Random Media: Aquman Who Are You Just A Man or a Superman?
by Graeme
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Your Mother Should Know
Whoever would’ve thought that we’d come to a time when “pouty men with floppy hair, dressing like their fathers and with oddly-shaped faces” would be a workable leading man type for television shows? I can’t quite work out if this is a good sign about the wonderfully open tastes of the Great British Public, or just something sad about the power of tweed.
More Than Meets The Eye
I got a spam email today, and the sender’s name was “Optimus Pop.” I love that as a name, as if the Transformers were made over by Warhol and turned into, I don’t know, some kind of enormous robotic commentary on the fickle nature of fame in today’s celebrity-obsessed society. It makes me wish that the Transformers was a franchise that could somehow grow past its original demographic, and branch out into all-new areas; I want to see Transformer rom-coms (Can Bumblebee win the heart of Amy Adams and defeat Starscream in a duel for the life of Buster Whitwicky?), Transformer documentaries (Michael Moore and a very sincere Optimus Prime talking about how dangerous fossil fuels are to the Earth, and why Energon Cubes are the way forward) and America’s Next Top Transformer, where contestants would be given makeovers that turned them into completely inanimate objects for Nigel to take photographs of. Hey, Michael Bay: If you’re looking for the next step for that movie franchise, you should totally call me.
Culture/Generation
Even more from Rian Hughes’ Cult-ure:
The culture gap was generational.
It described the difference between an older population with more traditional values and a younger generation whose new ideas came not primarily from the family or church environment, but from the vibrant, seductive – some may say dangerous – ‘new media’ environment.
The new media of the 50s, 60s was not the internet, but music, television, film, magazines and comics… The ‘new media’ meant that for the first time culture was not primarily being passed vertically, from parents to children, but horizontally.
Peer-to-peer.
As the world becomes more connected, cultural isolation is becoming rarer – and ever harder to enforce. ‘Traditional’ and ‘modern’ cultures, like different generations, are now rubbing shoulders more closely than ever before.
Certain memes that are acceptable in one context will be suspect or even offensive in another: democracy, free speech, religion, race, the role of women, homosexuality, bacon… The Generation Gap has become the Culture Gap.
We Are Always Drawing Maps
More Rian Hughes, from Cult-ure:
You could write the most informative review possible of a new record, but being made of words, that review will still not come close to the experience of actually listening to the song… This is another type of format conversion, of media remapping – a description in one media of something from another. A description, however accurate, is always a step removed, a reinterpretation of the thing itself.
Strangely, though, the description itself, now possessed of existence in the real world, has its own unique qualities and, though nothing like the musical experience it describes, is still a thing in its own right.
Again, the map becomes territory.
And due to this, can be mapped itself – it would be possible to have an article describing the history of the music review – a review of reviews. Or a book that detailed the history of mapmaking – a map of maps.
Introducing The Memetic Footprint As A Concept
Today, when all ideas, whatever their worth, are freely available on the Internet, we ourselves have to be very savvy about weighing up divergent opinions, about which sources we trust and what who we choose to believe. Because the world is now so interconnected we have a situation where a YouTube video made in the Middle East can inspire someone across the other side of the world to stab their MP. Ideas, good, bad and indifferent, can travel further and faster than ever before. To a greater or lesser degree, we all need to be aware of our own “memetic footprint”; as well as developing the tools to deal with other’s ideas, we have to also take responsibility for the ideas we ourselves pump out. That goes double for designers and writers! As I say on the back of the book, “In the new democracy of ideas, cultural power is devolving to the creative individual. Soon, we will all have the means to create. We just have to decide whether it be art or bombs”.
- Rian Hughes, designer and writer of Cult-Ure, the book he references above and which I am eagerly awaiting to have delivered by Amazon as you read these very words.
Comics Random Media: Gerard Jones Jack Kirby Men of Tomorrow
by Graeme
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Some Histories Are Written By The Losers
From Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones:
History is written by the winners – sometimes. But some histories are written by the losers. The history of the comic book has been told by those who got rooked and by those who sympathize with those who got rooked. The men who got rich from them kept their mouths shut. The men who founded the companies, bought the characters, and created the multimedia marketing empires kept their stories to themselves and let the writers and cartoonists write the history.
I’ve been thinking about that quote a lot, recently – Mostly in relation to the news that Disney/Marvel was awarded a summary judgment in the lawsuit filed by the estate of Jack Kirby over the termination of Marvel’s ownership of the characters Kirby created for them. There’s been a groundswell of support for Marvel making some level of reparation to the Kirby family on moral grounds, if not legal ones, following the decision, but what I keep thinking about is the fact that Disney and Marvel, on a corporate level, really don’t care about this matter at all. They get to keep their IP, and couldn’t care less about what the world thinks of them beyond that. History means nothing when compared with today and tomorrow, and the profits available therein.
“The Opponents Of The System Are As Much A Function of The System As Its Defenders”
More Grant Morrison quoting:
Before you set out to destroy “the System”, however, first remember that we made it and in our own interests. We sustain it constantly, either in agreement, with our support, or in opposition with our dissent. The opponents of the System are as much a function of the System as its defenders. TheSystem is a ghost assembled in the minds of human beings operating within “the System.” It is avirtual parent we made to look after us. We made it very big and difficult to see in its entirety and we serve it and nourish it every day. Are there ever any years when no doctors or policemen are born? Why do artists rarely want to become policemen?
For every McDonald’s you blow up, “they” will build two. Instead of slapping a wad of Semtex between the Happy Meals and the plastic tray, work your way up through the ranks, take over the board of Directors and turn the company into an international laughing stock… What if “The System” isn’t our enemy after all? What if instead it’s our playground?
From here. I have always liked the “make friends with them until they beg for mercy” school of thought in terms of dealing with conflict, I have to admit. I am the enemy, etc.
It’s A Dirty Story Of A Dirty Man
Like, I think, most people who’ve ever a copy of the News of The World, I’ve been following along with the stories about the newspaper’s phone-hacking scandal and subsequent closure with a mix of… I don’t know how to describe it: Schaudenfreude mixed with mild horror and worry about those who’ll find themselves out of a job because of this, perhaps?
I grew up with the News of The World, for reasons I can’t quite really explain; generally, my parents’ newspaper tastes went more along the lines of the Daily Mail and, once I’d gotten to an age where I had enough of an opinion to start influencing things, the Guardian. Yet, every Sunday, my dad would buy up literally stacks of newspapers, including Sunday editions of papers he’d never normally buy, amongst them the News of The World. There was always something very slick about the way it did things, I remember being aware of that at an early age: That, sure, the Sunday Mirror or Sunday People were pretty much doing the same thing as the News of The World, but the News of The World did it better, somehow… even if I could never have explained what “better” actually meant if you’d asked. More enjoyably? More tackily? More sensationally? Probably some of all of the above, mixed in with all manner of confusion and uncertainty. The News of The World, when I was a kid, was like really shitty junk food when you were starving: I knew it was bad for me, but it was so good sometimes that I didn’t care.
It’s that memory of a newspaper that I find myself sad about, reading all these stories. I can’t quite understand how the phone hacking went undetected for so long, or why it was even allowed in the first place – I definitely don’t understand the whole “hacking into a missing girl’s voicemail and deleting messages” thing, that just makes no sense to me at all – and so, all of that feels very… alien, and disconnected, and impossible to understand for me, if that makes sense, and instead, I’m left with this feeling of a number of greedy, stupid selfish bastards destroying 168 years of history for no good reason whatsoever.
I hope that those responsible get caught by the police; I hope that this whole thing causes enough of a shitstorm that British journalists – Hell, journalists from everywhere – rethink what it means to do their job, and what it’s worth (Hey, ending “I am the best journalist because I have the biggest checkbook” – That’d be nice). But most of all, I hope that those suddenly out of work because of this whole thing, especially those who weren’t even working at the paper when it happened, find new jobs and soon. The whole thing is just sad, really.