Raunch Feminism

Really nice entry on "raunch feminism" in Momus' blog today:

Raunch as choreography emerges from working class strip bars, cheap Western porn tapes, sexist rap videos. It confuses sex with the sex industry, and sexiness with pimping and whoring. It also confuses all sex with dick sex: its main move is the thrust, and its main facial expression the rock-guitar-solo "gurn". [...] My main objection (apart from the visceral aesthetic objection) to raunch feminism is this. Feminism as a project has two sides: the dismantling of patriarchy, and the empowerment of women. Raunch feminism proposes that women can be "empowered" without dismantling patriarchy... in fact, by embracing "the male gaze" entirely.

link

very little

I said I'd write more on aesthetics and ideas, but I really only had one more thought to make. I still weigh aesthetics into the "practical" - the other day I told Myer that I had given up the functionality of FireFox for the beauty of Safari. I've since gone back to FireFox (and ahead to Flock now and again) but the theme remains. Beauty - as problematic my relationship may be to that word, we're learning to get along for better or worse - often works as my divining rod for culture, theory, technology, etc. I gravitate towards beautiful things. I'm happy to report though that as my world of beauty sprawls into places I never thought I'd go, it has lead me also to thoughts I never expected to have. I guess I'm on the sound poetry square of the monopoly board right now - still dodging hotels.

the prettiness of good thoughts

Here's a little personal history. I remember when I first realized that erotic appeal of counterculture screw-your-homework-read-nietzsche transgression married to radical visual and audio culture. I'm a composer, and so maybe that's why it was first with a book called "Jamming the Media." It was probably junior year of high school - when I was still publishing a zine - and I think I bought Oval's Ovalcommers that same month. To me, Autechre was shiny and new, and I had a feverish need to absorb anything I thought would take me deeper into a world of skipping CDs and homemade literature. Reading Jamming was a simultaneous experience: I could absorb a history of radical media activism, while learning and marveling at what was for me at least a completely radical and beautiful presentation. The design made the book easy to fetishize. I remember it being thrilling to first read about the book, and then to own my own copy and feel the exhilaration of reading an essay about mail art couched under a fractured typeface. Even the type of paper was new to me - the visual experience was striking, I had never seen a book like this. But it wasn't just the beautiful design - I was as tantilized by the aesthetics of the design as I was by the aesthetics of the content of the book. The revolutionary immediacy of directly subverting a real power - the media - was entangled with punk rock and avant garde art and all those other cool things I knew enough about to know that I wanted to slip into their culture somehow.

More later...

ps, if anyone is listening, dial the knob to this: [mp3]
tobais on the air - ignore the annoying host if you can.

Lost

Rather than sleep, I watched a film about sleepless navel-gazers: Lost in Translation. Watching it again made me remember Momus' essay about the film:

It's the 'lesbian until graduation' syndrome, and Sofia is definitely interested in graduating. The world she's graduating from -- Japan, visual culture, youth culture -- is my world. That's why I feel betrayed too.

Essay

Flock

I'm blogging from Flock. This is a test.

the cult of tech

I had a little conversation with Bryan at lunch today, and we speculated how tech-saavy one of the visiting professors in the composition faculty actually is. The evidence: he can talk the talk, but makes some telling flubs (like referring to objects in max/msp in a strange and ambiguous way, or conceptualizing certain problems in a subtly un-techy fashion). He works in max/msp, has pointed us to analysis/resynthesis software by programmer friends, and can ramble on about esoteric IRCAM technologies with the best of them. I swear I saw him double-click on the back button in Internet Explorer though - also: Internet Explorer!? Unthinkable.

I remembered an article I saw on Myer's del.icio.us page - from usa today, but we'll forgive that for a minute - that spoke of the de-territorialization of tech-saavy people. It makes sense - technology is becoming networked in every capacity, and where there are networks, communities can form regardless of geography. The interesting thing to me is this phenomenon of a kind of naturalization of techyness. You are or you aren't. You get it or you don't. The initiates are constantly scanning for telltale signs of outsider status, and there's an emerging tech class system at work I think.

It'd be interesting to look at if there's a relationship between knowing tech and manufacturing ideas. If those who browse file systems as naturally as fishing a pencil from their pocket are better candidates for the sort of "hacker-proletariat" class that McKenzie Wark outlines in his Hacker Manifesto.

I don't have time to google it now, I need to get to class.