Trinketization #Libya

So, with the trajectory of a screaming scud missile, SKY News hones in on the zero-degree-point of trinketization and renders ‘The Fall of Tripoli™’ as a pantomime circus. Pleased as I am with my hats, these guys have rendered the geopolitical as farce better than SZ or KM or BBC et al. How NATO saves [...]

Hanging Channel

a draft for a round table discussion on television studies for the journal ‘South Asian History and Culture’ needs a bit more work…      Beyond television studies. The Kitchen Debate. The whole world is twitching and the study of television is in the final throes of a long generic isolation, becoming a fully integrated [...]

Slow/No News Day (or so it is made to seem)

The three fucking amigos, bastard dingbat flunkies from obsolete piggy pollie parties each singing from the same hymn sheet trying to save face and protect a disgraced plenipotentiary (propaganda wing of Capital). Fuck them. And the faded pundit celebrities lining up to resurrect careers with the odd critical quip, sitting on studio couches alongside spotlight [...]

Shimla – July 14-15 2009

An abstract for a talk at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, ‘Television in India’ conference -  July 14-15 2009 – Shimla News Media or Politics Show: Terror Reporting and the Box. If a regional encounter with the apparatus of television is to be approached critically, it may be the case that an exclusive use [...]

Celebrity Hijack

If you are gonna play the outrage game, play it all the way – a comment on the take-no-prisoners turn in televisual terror. The ever admirable Phil over at ‘a very public sociologist’ has a fine post about the new format of Big Brother ‘Celebrity Hijack’. Offering a blow by blow account of the ‘toe-curling’ [...]

Televisionaries

For a long time I have wanted to pay homage to the character played by Roshan Seth in “My Beautiful Laundrette”, a Stephen Frears film, written by Hanif Kureshi. Despite some problems with the film itself – ‘we did not fuck fascists, we fucked them up’ said one of my anti-racist South Asian comrades many [...]

Poignancy in Space

This post from Anti-Popper is brought forward to here to inaugurate a new series of ‘posts from the past’ – historical division – sci fi. Heh heh. The humanity of Adama and Jameson – is doggited. “Saturday 16 December 2006 galactica: my friend the blob “I can’t find my ancient copy of Battlestar Galactica 2: [...]

Comedy Terrors

Working out a new angle for a paper for Germany. Feeling like I need to do something with a few laughs. Hence, this opening… A new figure of fun in British media has an ominous underside, and yet on reflection I think does more politically than the mischief of the usual court jesters. The television [...]

The Hanging Channel

On friday we have a protest meeting about the Afzal Guru lynching planned in India. Many are disturbed by the trial in which a Kashmiri man, picked up after an attack by some ‘miscreants’ on parliament, was allegedly tortured into confession, which was then telecast, and the courts decided Guru was to be hung. Afzal [...]

Celebrities and heroes

Homesickness is hard to sustain when things seem to lurch still further towards cultural doom. This little photogenic scenario did it for me this morning: – a post by Ange from Melbourne where the state watches a little too closely. Howard’s cops having released 28 photographs of people they want to talk to in connection [...]

War Crimes of Tony Blair Redux

I hate to have to say so, but I am disappointed it has become mere entertainment, and yet this was probably all that would ever have happened. – ‘So much murder death kill on my TV’ I wrote back in September, and tonight I am watching a tele-novella style sit-com called ‘The Trial of Tony [...]

‘television from Harlem’ and the ‘anti-Hoon laws’

Its not all that often that I get really homesick, but this item twanged a few lumpen-nostalgia chords. The article contains some choice quotes. Councillor Roz Blades in particular seems the most stupid with her ‘television from Harlem’ quip, and the very idea that there are ‘anti-hoon laws’ makes me not at all surprised that [...]

The Guantanamo Cages

Gaston Bachelard suggests fire is the metaphor of metaphor (1938/1987:111 Psychoanalysis of Fire). I have been watching harrowing reports from Guantanamo detention camp on the late night news. They shine lights in the eyes of those unjustly interned there – the camp has been open for five years – they play loud music at all [...]

Saddam Hussain Superstar, who do you, what do you…

Saddam Hussain has been remade into a modern myth, reminiscent of him 2 millennia ago who was nailed on the cross by those god-botherers who thereafter suffered with the Christ-sickness and deified a carpenter. Saddam was no carpenter, but was the CIA-installed puppet of cold war skulduggery in the middle east – and now, having [...]

Fantasy.

Addiction confession. A kind of love story for our times. I’m hooked. Though I’m not sure I can convey exactly how extreme the pleasure of this summer transgression has been. Like blue bubbles of joy popping underwater but inside your brain. Embarrassing perhaps to admit the forbidden as guilty pleasure. The scandal that will face [...]

Worrying about what is televised is not yet the revolution.

Worrying about what is televised is not yet the revolution. (apologies to Gil Scott Heron) Photographs. The pictures we see of the wounded and dead from Lebanon deserve close brave attention (never looking away) not only because they still have affective purchase and really do provoke outrage and anger but also because they produce so [...]

Google Mail – TV looking for medical Anthropologist

There are numerous reasons to despair for anthropology as a discipline, but it could be TV that is suffering even more. Evidence – this email recently sent to all in the Goldsmiths department looking for the future Davina McCall of Ethnography (Davina? She has an ‘interest’ in anthropology, surely…) Google Mail – TV looking for [...]

Poco TV

Abhijit Roy writes:> have you received the copies of the journal? they were> posted more than a month back. he’s referring to the Kolkata based Journal of the Moving Image vol 4. The article is called something like ‘Postcolonial Television’. ITs out, but I have not yet seen it. So this is to be updated [...]