Cornel West Is Always so Cutting Edge

Look, I know that it's a bit hacky and somewhat lazy to link to articles from The Onion, but this one is just too relevant to our recent discussions not to be linked to on the big board here. Whew! That's an egregious amount of prepositions. Comment on the article, and/or my bad grammar, below.

Letters from the Real World

Well, folks, the new season of 24 has begun, and I'm loving it. It's a not-so-guilty pleasure of mine that I reveal to virtually everyone I meet. "You don't watch 24! Never seen it!! WTF!!!", these conversations tend to go.

Having said all of that, I have grown a bit weary of the series, and I've argued quite openly that if in fact this show is meant to be "realistic" (which is what it would lead you to believe what with it's incessant countdown clock framing, literally, every minute of each episode), the most realistic thing that could happen in it would be for Jack Bauer to die. After all, why is it that he's the only character who does the right thing and who can get there in just the nick of time and is a crack shot even when under fire and can withstand exposure to bioweaponry? Oh, that's right. It's because he's the star--and the main reason that we tune in to watch the show. Kill him off--no mater how realistic a move it would be (and it would be a really real one)--and ratings could plummet, I suppose.

So in any case, ENG 72 is off and running with its discussions of realism, so now's as appropriate a time as any to think about how this contemporary fictionalized reality show actually matches up against the reality of the real world. These distinctions are obviously not neat ones, IMO (if you couldn't glean that much from my deliberately muddled prose), so let's, um, interrogate them. Click here to watch a video about the reality of televised representations of torture.

From Work to Beer to Text

Today, I am satisfying the desire of You Made Me Theorize's legions of readers: I am allowing you to be flies on the wall of a class discussion. So here's the big reveal: Yesterday, we talked about The Beer Summit. Oh sure, we also talked quite a bit about representation and social constructionism and discursive power formations. But throughout all of that, The Beer Summit remained a very rich example that brought to light many of those aforementioned concepts.

And so, I come to you today to cite my own sources, as I was inspired to use The Beer Summit as a class example by this esteemed blog, which took its own inspiration from this insightful article. With that, I'll reiterate one of the driving questions that our class has been asking for the past few weeks: Who are the authors, and who are the readers here?

And now more questions: Where are the lines between those groups drawn? Do we think that someone (or some group, more likely) authored this whole Red, Light, and Blue thing, or are the readers--the social critics--just fighting to take control of the significance of this meeting, killing off the authors, so to speak? Discuss below.

I've got a fever, and the only prescription is more pharmakon

The following clip is simultaneously moving and deeply, deeply troubling. What you’ll see is a montage of clips, the first third of which depict stock images of Americana—football and such. Then, at roughly the 1:35 mark, you’ll see 9/11 footage of United Airlines Flight 175 crashing into the World Trade Center. All of this is set to the track “A Song for Our Fathers” by the post-rock group Explosions in the Sky.

What’s moving about the clip is that it does a fair job of making a fairly sophisticated political statement about American foreign policy. It also, according to the gloss on youtube, was apparently a class project (grade unknown—to me, at least). In that context, I’d happily give the students credit.

What’s troubling about the clip is that it frames its politics in terms of 9/11—that event is literally and grotesquely the catalyst here—and in doing so soundtracks those politics with EITS’s music. Explosions have been notoriously linked to 9/11 in ways that are flat out wrong. Absolutely wrong. Click here for the poison. And here for the antidote. Sure, the band’s name absolutely demands this type of historicizing, but it’s still unsettling to see how even in an era where nearly open access to media—and the ability to manipulate it—doesn’t always seem to result in increased awareness of what information is actually being manipulated—in short what is true and what isn’t. Certainly there are larger theoretical questions circulating here about the nature of truth and representation, and I’d be happy to see people put pressure on those questions in the comments section. But in this case, the tendency to mythologize EITS as a 9/11 band does them and 9/11 a disservice, I would argue.

What brought all of this up was an attempt to look for a clip of Explosions performing “Catastrophe and the Cure,” a song that presents a dialectical clash between opposite musical dynamics. The title obviously does the same. I intended to place that clip up here as a way of inciting discussion about social and class conflict, and the ways that these issues are at the heart of virtually any discussion of 9/11/01, whether its anniversary remains a day of mourning or a day of service. My general academic interests lie in the ways in which cultural concerns like class conflict weave their way into the sonic fabric of popular music. However, once I typed Explosions’ name into youtube’s search bar, I got a hit for this video, the image of the burning Trade Center ominously gleaming outward from my computer screen.

Despite my initial frustration, I persevered, and I ultimately found the clip for which I was searching. I’ll be curious to hear what people think about it in light of this broader context. Does the song—musically and performatively—provide a corrective to the tensions of the class project clip? Does the band seem particularly political? Does the song seem political? What conflicts—cultural or otherwise—are presented here (if any are)?

Explosions In The Sky- Catastrophe and the Cure
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