Posts Tagged ‘Avatar’
Tuesday!
* C21′s book on Debt is finally almost out. My essay draws on the bits of the Polygraph introduction I wrote and is about ecological debt.
* Syllabus minute: I have W.H. Auden envy.
* MOOC Completion Rates: The Data.
* How neoliberal universities build their football stadiums.
Some projections showed Athletics might not be able to make payments starting in the 2030s when the debt service balloons. The debt is structured so that for the next 20 years, Cal only needs to make interest payments on the debt. The principal kicks in in the early 2030s, resulting in payments between $24 million and $37 million per year.
Look, if it’s good enough for an idea man who settled out of court on securities fraud, it’s good enough for me.
* Kent State fires adjunct who built their journalism master’s.
* Ian Morris, psychohistorian.
* What If? on The Twitter Archive of Babel. The Twitter Archive of Babel contains the true story of your life, as well as all the stories of all the lives you didn’t lead….
* Proud Species Commits Suicide Rather Than Be Driven To Extinction By Humans.
* A People’s History of “Twist and Shout.”
* PPP: Russ Feingold Poised For Comeback, Could Top Scott Walker Next Year.
* Michael Chabon: Dreams are useless bodily effluvia. Nicholson Baker: Dreams are all we have.
* You and I are gonna live forever: 72 is the new 30.
* Settling nerd fights of the 1990s today: Is This the Smoking Gun Proving Deep Space Nine Ripped Off Babylon 5?
* The Star Wars Heresies: Star Wars and William Blake. Tim Morton’s essay in Green Planets has a similar impulse with respect to Avatar.
* And in even more insane mashup news: WWE Keeps Pressure On Glenn Beck.
Saturday Night Links
* Breaking: Right-wing Supreme Court Justices don’t take their jobs seriously. Supreme Court May Be Most Conservative in Modern History. Antonin Scalia, semi-retired crank.
* Jonathan Cohn, Scott Lemieux, and Richard Hansen and ponder the legitimacy of a Supreme Court that has actually gone the full monty and overturned the ACA.
* Of course they say the same thing about us. Judge Strikes Down Key Parts Of Walker’s Anti-Public Employee Union Law.
* Don’t check the date, just believe it: Google Maps QuestView for the NES.
* This collection of more-accurate Dr. Seuss titles is one of my favorite things on the entire Internet.
* James Cameron teases the Avatar sequels.
“The best inspiration I got for ‘Avatar’ 2 and 3 was dealing with the master navigator culture in Micronesia,” Cameron said by phone from Tokyo on Friday, where he attended the Japanese premiere of “Titanic 3D.”
The Micronesians, a seafaring culture who navigated the Pacific for centuries without the aid of compasses or charts, already have a lot in common with the blue Na’vi residents of Pandora — they’re an indigenous, matrilineal culture, colonized by outsiders. And the cerulean and aquamarine tones of “Avatar” and its inhabitants seem drawn from postcards from the watery Micronesian region.
* The New York Times has some fun with towards a quantum theory of Mitt Romney.
* 21st Century as Intergenerational War. More here and here.
* Why are colleges acting as volunteer loan collection agents for the banks?
* In 2011, California spent $9.6 billion on prisons, versus $5.7 billion on higher education. Since 1980, California has built one college campus; it’s built 21 prisons. The state spends $8,667 per student per year. It spends about $50,000 per inmate per year.
* The lottery lie: The educational “bonus” appears to be nonexistent. Miller and Pierce (1997) studied the short- and long-term effect of education lotteries. They found that lottery states did indeed increase per-capita spending on education during the lottery’s early years. However, after some time these states actually decreased their overall spending on education. In contrast, states without lotteries increased education spending over time. In fact, nonlottery states spend, on average, 10 percent more of their budgets on education than lottery states (Gearey 1997).
* The education reform lie: it’s impossible to talk about primary and secondary education in America in any meaningful way if you won’t allow yourself to discuss class.
* Hunger Games commentary watch: Understanding Katniss.
* If you and your board are now determined to show that you in fact have wisdom and maturity when you exercise your powers over the eduction of your young, then you should acknowledge that it was a rotten lesson you taught young people in a free society when you denounced and then burned books–books you hadn’t even read. You should also resolve to expose your children to all sorts of opinions and information, in order that they will be better equipped to make decisions and to survive. Yours sincerely, Kurt Vonnegut.
* Too Smart to Fail: Notes on an Age of Folly.
But the problem goes far beyond politics. We have become a society that can’t self-correct, that can’t address its obvious problems, that can’t pull out of its nosedive. And so to our list of disasters let us add this fourth entry: we have entered an age of folly that—for all our Facebooking and the twittling tweedle-dee-tweets of the twitterati—we can’t wake up from.
* Slate continues to pioneer bold new horizons in fantasy capitalism.
* 3 New Studies Link Bee Decline to Bayer Pesticide. No one could have predicted the widespread implementation of insecticides would kill so many insects!
* The government has put the chances of a magnitude 7.3 quake centered in the north of Tokyo Bay at 70 percent over the next three decades, and has estimated there would be about 11,000 casualties and 850,000 buildings destroyed.
* Cancer research: it’s worse than you think.
* “Military surplus a bonanza for law enforcement.”
* And Canada will stop issuing pennies. Honestly, they’re decades ahead of us. Could be centuries.
Clarke’s Fourth Law?
“Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from nature.” Explains everything from Avatar to the Fermi Paradox. Via MeFi.
Wednesday
* Via everywhere: “A Letter to My Students” from Michael O’Hare.
Now, your infrastructure is falling to pieces under your feet, and as citizens you are responsible for crudities like closing parks, and inhumanities like closing battered women’s shelters. It’s outrageous, inexcusable, that you can’t get into the courses you need, but much worse that Oakland police have stopped taking 911 calls for burglaries and runaway children. If you read what your elected officials say about the state today, you’ll see things like “California can’t afford” this or that basic government function, and that “we need to make hard choices” to shut down one or another public service, or starve it even more (like your university). Can’t afford? The budget deficit that’s paralyzing Sacramento is about $500 per person; add another $500 to get back to a public sector we don’t have to be ashamed of, and our average income is almost forty times that. Of course we can afford a government that actually works: the fact is that your parents have simply chosen not to have it.
* But the news isn’t all bad: Nike has filed a patent on the self-lacing shoes from Back to the Future, Part II.
* Should blogs count toward tenure? Cathy Davidson says yes, but as service work, not publication. More from Chutry, who approves.
* New Jersey in the news! The state lost $400 million in federal education funding for not following directions.
* Trailer for AMC’s The Walking Dead. I’m cautiously optimistic, even if some of this (particularly the washed-out, poorly acted opening scenes) seems really amateurish.
* John Krasinski’s adaptation of Brief Interviews With Hideous Men can be watched on Hulu until September 5. Speaking as a hideous man, I thought it was worth watching.
* “Competitive balance an issue in EPL.” Four 6-0 games in two weeks—you think?
* What’s in the Avatar special edition?
* And presenting the Next Generation that never (but almost) was, starring Wesley Snipes as Geordi La Forge.
I Think One of Us Is Doing This Wrong
Despite having written about it, Žižek now says he hasn’t actually seen Avatar. But take heart, true believers:
Žižek promises that he will see the film and then write a Stalinist ‘self-criticism’.
Proliferation and the Digital
James Cameron produced over 100 versions of Avatar to fit every possible screen and projection configuration imaginable.
Select Links While I’m Away (Part 1)
* The team behind Logicomix explains structuralism.
* It really does look like health care will pass. The CBO score is good. The left is (mostly) happy again. The votes are (mostly) there. Insurance companies keep turning out to be totally terrible. Rahm is stretching for his totally undeserved victory lap. Alterman says Kucinich gets a victory lap too. Steve Benen thinks we all get one. Hooray!
* Obama Economic Team Outlook Presumes No Job Growth For All of 2010. Yes, we … oh, forget it.
* 1st Lt. Dan Choi arrested after chaining himself to the White House fence in DADT protest.
* Shrinking Detroit Back to Greatness.
* A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving. Wow. More here.
* More March Madness: America’s Greatest Living American Abstract Painter Tournament.
* NC-Sen: Richard “Dick” Burr still leads his opponents but remains under 50%. This is winnable.
* The Hobbit begins filming in June.
* Viacom is suing Google for hosting videos it uploaded to Google. (via and via) Related: When Wells Fargo sued itself.
* Please be advised Avatar is the work of the devil.
* Okay, fine, one more. That’s what Bea said.
3/16
* News that a Mississippi high school has canceled prom rather than allow a lesbian couple to attend has caused a “lesbian prom pictures” meme to ripple across the Internets.
* Inside Higher Ed has an article concerning (another) recent spate of suicides at Cornell.
* Saudi Arabia may not worry about Peak Oil, but they’re definitely nervous about Peak Demand.
* If David Brooks had a point, he might have a point. More from Taibbi and Chait.
* More Congressional procedure! Just because “deem and pass” happens all the time doesn’t mean it’s not tyranny when Nancy Pelosi does it. Ezra Klein is right when he says we should simplify Congressional procedure, but I think our friends in the GOP would be the first to tell us we can’t just unilaterally disarm.
* Avatar will be rereleased with an additional forty minutes à la Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, bringing its total running time to three days.
* But what the world needs most, of course, is another Battlestar Galactica sequel. I’ve fallen off watching Caprica, but from what I hear it’s at least good enough to Netflix—but I’m really not sure what’s left for a third series, except (perhaps) something pre-apocalpytic set on contemporary Earth using the BSG mythology as its starting point. Still, and it’s just a crazy idea: why not something new?
Žižek v. ‘Avatar’
This does not mean, however, that we should reject Avatar on behalf of a more “authentic” acceptance of the real world. If we subtract fantasy from reality, then reality itself loses its consistency and disintegrates. To choose between “either accepting reality or choosing fantasy” is wrong: if we really want to change or escape our social reality, the first thing to do is change our fantasies that make us fit this reality. Because the hero of Avatar doesn’t do this, his subjective position is what Jacques Lacan, with regard to de Sade, called le dupe de son fantasme.
This is why it is interesting to imagine a sequel to Avatar in which, after a couple of years (or, rather, months) of bliss, the hero starts to feel a weird discontent and to miss the corrupted human universe. The source of this discontent is not only that every reality, no matter how perfect it is, sooner or later disappoints us. Such a perfect fantasy disappoints us precisely because of its perfection: what this perfection signals is that it holds no place for us, the subjects who imagine it.
Slavoj Žižek begins with something not entirely unlike my “war of genres” analysis of Avatar and goes someplace pretty interesting with it:
At the same time as Avatar is making money all around the world (it generated $1bn after less than three weeks of release), something that strangely resembles its plot is taking place. The southern hills of the Indian state of Orissa, inhabited by the Dongria Kondh people, were sold to mining companies that plan to exploit their immense reserves of bauxite (the deposits are considered to be worth at least $4trn). In reaction to this project, a Maoist (Naxalite) armed rebellion exploded.
Arundhati Roy, in Outlook India magazine, writes that the Maoist guerrilla army:
is made up almost entirely of desperately poor tribal people living in conditions of such chronic hunger that it verges on famine of the kind we only associate with sub-Saharan Africa. They are people who, even after 60 years of India’s so-called independence, have not had access to education, health care or legal redress. They are people who have been mercilessly exploited for decades, consistently cheated by small businessmen and moneylenders, the women raped as a matter of right by police and forest department personnel. Their journey back to a semblance of dignity is due in large part to the Maoist cadres who have lived and worked and fought by their sides for decades. If the tribals have taken up arms, they have done so because a government which has given them nothing but violence and neglect now wants to snatch away the last thing they have – their land . . . They believe that if they do not fight for their land, they will be annihilated . . . their ragged, malnutritioned army, the bulk of whose soldiers have never seen a train or a bus or even a small town, are fighting only for survival.The Indian prime minister characterised this rebellion as the “single largest internal security threat”; the big media, which present it as extremist resistance to progress, are full of stories about “red terrorism”, replacing stories about “Islamist terrorism”. No wonder the Indian state is responding with a big military operation against “Maoist strongholds” in the jungles of central India. And it is true that both sides are resorting to great violence in this brutal war, that the “people’s justice” of the Maoists is harsh. However, no matter how unpalatable this violence is to our liberal taste, we have no right to condemn it. Why? Because their situation is precisely that of Hegel’s rabble: the Naxalite rebels in India are starving tribal people, to whom the minimum of a dignified life is denied.
So where is Cameron’s film here? Nowhere: in Orissa, there are no noble princesses waiting for white heroes to seduce them and help their people, just the Maoists organising the starving farmers. The film enables us to practise a typical ideological division: sympathising with the idealised aborigines while rejecting their actual struggle. The same people who enjoy the film and admire its aboriginal rebels would in all probability turn away in horror from the Naxalites, dismissing them as murderous terrorists. The true avatar is thus Avatar itself – the film substituting for reality.
Along the way he gives a lovely one-sentence analysis of Titanic as well:
At this moment the ship hits the iceberg, in order to prevent what would undoubtedly have been the true catastrophe, namely the couple’s life in New York.
Three For Sunday
* Steve Benen has talking points for Democrats. I’m pretty sure I want Steve to run for Congress.
* I’ve bookmarked both these Third World uses of Avatar for possible eventual papers on the film.
* And Marginal Revolution wonders whether Cleveland would rather lose the championship than risk losing LeBron.
Other Links
* Why would Fox remake Torchwood? It’s like two years old and already in English. If they like it they could air it as is and it would cost them nothing. They should spend that money on Untitled Joss Whedon Cancelation instead.
* Wolverine admits to steroid use.
* Battlestar anthropology: The human population of Earth has generally always been 50,000. Via MeFi.
* Breathless news reports are claiming overstimulation during Avatar may have contributed to a Taiwanese man’s death.
* Lessons from an Academic Vagabound.
* How to Survive an Atomic Bomb. Helpful advice from Mutual of Omaha. Via Boing Boing.
