Archive for May 2007
socialist melodramaticism
You’ve heard about what is going on in Venezuela with the tv stations, yes? (The link there is not an endorsement… Too tired to sift through to find a fair report…) But did you notice this?
Radio Caracas’ soap operas such as The Ex and My Cousin Ciela are popular, regularly attracting more than 50 per cent of Venezuelan viewers.
Two opinion polls have shown that more than 70 per cent of Venezuelans, including many of Mr Chávez’s own supporters, are opposed to the decision not to renew the licence. Arturo Sarm-iento, a Caracas businessman who runs Telecaribe, an independent regional television station, and supports the government’s policy, admits the measure will “have a huge political cost”.
[…]
A public-service channel, Venezuelan Social Television (Teves), is to replace RCTV. […] Elsewhere in the world, with few exceptions public-service stations have not won a sterling reputation for slick popular programming. Lil Rodriguez, the channel’s new president, hardly encouraged optimism when she announced last week that “we don’t intend to make Teves really boring”.
Teves is planning to develop its own soap opera based on the lives of Simón Bolívar, Venezuela’s nat-ional hero, and Manuela Sáenz, one of his lovers, but until that is ready viewers will have to make do with a range of cooking, travel, music, opinion and other documentary shows, as well as an opinion programme.
One hell of an article, there waiting for someone to scoot down to Caracas and write, about the emergence of a new sector of socialist mass aesthetic form. I’d for one would love to know what comes of it, and what goes into it…
Here’s the question: say you were a socialist head of state of wherever you currently live, and had decided to pull network X off of the air and replace it with Your Own Social Television Network. What programming would you schedule as not to make it “really boring”? Mine would feature, of course, lots of ads without products, but I’m still thinking about what would provide the filler stuff, the actual shows, that folks would skip over with their TiVos to get back to the publicités…
travel notes…
1) Somewhat refreshing to take a break from posting and even scrolling through the RSS feeds. Amazingly, I took this break despite having free internet access here in Amsterdam. For me, it’s been nothing but the IHT and the Guardian at night, and some hotel bar writing (on paper!) and that’s that. I think I have a slight case of nostalgia for pre-totally-immersive ‘net days, which I’m not sure what to do with. Surely the boredom of being back stateside in a week will take care of that.
2) Amsterdam has won me over. If it is possible for my wife and I ever to haul off and make it as independent intellectuals (she’s much further along on this than I am, what with her book underway and agent and so forth), I vote for right here. Paris is lovely. But Amsterdam, it’s something else. The magazine store alone, up in the little square along with the American Book Store, is reason enough.
3) Looking for a place to calm the kiddo down for a nap while in Paris (by “calm the kid down” I of course mean seriously overdue unweaned boobie action but whatever. STFU) we wandered into the Place Dauphine, which is the sort of thing that happens in Paris. See Andre Breton, Nadja, for the significance of the place, the “clitoris of Paris”…
4) All for now, but thanks for continuing to read… I’ll be back on regular schedule soon enough…
quotidian
I am a strange bird, when it comes to travel.
For on the one hand, the number one reason I crush the credit card to
go, and the number one deciding factor that informs the choices I
make in terms of where to visit, is that I am almost pathologically
addicted what we might call the banally exotic quotidien. Look, I go
to museums, I see the sights. Or at least I did in the past. But what
gets me out here is stupid stuff like street-signs and supermarkets
and the way people serve coffee and when they buy their newspapers
and where they buy them and what they look like. Laugh at me all you
like – perhaps you are a gourmand, or a sex-tourist, or you only go
where you’re likely to find, what, the best thriftstore buys.
Whatever. But in a certain way, my special preoccupation with the
everyday in my travels undoubted comes close to what travel for
pleasure and edification has always boiled down to…
People are always asking me, in the real world, if my work intersects
with that of Michel de Certeau, and the answer is always no, not
really. But, strangely enough, I am a practices of everyday life guy
through and through when it comes to those couple of weeks a year
that I’ve paid to remove from my usual activities and (at the moment)
incredibly bleak surroundings. Go figure.
But on the other hand, my little addiction to the small stuff is, in
a certain sense, something that my personality-construction is almost
categorically unfit for. Why? I am one of those people – I can’t tell
if we are rare or not – who is compulsively fearful of making little
mistakes in everyday performances. I hate not knowing, for instance,
whether it is appropriate or not to ask for a coffee à emporter at
this establishment or that. I hate not knowing how to use a subway
turnstile. I hate being baffled by menus, I hate not understand how
to hail a taxi, I fear running afoul of written or unwritten rules
about smoking in public. I am addicted to foreign newspapers, even
those I can’t read – but I am terrified of buying them, for fear that
the newsagent will wonder after I leave “Why the fuck was he buying
that if he doesn’t have the language.” It is ridiculous, I agree.
There are a few major factors that go into this personality defect
(and it is, for sure, a defect): my upbringing by fastidiously-
correct anglo-canadian parents, who made minor forms of impolite or
awkward behavior feel like, what, public urination. An pathological
need to “be in the know” about everything (this need is one,
obviously, that intersects with my internet compulsion, blogging,
etc…) doesn’t help. And with Paris in particular, it also has
something to do with my weird relationship to the French language,
which I really am supposed to know, both because of my education and
because, for chissakes, I write on and teach French authors
constantly… but even if I can read French authors in the original
at a level that has permitted me to develop, from what I can tell,
some very very insightful arguments based on microscopic close
readings of the language itself, I still cannot properly order a
fucking coffee in French, and I stand blankly stunned whenever anyone
says anything that I am not prepared for.
So I am, yes, a strange bird in my own quiet little way. (I wish my
psychokinks were more interesting – for your sake, as readers…) But
what I am wondering about today is what this combined fascination and
fear has to do with my work, the issues and texts that I am
interested in and the arguments that I am trying to articulate about
them. For one thing, it clarifies quite a lot of the backstory of why
I am so interested in a figure like Neurath
– clear, international communication-methods, which make it at once
easier to order coffee and, perhaps, less interesting to do so. But
it goes well beyond this as well.
More posts are coming, if I can keep the battery charged…
