandi379 .

- https://nianticlabs.com/privacy/en/

- https://policies.warnerbros.com/privacy/children/en-us/html/children_privacy_en-us_1.0.0.html

- https://www.childnet.com/blog/a-parents-guide-to-harry-potter-wizards-unite

Games currently playing

DJ

– Mortal Kombat 11 - https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/mortal-kombat-11-ps4/

Buck

– Mafia 3 - https://store.steampowered.com/app/360430/Mafia_III/

Professor

– Harry Potter Wizards Unite - https://www.harrypotterwizardsunite.com/

Other topics discussed

Snow falls on Queensland

- https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-06-04/snow-falling-in-stanthorpe-cold-weather-queensland/11174962

List of Apollo Missions

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apollo_missions

Luna Park

- Melbourne - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_Park,_Melbourne

- Sydney - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_Park_Sydney

Iron Sky (2012 movie)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Sky

Mickey Mouse as a Warhammer 40k character

- http://www.coolminiornot.com/pics/pics2/img3e1fc14857e56.jpg

Space Shuttle retirement

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_retirement

Virgin Galactic

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Galactic

Chinese Anime

- https://www.ranker.com/list/best-chinese-animation-anime/ranker-anime

Asur illustrations

- https://www.facebook.com/asur.illustrations/

Tik Tok fails to remove predators

- https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-47813350

Mom blames Pokémon Go

- https://gamerant.com/girl-hit-car-pokemon-go/

Finsta (Instagram trend)

- https://www.today.com/parents/parents-you-know-about-instagram-do-you-know-finsta-t117541

Cuban American mob

- https://crimereads.com/the-birth-of-the-cuban-american-mob/

Igor (character)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_(character)

Channing Tatum (American actor and singer)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channing_Tatum

This Is The End (2013 movie)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_the_End

The Prestige (2006 movie)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prestige_(film)

Shoutouts

9 Jul 1958 - The 1958 Lituya Bay earthquake occurred with a moment magnitude of 7.8. The strike-slip earthquake took place on the Fairweather Fault and triggered a rockslide of 40 million cubic yards (30 million cubic meters and about 90 million tons) into the narrow inlet of Lituya Bay, Alaska. The impact was heard 50 miles (80 km) away, and the sudden displacement of water resulted in a megatsunami that washed out trees to a maximum elevation of 1,720 feet (520 m) at the entrance of Gilbert Inlet. This is the largest and most significant megatsunami in modern times. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Lituya_Bay,_Alaska_earthquake_and_megatsunami

9 Jul 1981 – Donkey Kong, an early example of the platform game genre was released. In the game, Mario (originally named Mr. Video and then Jumpman) must rescue a damsel in distress named Pauline (originally named Lady), from a giant ape named Donkey Kong. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donkey_Kong_(video_game)

11 Jul 1969 – David Bowie Space Oddity inspired by Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey was released during a period of great interest in space flight. The United States' Apollo 11 mission would launch five days later and would become the first manned moon landing another five days after that. - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-11/david-bowies-space-oddity-50-years-old-moon-landing-anniversary/11297134

4 Jul 2019 – Mad magazine ends publication of future issues will no longer feature new content, with the magazine instead relying on classic content from its nearly 67-year history. - https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/jul/04/the-end-of-satire-mad-magazine-to-cease-regular-publication

Remembrances

6 Jul 2019 - Mandla Maseko, aimed to be the first black African in space. In 2013 he was one of 23 winners out of a million entrants to a competition by the Axe Apollo Space Academy to attend a US space academy, in order to be the first black African in space. He was nicknamed "Afronaut" and "Spaceboy". He went to the Kennedy Space Centre for a week to do tests, such as skydiving and a journey on a reduced-gravity aircraft, ahead of a planned one-hour suborbital flight on board a XCOR Lynx Mark II that was planned to take place in 2015. However, the flight did not happen as XCOR Aerospace went bankrupt in 2017. He would have been the second South African in space, after Mark Shuttleworth in 2012. He died at the age of 30 in a motorbike accident in Pretoria - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-09/man-destined-to-be-the-first-black-african-in-space-dies/11290548

9 Jul 1856 - Amedeo Avogadro, was an Italianscientist, most noted for his contribution to molecular theory now known as Avogadro's law, which states that equal volumes of gases under the same conditions of temperature and pressure will contain equal numbers of molecules. In tribute to him, the number of elementary entities (atoms, molecules,ions or other particles) in 1 mole of a substance, 6.022140857(74)×1023, is known as the Avogadro constant, one of the seven SI base units and represented by NA . He died at the age of 79 in Turin - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amedeo_Avogadro

9 Jul 1978 - Zoltán Aladár, Transylvanian composer, music critic and teacher (The Goat and the Three Goons). He died at the age of 49 in Târgu Mureș - https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/zoltan-aladar

9 Jul 2014 - Eileen Ford, was an American model agency executive and co-founder of Ford Models with her husband, Gerard "Jerry" Ford, in 1946. Ford Models was one of the earliest and internationally recognized modelling agencies in the world. She died at the age of 92 from complications of meningioma and osteoporosis in Morristown, New Jersey. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eileen_Ford

Famous Birthdays

8 Jul 1894 - Pyotr Kapitsa, was a leading Sovietphysicist and Nobel laureate, best known for his work in low-temperature physics. He discovered superfluidity in 1937 when he observed liquid helium flowing without friction – in other words with no loss of kinetic energy. He was born in Kronstadt - https://www.famousscientists.org/pyotr-kapitsa/

9 Jul 1942 - Richard Roundtree, is an American actor and former model. Roundtree is noted as being "the first black action hero" for his portrayal of private detective John Shaft in the 1971 film Shaft, and its four sequels, released between 1972 and 2019. For his performance in the original film, Roundtree was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year – Actor in 1972. He was born in New Rochelle, New York - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Roundtree

9 Jul 1971 - Marc Andreessen, is an American entrepreneur,investor, and software engineer. He is the co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used Web browser; co-founder of Netscape; and co-founder and general partner of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Andreessen is also a co-founder of Ning, a company that provides a platform for social networking websites. He sits on the board of directors of Facebook, eBay, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, among others. Andreessen was one of six inductees in the World Wide Web Hall of Fame announced at the First International Conference on the World-Wide Web in 1994. He was born in Cedar Falls, Iowa - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen

10 Jul 1856 – Nikola Tesla, was a Serbian-American inventor,electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, and futurist who is best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system. His alternating current (AC) induction motor and related polyphase AC patents, licensed by Westinghouse Electric in 1888, earned him a considerable amount of money and became the cornerstone of the polyphase system which that company would eventually market. Tesla became well known as an inventor and would demonstrate his achievements to celebrities and wealthy patrons at his lab, and was noted for his showmanship at public lectures. He was born in Smiljan, Austrian Empire (modern-day Croatia). - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla

Events of Interest

9 Jul 1893 - Daniel Hale Williams III repairs the torn pericardium of a knife wound patient, James Cornish, without penicillin or blood transfusion. - https://www.onthisday.com/people/daniel-williams

9 Jul 1922 – Johnny Weissmuller swims the 100 meters freestyle in 58.6 seconds breaking the world swimming record and the 'minute barrier'. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Weissmuller

9 Jul 1955 – The Russell–Einstein Manifesto calls for a reduction of the risk of nuclear warfare. It highlighted the dangers posed by nuclear weapons and called for world leaders to seek peaceful resolutions to international conflict. The signatories included eleven pre-eminent intellectuals and scientists, including Albert Einstein, who signed it just days before his death on 18 April 1955. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%E2%80%93Einstein_Manifesto

9 Jul 1971 - British battleship HMS Vanguard explodes at Scapa Flow (the result of an internal explosion of faulty cordite), killing 804. - https://www.onthisday.com/photos/hms-vanguard-disaster

Intro

Artist – Goblins from Mars

Song Title – Super Mario - Overworld Theme (GFM Trap Remix)

Song Link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GNMe6kF0j0&index=4&list=PLHmTsVREU3Ar1AJWkimkl6Pux3R5PB-QJ

Follow us on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/NerdsAmalgamated/

Email - Nerds.Amalgamated@gmail.com

Twitter - https://twitter.com/NAmalgamated

Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/6Nux69rftdBeeEXwD8GXrS

iTunes - https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/top-shelf-nerds/id1347661094

RSS - http://www.thatsnotcanonproductions.com/topshelfnerdspodcast?format=rss

[liveartandperformancegroup-blog]

Announcing the programme of the day! Squash & Stretch Festival 2018.

Main Performers

Tero Nahua (Finland)

Plastique Fantastique (London)

Tero Nauha

Artists, Doctor of Arts (Theatre and dance), Postdoctoral researcher

Tero Nauha is an artist and a postodoctoral fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. He is a participant of a Finnish Academy funded postdoctoral research project ‘How To Do Things With Performance’, also. He defended his doctoral research at the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts in Helsinki in January 2016. In 2015, he published his first fiction novel Heresy & Provocation for a Swedish publishing house Förlaget.

His performance art projects have been presented at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Theatrediscounter in Berlin, CSW Kronika in Bytom, Performance Matters in London, and at the New Performance Festival in Turku, among other venues.

Lives and works in Helsinki, Finland

https://teronauha.com

Plastique Fantastique

Plastique Fantastique, a collaboration between David Burrows, Simon O’ Sullivan, Alex Marzeta and Vanessa Page (sometimes with others, including Harriet Skully, Ana Benlloch, Stuart Tait, Mark Jackson, Tom Clark, Simon Davenport, Joe Murray, Lawrence Leaman, Samudraka and Aryapala), is a mythopoetic fiction-an investigation of aesthetics, the sacred, popular culture and politics-produces through comics, performances, text, installations and shrines and assemblages.

http://www.plastiquefantastique.org

Performers

Fred Astaire- Puttin’ On The Ritz dance/ Veronica Cordova de la Rosa

I dance to Fred Astaire-Puttin’ On The Ritz song. I dress up as customer service assistant and stretch and squash for five minutes while dancing. Others can join me!

Veronica Cordova de la Rosa is a fictional character. Unconventional ways to take on life.

https://veronicacordovadelarosa.wordpress.com

LINE UP (and join in)/Peta Lloyd

Instructions for the next 5 minutes:

On 5 6 7 Walk up

1 and 2 and 3 and 4

Right together Right together Step turn together clap

Left together Left together Step turn together clap

Grapevine left Grapevine turn

Cha cha and out cha cha and back

Shimmy 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

http://www.petalloyd.co.uk

Temporary State of Excessive Craving for the Fullness of a Phallic Presence/Sam Hall

The Blobby Boys carry out an intervention involving coke, burgers, wearable screens and copious amounts of expanding foam.

Sam creates work through the re-appropriation of mundane activities such as taking the bus or going to McDonald’s, finding novel ways to celebrate personal and cultural identity in web centric, consumer driven environments and exploring ideas of fetish, childhood and consumerism.          

www.instagram.com/sam_hall6

Tights/Katy Watson

Katy walks down the main staircase of the Headington Hill Hall wearing a black dress and carrying a handbag with cosmetics and tights in it. When she reaches the bottom, she sits on a chair and applies a pair of tights to her head followed by dry shampoo, makeup and more tights. She sings odd lines from “Over the Rainbow’ and other songs occasionally.

Katy Watson’s performance style in this piece is influenced by her interest and practice of the Japanese dance form Butoh, and a desire to communicate directly with her audience about things that affect her and other women.

A noise of requiem/Dario Utreras, Zarah Haji Fath Ali Tehrani, Beth Shearsby

Prometheus/Marcin Gawin

Prometheus is an intimate, participatory performance. It creates a sacred, collective experience of a construction of a human being. The piece is a procedure of reversed autopsy performed in a manner of guided meditation and a private mass, but above all, Prometheus enables audience to look at the common denominator of the human species by herding with anatomically accurate replicas of human’s most inner components.

Marcin Gawin is a fine artist born in Poland, and working in performance, video and image making. Drawing on lowbrow and camp aesthetic, his work focuses on establishing artificial environments and hierarchy with the means of a role imposition, absurd and (direct) confrontation.

Touch Screen/Hugh Pryor

Hugh’s fractal video projection creates organically generated fractal patterns as seen in nature with ferns and cauliflower. This is interactive as shadows and images of the viewer feeds into the self-repeating images. Hugh is going to take this process one step further by residing inside the fabric screen during the performance and will make himself, as well as the audience, part of the fractal generation process.

Hugh Pryor is an Oxford based artist who specializes in experimental photography and sculptural installations. Hugh’s overaching interest in motion has evolved as a deep exploration of the potential for photography to capture movement. Using his own highly individual thecniques. Hugh has been working with dancers and performers and is incorporating  performance art as an integral part of his practice.

http://www.hughpryor.co.uk

Ectoplasmic Masks/Luke Jordan

In the form and subversion of a Victorian seance my improvised vocal / body sound is channeled thorough a 'spirit trumpet' and light.  Variations of frequency cause undulations of vibrations of the trumpet against on a metal plate, and patterns of flashing / flickering light : whilst my features are transformed by a mask of yeast / fungus.

Demonstration 7: how to bag one’s air/Robert Luzar

Demonstrations are works that partially show or demonstrate actions which ‘may’ or ‘may not’ be done by anyone, artist or audience. Appearing on the Web as ‘how to’ videos. Demonstrations show audiences step-by-step actions that open possibilities; but these are ‘on-going’ works that appear in multiple performances, where audiences are shown how such works take place.

Robert Luzar is an artist, writer and educator living in Bristol, UK. His works engage 'events' that reflect spaces, traces, and actions of ongoing work. He holds a PhD through practice from Central Saint Martins; and has exhibited internationally in venues such as the Palazzo Loredan Venice (IT), Torrance Art Museum (USA), DRAWinternational (FR), Katzmann Contemporary (CA), KCCC (LTU), Künstlerhaus Dortmund (DE), Nunnery Gallery (UK), and Talbot Rice Gallery (UK).

www.robertluzar.com

Snack daddy in the castle of card  /Robert Ridley-Shackleton

i work hard at the card so u can get down x

Robert Ridley-Shackleton I am the cardboard prince and ive come to play with u, put down your books and let me feed ya.

http://hissingframes.blogspot.co.uk

Sonic Extractions/Victoria Karlsson

Sonic Extractions aims to focus the participants and audience towards the sounds of our inner worlds, the sounds of our thoughts, desires and emotions. It proposes that the artist can ‘extract’ inner sounds from the minds of the participants and play them for all to hear. It confronts both our desire to believe in a ‘pure’ connection of minds, as well as the feeling of intrusion and loss of control we would experience should someone truly be able to ‘penetrate’ our mind.  

Victoria Karlsson is a sound artist, currently undertaking a research degree in sound art at UAL, London, focusing on sound in thoughts. She is interested in investigating our emotional connection to sounds, what they mean to us and how they affect us, using performance, scores and photography.

www.victoriakarlsson.co.uk

DUO/Anette Friedrich Johannessen and Jan Egil Finne

In our performance, we will extend our awareness of each other, our materials and the surroundings, to uncover the dynamics and energy of working as a duo. During this time, all actions will consist of complementary improvisations, where we as individuals and as a team, will evaluate repetition, systems and order.

DUO is a live performance project by Anette Friedrich Johannessen and Jan Egil Finne that investigates the structures and revitalize the dynamics between humans, space and objects. To work on site, gives us the freedom to perform intuitively, open-minded and free of boundaries.

https://janegilfinne.wixsite.com/artwork

http://anettefriedrichj.tumblr.com

Untitled, Cone Dance, 2018/Jessie Palmer

A reflection on our apparent funnelled vision. Cones held to the face, we move without seeing each other.

Jessie Palmer My practice frequently explores the function of colour and the question of what it is to perform, both in art and in life more generally. These themes often enter a dialogue with absurdity or absurdism, generating bizarre spectacles.

Rise and Fall/Hannah Oram and Rosie Mullan

Location: Top Roof in front of the main garden

(Dur. 10 minutes)

Throw it down waiting for the catch

Bricks rise above our heads

Rosie Mullan and Hannah Oram We are a performance art duo living and working in London. We have performed together in London, Oxford and Beijing.

http://rosiemullan.com/Mantle-Clicks

http://hannahoram.com

Weigh In /Al/ice/ex Donaghy

Loose fitting jumper, slack on bones worn away by restricted diet and over exercise. Screaming sisters and cool covered nurses cannot get inside, the body just shakes and shakes all night long, pumped up and starved. Covering the bites of disgust and harm, waking up and returning to where everyone is carrying on.

Al/ice/ex Donaghy I am an interdisciplinary artist working mainly in performance with influences from Butoh dance, experimental writing/music and photography.

adonaghy.com

Human Clay Head (2017-18)/Robin Woodward

A person, a happening, loss of Identity, a becoming.

Using a full block of Terracotta Clay the artist places on his face he removes the ability to see, hear and breath. In actual fact, this performance is a physical representation of a distinct kind of ‘feedback loop’, a downward spiral, one that suggests a curious relationship to Wheatly’s film High Rise. By removing sensory functions, the artist becomes other and no longer has the ability to control what he does and when he wants to do it. In relation to Peggy Phelan’s theories the performance occurs over a time which will not be repeated, but on repetition it becomes “different”. The artist’s actions are unscripted and random.

“In working with clay, I form faces which may or may not represent and inner self. In my performance I do not die, but much like Laing, I become more animal. I lose the restrains that society holds on me. A more devious, sexual, frightening character takes my place-I become, I transgress into madness.”

https://www.robinwoodward.com

Mishearings/Serena Braida and Iris Colomb

Mishearings is a poetic performance piece which explores miscommunication through text and voice. The text is based on a simple process involving correspondence and homophonic translation. The result is a peculiar sequence of text which are linked through sound rather than sense. The performance involves fluctuating levels of intensity built on a variety of ways of reading intermittently and simultaneously. This piece started as a commission for the 2017 European Poetry Night, curated by SJ Fowler as part of the Enemies Project, and recently evolved into the creation of an artist book in collaboration with designer Hortense Bedouelle.

Iris Colomb is a poet, artist, translator and curator based in London. She is the art Editor of Haverthorn magazine and a member of the interdisciplinary collective 'No Such Thing'. Her current projects involve artist books, performance scores, and collaboration.

http://iriscolomb.com/

Serena Braida is a poet, writer, multidisciplinary performer and voice practitioner working both in Italian and English. Her current work focuses on cross-genre writing, text and performance. She co-curates the Locomotrix literary series at Housmans Radical Bookshop.

serenabraida.com

Im Abendrot (At Sunset)/Austin Sherlaw-Johnson

Austin Sherlaw-Johnson is a composer and performance artist who works in a variety of media. Recent work includes: Explicit Sounds (six actions for one performer), Making a Box as Quickly as Possible (video), Anti-Conceptualism, (installation), John Cage and Teeny Duchamp Play Chess in front of a Live Audience (theatre piece for two performers) and You’re Beautiful (three three minute pop songs for two performers).

www.austinsherlawjohnson.com

Welcome!/Tess Tallula

Performance and art object advocating and perpetuating love, warmth, openness and acceptance.

Tess Tallula is an interdisciplinary artist who composes immersive experiences in physical and digital worlds. Her work is celebratory and often has layers of meaning. She lives and loves in Oxford, commissions and collaborations welcomed.

egg-Hamlet 2/NuNu Theatre

egg-Hamlet is a bigger project to fight Hamlet as an emblem of Britishness in theatre and in the English language. egg-Hamlet is like the foreign artist's away match with the almighty British Shakespeare. egg-Hamlet is a confrontation that can work only through engaging with the notions of failure, de-construction, futility, non-performability, opening of the Shakespearean text to 'infestation' from other forms and removing it from the high stage of British theatre and English language standard. egg-Hamlet 2 is an installation with eggs, video and two monologues.

Nu Nu is a theatre company that supports actors and performers who work with English as a second language. Nu Nu supports marginalized artists and artists at a crossroads of their careers. Nu Nu's ethos is interdisciplinary, having collaborated with composers, performance artists, visual artists, sculptors, animators, illustrators for all our projects.

http://nunuplatform.com/sample-page/

Two for joy/Jezella Piggott and Naomi Morris

This is your body, your greatest gift, pregnant with wisdom you do not hear, grief you thought was forgotten, and joy you have never known.

Jezella Pigotts practice draws on cult female anthropology. Her work often combines drawing, print making and performance.

https://jezellapigott.co.uk

Revealed/Concealed/Exposed/Enclosed/Naomi Morris

This is a ongoing solo performance project stemming from work initially exploring finding physical form from nothing and finding the light from darkness.

http://naomiemorris.wixsite.com/portfolio/projects

Smile/Clare Carswell

Come and meet the artist’s ageing smile, get up close and let her show you her teeth!

An interactive performance that invites audience to meet the middle-aged smile of the artist. It will reveal gum recession and the dental hygiene routine required to keep it in check, a usually unseen aspect of inhabiting and maintaining a middle-aged body.

Clare Carswell MA(RCA) works with performance and drawing to make works for the gallery and public space. She curates the work of others at AYYO Contemporary Art, a gallery and project space near to Oxford. She runs Art Pitch, a residential programme for UK and international artists and writes and lectures on contemporary art.

www.clarecarswellperformance.com

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[daniellethamasa]

Hey all, Dani here.

So, I don’t do a lot of mini reviews on here, but I’m making a bit of an exception today. Though I could probably rave and ramble on about both of these intriguing stories, if I did so who knows when I would be able to squeeze them onto this blog. I’m supposed to only be posting 5 days each week, giving myself basically weekends off, but I’ve had a lot of things I’ve wanted to talk about lately, so bonus posts are happening. Anyway, let’s just jump into these reviews.

Summary (Vox Machina Origins)

Roguish twins Vax’ildan and Vex’ahlia investigate a curse afflicting the impoverished citizens of the port city of Stilben. Things are not what they seem for the adventurous siblings…between fighting shark-riding fish men and black-clad assassins, they meet an antlered half-elven druid with her own theory about the curse.

Summary (Bitch Planet)

Eisner Award-nominated writer Kelly Sue DeConnick (Pretty Deadly, Captain Marvel) and Valentine De Landro (X-Factor) team up to bring you the premiere volume of Bitch Planet, a deliciously vicious riff on women-in-prison sci-fi exploitation.

In a future just a few years down the road in the wrong direction, a woman’s failure to comply with her patriarchal overlords will result in exile to the meanest penal planet in the galaxy. When the newest crop of fresh femmes arrive, can they work together to stay alive or will hidden agendas, crooked guards, and the deadliest sport on (or off!) Earth take them to their maker?

Collects BITCH PLANET #1-5.

My Thoughts

Rating: Vox Machina Origins (5 stars) Bitch Planet, Vol 1 (4 stars)

Here’s a fun fact…there is actually a connection between both of these comics, and it happens to be actress Ashley Johnson. She plays gnome cleric Pike Trickfoot in the web series Critical Role, which I have gushed about on this blog a couple times already, and then when she did an episode of Signal Boost on Geek & Sundry, Ashley recommended Bitch Planet as something to read.

As a huge fan of Critical Role because of the epic storyline (seriously I have watched all 113 episodes of the show and they are typically 3-5 hours long each–so basically I’ve invested a lot of time for this), the announcement of a prequel comic greatly excited me. This was a fantastic story detailing part of an early adventure before Vox Machina truly formed. This particular issue focuses on Vex and Vax, though there is a decent amount of Keyleth in it as well. Go Team Half-Elf. The artwork was great, and it was actually done by a Critter (what we fans of the show call ourselves), so that’s even cooler. Matt Colville manages to capture the personalities and attitudes of the characters so well, and this 27 page comic issue was over too quickly. There will be 6 issues in this original run, with one issue being released each month, so I am eagerly awaiting the next installment.

Moving on to Bitch Planet. First off, please note that this graphic novel is tagged as for mature (age 16+ readers). There is violence and nudity and more within the pages. This one takes place on a prison planet where women who are considered non-compliant are sent. If a woman is too fat, too outspoken, too ugly, etc. etc. she gets sent out to this prison to live and work, and they are not treated well here. But man, the diversity within this graphic novel is outstanding. The variety of sizes and shapes and colors and everything displayed by the group of women we follow is absolutely wonderful. In some ways this feels like a sci-fi version of “Orange is the New Black”…kind of. Add in the politics of something like The Handmaid’s Tale and you’re probably pretty close to what is portrayed within the pages. I am greatly intrigued by this series, and I’m hoping to learn more about the core group of women, because so many of them were introduced in the first few issues that I actually had to reread some parts to make sure I knew who was who. Thankfully I already purchased Vol 2, so I’ll be reading that very soon.

Where to Buy

Vox Machina Origins: Amazon, Dark Horse, Comixology

Bitch Planet, Vol 1: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-million, Book Depository

Comic Mini Reviews: Vox Machina Origins and Bitch Planet Hey all, Dani here. So, I don't do a lot of mini reviews on here, but I'm making a bit of an exception today.

[holleygrigsby01-blog]

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Considered that pneumatology is actually the forerunner of present day psychological science, Amo should be deemed the Father of Psychological science" in Ghana and also the Father of Dark Psychology" as Amo's research in pneumatology precedes the award from Ph.D. in psychology in 1920 to Francis Cecil Sumner, the very first African United States to acquire a Ph.D. in psychological science (Sawyer, 2000 ). Friedrich Naumann Groundwork for Independence & TB Found Animate Europe Launch// Reside Celebration// 1700. To this level, this is feasible to suggest that African scholars and also trainees at the university researched psychology in terms of its own subject matter, structure from human mind as well as practices. Students enlisted in the graduate certification program will definitely be actually called for to complete a minimum required from 15 credit hours, which include conclusion from any type of among many three-course core focus (9-12 hrs) and several open electives (3-6 hrs). The business people I captured made massive developments ... they developed thousands as well as countless jobs as well as scaled up whole economic situations. Because our 2 nations have actually acknowledged to this located on the dependability from our particular ticket management plans, that is. Jeffrey D. Sachs is a world-renowned professor of economics, forerunner in lasting progression, senior UN advisor, bestselling author, and also syndicated columnist who monthly paper columns seem in greater than 80 countries.

[recentanimenews]

Three More Curious Students Join the Cast of "My Girlfriend is Shobitch"

  Three more cast members have been announced for My Girlfriend is Shobitch, an upcoming TV anime based on the ecchi 4-panel Boku no Kanojo ga Majime Sugiru Shojo Bitch na Ken ("My Girlfriend is a Faithful Virgin Bitch") web manga by Namiru Matsumoto about a young man who discovers his chaste-appearing girlfriend has a relentlessly dirty mind.

  The new cast members include:

    Juri Nagatsuma as Saori Igarashi, a 2nd year student and the chairperson of Haruka's class. Saori has a very strict and severe personality, and she's constantly on the look-out for indecent behavior that would upset the school's morals. However, because she wants to set a good example, this makes her an excellent target for Akiho's teasing.

    Miki Hase as Saya Shizumori, a 2nd year high school student and the chairperson of Class 4. Saya is shy and soft-spoken, but surprisingly aggressive when it comes to sexual matters. She's always on the lookout for sexy situations, both in theory and in practice, and she's good friends with Saori, to whom she diligently passes along her discoveries.

    And Marin Mizutani as Misaki Aikawa, a 1st year high school student and Kanata's classmate. Unlike Kanata, Misaki has an understanding of adult subjects that's appropriate to her age, so Misaki is often embarrassed when Kanata uses sexually-charged language that she doesn't understand.

    Described as a "pure love, dirty joke, love-love comedy", the story of Boku no Kanojo ga Majime Sugiru Shojo Bitch na Ken follows Haruka Shinozaki, an ordinary high school student who confesses his feelings to Akiho Kōsaka, a beautiful, intelligent, and athletic girl with an aura of mystery about her. Akiho agrees to go out with Haruka, but contrary to Haruka's perception of her, Akiho is obsessed with sex (in theory, rather than in practice) and is constantly embarrassing Haruka with her "investigations".

    The original Boku no Kanojo ga Majime Sugiru Shojo Bitch na Ken web manga is serialized in the Comic Newtype digital manga magazine as well as on Kadokawa's Comic Walker website. The series is also published in print by Kadokawa. The My Girlfriend is Shobitch TV anime is directed by Nobuyoshi Nagayama and features animation by Diomedéa.

My Girlfriend is Shobitch will broadcast on AT-X beginning on October 11, 2017, with additional broadcasts to follow on Tokyo MX, KBS Kyoto, Sun TV, Mie TV Broadcasting, TVQ Kyushu Broadcasting, Gifu Broadcasting, and BS11.

  Sources:

Ota-suke

MoCa

  Paul Chapman is the host of The Greatest Movie EVER! Podcast and GME! Anime Fun Time.

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com

[wbwest]

New Post has been published on WilliamBruceWest.com

New Post has been published on http://www.williambrucewest.com/2017/03/31/west-week-ever-pop-culture-review-33117/

West Week Ever: Pop Culture In Review - 3/31/17

So, as a week has passed, I find I’ve got some more thoughts on Power Rangers. I watched it again (don’t ask me how), and I actually liked it a lot better. The first viewing is pretty jarring, but once you know what you’re getting yourself into, it’s easier to let go and let Zordon.

Something about it struck me, though: the teens have an odd bloodlust thing going on. They’re really jonesing to kill something/somebody. When they first encounter Alpha, and don’t realize he’s “one of the good guys”, Zack’s immediate response is “We could kill it”. Not “Hey, we should run” or “We need to get away from it”. It was basically “We could end its life”. And while I know kids shows have to use language like “destroy” or “eradicate” or anything that’s not “kill”, I’m not used to applying “killing” to the world of Power Rangers. Even Zordon says that Rita must be “stopped”, and the kids immediately take that as “We have to kill Rita.” Hold your horses, hoss! I know they live in some little podunk fishing town, but have these kids killed before? Will they kill again?!

Also, Brian Tyler’s score needs to be applauded. It’s one basic theme that’s repeated throughout the film, but I didn’t realize how epic it was until the second viewing. Sure, it’s not “Go Go Power Rangers” or any of the show’s songs from Ron Wasserman, but it really conveys that superhero aesthetic the movie is going for.

It’s not all sunshine and roses in the world of Power Rangers, however. First up, original Green Ranger Jason David Frank was apparently kicked out of the premiere of the film because he took out his camera to film the audience’s reaction to his onscreen cameo. If you’re not familiar with his antics, his lives his life online. He thinks he’s giving a ton of access to his fans, so he basically vlogs EVERYTHING. Signings, convention panels, etc. He was a web series called My Morphing Life, so I assume  he was trying to get footage for that. Well, security did what the original 5 Power Rangers couldn’t do, and that was defeat the Green Ranger. They escorted him out and he didn’t even get to see the mid credit scene. They tried to take his phone, which he wasn’t about to let them do, so he yelled “It’s morphin time” and proceeded to beat up a bunch of middle aged men. Well, I don’t know about that last part, but it’s still fun to imagine.

Next up, murderous Wild Force Red Ricardo Medina Jr has been sentenced to 6 years in jail for the 2015 stabbing death of his roommate. Earlier this month he pleaded guilty voluntary manslaughter, and he got the maximum sentence for that charge. While I poke fun at it, the whole matter kinda sucks. I mean, he claims it was in self defense. In this crazy country, if he’d shot the guy, we probably wouldn’t even be having this discussion. Instead, he had to go and use a sword, and the American legal system just isn’t built for that. Here’s hoping he gets off early for good behavior or something.

There was a Justice League trailer released last Saturday, and that’s all I have to say about that. No, I guess I have more to say. Look, if the DCEU movies still get you hard, then more power to you. I’ve been fooled enough by those films to know that they’re more than likely not going to be my cup of tea. I felt like I was in Bizarro World, though, as everyone seemed to love the trailer but hate Cyborg. I was the opposite. I just can’t get excited about these things anymore, but I thought Cyborg looked cool. I’ve been told the CGI is outdated, but I’d rather he look like that than just a Black guy in a silver suit. Anyway, Snyder makes long-form stylized music videos. That’s what Watchmen was, and Dawn of Justice was a darker version of that. Here, it’s business as usual for him.

Speaking of DC movies, apparently Joss Whedon is in talks to write, produce and direct a Batgirl movie. Ya know, until he drops out. I’ve never worshipped at the altar of Joss, as I can see the holes in his whole gimmick. He’s always the go-to guy for “strong, female characters”, but I feel like it’d make more sense to just hire a woman instead of hiring a man who seems to understand women. I think DC is just trying to hedge their Bat bets because they know Affleck has one foot out the door. DC is the KING of announcing shit with nothing to back it up. The only time the MCU did that was with Inhumans, but DC has promised Green Lantern Corps, Black Adam, and  Cyborg films – all of which seem to be in Development Hell. To me, this is just another empty promise. DC is the dad who makes a ton of empty promises because he’s scared you love mom’s new boyfriend (Marvel) more than him. And they’re right. Have people forgotten all the Wonder Woman drama? People act like this is a major heel turn, with Whedon “defecting” from Marvel to DC, but I think the Russo Bros effectively swept away any influence folks thought Joss had on the MCU. Age of Ultron was a bore of a chore, so I’m not exactly jazzed about him crossing the aisle. I also don’t like the idea of a standalone Batgirl film that didn’t organically evolve from an existing Batman franchise. The Batman is falling apart, and instead of fixing that, they move on to Batgirl? Get your shit together, DC!

In the world of TV, Katie Cassidy is reportedly returning to Arrow next season as a series regular. Instead of playing Laurel Lance, however, she’ll be reprising her Earth 2 identity as villain Black Siren. If you remember, she crossed over into our world this season, and Oliver’s determined to rehabilitate her. I’m bored just thinking about it. However, if you know anything about the Arrowverse, you know that “series regular” doesn’t mean much. After all, Willa Holland is a series regular, and we’ve seen Thea how much this season? And Cassidy already had that exclusive Berlantiverse contract this season that yielded few results. I guess we’ll have to wait and see how much exposure she actually gets.

Speaking of the Arrowverse, we finally got our first look at Cress Williams as Black Lightning in the pilot being filmed by The CW. Fox passed on this a few months ago, so naturally The CW came to the rescue. Personally, I don’t think that universe needs a fifth show. They always add a show to the detriment of another. Arrow suffered when Flash came along, Flash suffered when Supergirl and Legends of Tomorrow came along. Supergirl‘s still getting used to its new home, while Legends is only just starting to get good. I think they should focus on what they have instead of trying to expand right now. Someone online said that Black Lightning was corny, but so was Static and folks are always claiming they wanna see that character make a comeback. Sure, Black Lightning hails from a different era, and I really hope they just call him Lightning, kinda like how Ollie was just The Arrow in the beginning. The only important storyline I remember featuring Black Lightning was when he was chosen to be the Secretary of Education under the Luthor Administration. Other than that, his daughters have had more page time than he has in recent years. I’d be all for the character joining the Legends team, but I don’t know if there’s enough meat on that bone for a series. And knowing The CW, they’re gonna green light it anyway – not even stopping to think how a failure would devalue the brand.

Things You Might Have Missed This Week

The Big Bang Theory scored a 2-season renewal, which will take it through season 12. Suck it, haters!

Han Solo is not the character’s real name. His birth name was Handsome Solowitz, but his manager made him change it

Adam Sandler inked a deal for another 4 Netflix movies. When, exactly, did he officially become the White Tyler Perry?

In the upcoming film, Jumanji will now be a video game console and not a board game. As someone who never saw the first film, and has never played many board games, this doesn’t bother me in the least

The upcoming Astonishing X-Men comic series will feature a different artist every issue. All I know is that each issue better be a self-contained, done-in-one affair, or this is gonna get messy!

TLC is planning to bring back Trading Spaces. Paige Davis better return to host, or GTFO.

Jack the Ripper time travel drama Time After Time has been canceled by ABC

Bones ended its 12-year run, making it the longest-running Fox drama

AMC has renewed sci fi android drama HUMANS after a blink-and-you-missed-it second season.

Jordan Peele is being sought after to direct the live action Akira movie. Seems like an odd choice, but I guess he can write his own ticket after Get Out‘s success.

Mindy Kaling announced that her series, The Mindy Project, would end after its next season on Hulu.

In music news, I’ve just discovered a new Chinese boyband called Acrush. There’s a catch, however – it’s actually made up of androgynous girls! CRAZY!

Did you see that? I’m just glad Spider-Man is in the MCU now. Nobody does a shared universe like Marvel, so it’s nice to see him come home. It still feels like it’s an Ultimate Spider-Man movie, what with Gank…”Ned Leeds”. Seriously, why would Marvel go to the trouble of clearly putting Miles Morales’ best friend Ganke in the movie but then call him one of the Hobgoblins? Am I really supposed to expect this kid to become Hobgoblin down the road, a few sequels from now? It almost feels like fanservice to give him that name, to make fans wonder what might happen in the future, while never actually delivering it.

Anyway, every announcement about this film just gets better and better. For example, it was announced that it would officially introduce Damage Control to the MCU. In the comics, Damage Control was a construction firm co-owned by Tony Stark and Wilson Fisk (The Kingpin) that was tasked with rebuilding NYC after superhero battles. It’s such a logical concept, but something that gets lost in the suspension of disbelief that comics require. I’ve loved every appearance of Damage Control, so it’s nice that we’ll finally get to see them onscreen. They were actually mentioned in an episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., as a division of S.H.I.E.L.D. itself, so it’ll be interesting to see how the movie handles this.

Also, it was reported that Pepper Potts might be making her return to the MCU in the film. I tend to hate Gwyneth Paltrow, but I really like her take on Pepper, as she serves as a good match for Downey’s Stark. If this rumor pans out, I’ll be very happy.

At this point, the only thing I’m not looking forward to is The Vulture. I always thought he was a lame character, but here’s hoping Keaton can do something to make him interesting. I’m as eager for this film as I’m not eager for Justice League. I swear I’m not just some Marvel fanboy, as I’m currently reading more DC than Marvel. That said, Marvel simply makes better movies, and it appears this will be one of them. So, for those reasons, the Spider-Man: Homecoming trailer had the West Week Ever.