Author Archives: dogpossum

more BB talk

Since my first post there have been some responses to the BB thing on other blogs:
Moment to Moment
Pavlov’s Cat (and here)
A Wild Young Underwhimsy
Reasons you will hate me
Ausculture
I’m not the only one who read this episode as a bit of sexual harassment designed not so much as an ‘authentic’ sexual advance towards Camilla by two men, but rather as an act designed more to engage in a little man-man posturing through humiliating a woman (AWYUW and MtM echo that point).
::update::
And some more online commentary rolls in:
Mark @ Larvatus Prodeo
tubagooba (and here) who, interestingly, writes

I haven’t been exposed to these attitudes much in my day-to-day life, which might say more about my day-to-day life than it does about either BB or Australian society in general

I don’t know tubagooba, but I was surprised to read this: have I overgeneralised my own experiences?.
Blogger on the Cast Iron Balcony
armagnac’d (who makes some unsettling comments about breast-enhancement surgery and feminism which I’m not sure are all that helpful, considering…)
what the cat dragged in
There’s a comment by Lumby on crikey, but I can’t be arsed with that (I think you have to pay..?)
Over at The Road to Surfdom there are panopticon references.
Hoyden about town contributes.
Andrew Bartlett comments on the Bartlett diaries… though I haven’t yet had a chance to read it.
There’s some pretty serious artillery up there, so I’m not going to step up and get involved.
Having waded through all that, though, (esp the scuffling on LP), you may want to rest your eyes over here, or perhaps just start with this little sproinger:
sproinger2.jpg

go O.C. go

Ok, so watching the OC, the brown-haired boy with all the ‘witty one-liners and pop culture quips’ and the dumb ex-barbie girlfriend is hanging out with a blonde girl in the city where Brown Uni is.
They totally have to be a couple – they have matching novelty voices.

abstract frenzy

I’m feeling a bit confused. A couple of months ago I went over the list of upcoming conferences and did a heap of abstracts, including one for this year’s CSAA conference. Here’s the call for papers:

f things are ‘un-Australian’ it must be because they come from UNAUSTRALIA.
Where is it?
Who lives there?
How does it come to be?
What is its past and what is its future?
While raising some very local questions of critique and desire, the theme is open to international perspectives and interpretations.
Do other places have their own unplaces? What goes on there?
UNTHEMED papers are also welcome.

I got all confused before I figured out what conference/what abstract/wuh? was going on.
I’m not too inspired by the conference theme, even though I do do a fair bit of work on global/local stuff, but almost two months ago to the day I pulled out this action:

Swing Talk and Swing Dance: online and embodied networks in the ‘Australian’ swing dance community.
Since its revival in the 1980s, lindy hop and other swing dances have become increasingly popular with middle class youth throughout the developed world.
There are vibrant local swing dance communities in Melbourne, Sydney, Hobart, Perth, Canberra and Brisbane for whom dancing – an embodied cultural practice – is the most important form of social interaction. Swing dancers will travel vast distances and spend large amounts of money solely to attend dance events in other cities. The success and appeal of these events lies in their promotion as unique and showcasing their local dance ‘scene’.
In travel itineraries which criss-cross the country, swing dancers develop networks between local communities that are not only cemented by their embodied interpersonal interaction, but also by their uses of digital media. In this paper, I examine the ways in which the online Swing Talk discussion board is utilised by Australian swing dancers to develop personal relationships with dancers in other cities, which in turn serve to develop relationships between local communities. This insistence of local community identity in swing dance culture in Australia defies a definition of a ‘national’ swing dance community. I describe the ways in which ‘Australian’ swing dance is an ‘unAustralia’ – not a homogenous ‘whole’ but a network of embodied and mediated relationships between diverse local communities and individuals.

It’s interesting to see a few other abstracts – here, here and here.
I’ll only go if I score their grant thingy for pgrads/early career types. I can’t afford to get there (air fares) or to pay to get in ($190). I doubt my paper is clever enough or sexy enough to score me some free money. But them’s the breaks. Nor am I sure it’s an especially great time for me to attend a conference – once again it’s on the weekend after MLX, which will keep me more than a little busy.
Not to mention the whole writing a paper thing. I’m kind of a bit tired of writing…

Cars and Over The Hedge

I’ve recently seen Over the Hedge and Cars (did I mention my nieces are 11 and 7?). So I have things to report. But not right now. I’m a bit tired.
But you might want to go have a look here to read the Over the Hedge comic (from which the film was developed).
Super Size Me convinced me never to eat McDeath or other scary junk food ever again. OTH did a similar job. While it was a refreshingly child-centred film, the Message was decidedly anti-junk food and anti-television/sloth… not to mention anti-suburban development. It’s not a pixar-type multimodal/polyvocal text. OTH is a children’s film. But it was ideologically heavy in a very hippy-friendly way (well, perhaps without the ‘violence’).
Cars, on the other hand, was uncomfortable viewing for me. Very ‘go-cars!’, ‘drive one – now!’, ‘use fossil fuels – today!’. It didn’t sit well with me, and is my least favourite pixar effort to date. It looked great (but they all do, right?), but I just had this odd discomfort with the whole car/petrol/nostalgia thing. I’m not sure I want to revisit the 50s, where people drove just for the pleasure of driving (rather than getting places). Though I do dig neon.
It might have been my cold talking, but I also found it really really loud.