Writing

The Influence of Art and Performance on the Rise of American Independent Cinema

“As in the other arts in America today – painting, poetry, sculpture, theater, where fresh winds have been blowing for the last few years – our rebellion against the old, official, corrupt and pretentious is primarily an ethical one.” The above statement, taken from the manifesto of the New American Cinema Group (81) written after […]

‘The Free-Appropriation Writer’ in the New York Times

On February 26 2010, in a piece called “The Free-Appropriation Writer,” The New York Times’ Randy Kennedy reported on the recent controversy over German novelist Helene Hegemann, and whether the use of another writer’s work in her novel was theft or an allowable form of “sampling” or “remix.” Kennedy’s article misses the central issue around […]

Telling the Truth in ‘David Holzman’s Diary’ and Bruce Conner’s ‘Report.’

Bruce Conner’s Report (1967) and Jim McBride’s David Holzman’s Diary (1967) both appeared in a year when cynicism about the media, politics, and the Vietnam War were high and cultural shifts were taking place all over the globe. The Kennedy assassination had shocked the country just four years before, and the growth of an underground […]

Media Hot & Cold Revisited

The following is my reaction to Eduardo Navas’ excellent article posted on Remix Theory, about how McLuhan’s ideas about “Hot & Cold” media apply to a contemporary media landscape that is vastly different from the milieux in which McLuhan was writing in the 60’s. I originally posted this on the Social Media Mashup […]

De-Douching America

This weekend, I’m catching up on my Daily Shows & Colbert Reports that I missed while in SF. I just watched Wednesday’s Daily Show, and was blown away by “So You Think You Can Douche”, taking on the talking heads on cable news networks. It’s not that it was so much better than the typical […]

Tracking Political Participation Among The Colbert Report Audiences

Since the mid-90’s, proponents of the Internet have championed the new technology as a reviver of democracy, a way for individual voices to be heard in a political landscape where politicians increasingly favor their own interests over of the people they are elected to represent. In 2001, Pierre Lévy wrote, in Cyberculture, True electronic democracy […]

The Role of The Daily Show in Speaking Truth to Power

On the November 5th, the day after Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, Jon Stewart asked his audience on The Daily Show “How are we gonna make this shit funny?” Stewart stepped into the role of host of the show in 1999, the tail end of the Clinton administration, but for the past 8 […]

The Politics of Media Ownership in Remix Culture

In Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky outlines 5 filters through which the dominant elite is able to control the media and regulate information. They are: concentrated ownership, the influence of advertising, reliance on information from the government, flak (backlash) and “anticommunism” as a control mechanism[1]. Nowhere does he cite direct government control (i.e. regulation by legislation) […]