Wednesday, February 6
EXT. BY THE ROADSIDE. DAY.
Kantogirl abruptly stops walking upon hearing alarm sound coming from inside backpack. Traffic noises all around. It is a sweltering Manila afternoon:
Kantogirl: Say that again?
M. Headwriter: They want to get Ate Guy for that episode you're writing.
Kantogirl: Say what?
M. Headwriter: [muffled response}...due on Thursday...[muffled muffled]
Kantogirl: [turning off phone, mumbling] Hot damn.
Kantogirl abruptly stops walking upon hearing alarm sound coming from inside backpack. Traffic noises all around. It is a sweltering Manila afternoon:
Kantogirl: Say that again?
M. Headwriter: They want to get Ate Guy for that episode you're writing.
Kantogirl: Say what?
M. Headwriter: [muffled response}...due on Thursday...[muffled muffled]
Kantogirl: [turning off phone, mumbling] Hot damn.
Reason why we should all get a blog: so we can bookmark and link articles which interested us before, and remember where exactly we got it. If you’re like me, pre-blog days, you probably forget half the sources of the stuff you read while crawling the net. You may have right-clicked the article and saved it, but forgot to include the URL. After ten million years, you come across it again inside the dearth of your hard drive and blog about it, completely oblivious to the fact that you’re actually stealing links from somebody else’s blog.
It turns out the Lacan article from the earlier post from a cheesedip entry from way back last year, before I had this blog. You can find a link there to the original text there. Lia sent me the URL via email. Thanks, girl. I’m becoming senile.
It turns out the Lacan article from the earlier post from a cheesedip entry from way back last year, before I had this blog. You can find a link there to the original text there. Lia sent me the URL via email. Thanks, girl. I’m becoming senile.
Tuesday, February 5
There's an article in Time Magazine about the phenomenon of blogging. It's not a down the dark alley business anymore. We're going mainstream, baby.
And in the morning of the second day, Kantogirl stirs from beneath her blankets to the roaring sound of jet planes overhead. With much grumbling she gets up and peers outside the window just in time to see the flock in the direction of Malacanang. The Madame President Arroyo hath returned. All hail the President. Blasted aeroplanes. Bah.
Monday, February 4
Lacan and silence in television
"Abstract.
"Voice does not simply persist at a different level with regard to what we see, it rather points toward a gap in the field of the visible, toward the dimension of what eludes our gaze. In other words, their relationship is mediated by an impossibility: ultimately we hear things because we cannot see everything." -- Slavoj Zizek
What should we make of the off-camera noises of Psychanalyse I, Lacan's television broadcast of January 1973, better known under the title of its 1974 redaction, as Télévision? Someone coughs; a shifting chair (?) squeaks; the recording machinery -- or maybe it's a central air system -- whirs noticeably throughout the film; the sounds of heavy traffic can be heard through the closed windows of Lacan's Rue de Lille bureau. Many of the aural artifacts of the film are obviously due to the poor state of the recording. But even if we discount that residue of the event -- and I would argue expressly that we cannot do so -- Télévision is a remarkably noisy performance.
The viewer -- or, more precisely, the auditor -- may be tempted to ask, was it always like this in Lacan's consulting room? The classic scene of psychoanalysis depends, we may have assumed, on an absence of sound: the hushed speech of the analysand, punctuated by periodic full-stops, signalling her resistance; the pursed lips of the phlegmatic analyst -- stand-in for the most impassive of all audiences -- speaking only when the silence becomes unbearable for everyone. But our phantasies of that sepulchral scene are, it would seem, discounted by the evidence of Télévision.
To respond that these noises are merely an incidental background to Lacan's utterances in the film misses, I propose, the crucial sense in which the noises are accidental, but in a specifically Lacanian sense: which is to say, the sense in which their fortuitousness is essential to the properly psychoanalytic reception of Lacan's message. The ultimate irreducibility of noise is a founding element of Lacan's address to his television audience."
I can't remember where I got it, except that I wrote in down after reading it somewhere while I was in Bacolod last year. I find it strange because we are often told that television cannot be too quiet. One watches television while attending to post-dinner chores, while brushing your teeth. It doesn't take into consideration those who sit and watched totally enraptured, an audience willing to suspend all other activities except to watch and listen. So what we have is a television that is often noisy and rambunctiously so. There are screams and slaps and tendencies for melodrama. While the video about terrorists or soldiers or protestors roll on in the six o'clock news, there is an accompanying voice commentary, the ambient sound playing in the background. Nowhere is there total silence. Which reminds me of something Allen Ginsberg once said: "Whoever controls the media - the images - controls the culture."
"Abstract.
"Voice does not simply persist at a different level with regard to what we see, it rather points toward a gap in the field of the visible, toward the dimension of what eludes our gaze. In other words, their relationship is mediated by an impossibility: ultimately we hear things because we cannot see everything." -- Slavoj Zizek
What should we make of the off-camera noises of Psychanalyse I, Lacan's television broadcast of January 1973, better known under the title of its 1974 redaction, as Télévision? Someone coughs; a shifting chair (?) squeaks; the recording machinery -- or maybe it's a central air system -- whirs noticeably throughout the film; the sounds of heavy traffic can be heard through the closed windows of Lacan's Rue de Lille bureau. Many of the aural artifacts of the film are obviously due to the poor state of the recording. But even if we discount that residue of the event -- and I would argue expressly that we cannot do so -- Télévision is a remarkably noisy performance.
The viewer -- or, more precisely, the auditor -- may be tempted to ask, was it always like this in Lacan's consulting room? The classic scene of psychoanalysis depends, we may have assumed, on an absence of sound: the hushed speech of the analysand, punctuated by periodic full-stops, signalling her resistance; the pursed lips of the phlegmatic analyst -- stand-in for the most impassive of all audiences -- speaking only when the silence becomes unbearable for everyone. But our phantasies of that sepulchral scene are, it would seem, discounted by the evidence of Télévision.
To respond that these noises are merely an incidental background to Lacan's utterances in the film misses, I propose, the crucial sense in which the noises are accidental, but in a specifically Lacanian sense: which is to say, the sense in which their fortuitousness is essential to the properly psychoanalytic reception of Lacan's message. The ultimate irreducibility of noise is a founding element of Lacan's address to his television audience."
I can't remember where I got it, except that I wrote in down after reading it somewhere while I was in Bacolod last year. I find it strange because we are often told that television cannot be too quiet. One watches television while attending to post-dinner chores, while brushing your teeth. It doesn't take into consideration those who sit and watched totally enraptured, an audience willing to suspend all other activities except to watch and listen. So what we have is a television that is often noisy and rambunctiously so. There are screams and slaps and tendencies for melodrama. While the video about terrorists or soldiers or protestors roll on in the six o'clock news, there is an accompanying voice commentary, the ambient sound playing in the background. Nowhere is there total silence. Which reminds me of something Allen Ginsberg once said: "Whoever controls the media - the images - controls the culture."
Is chatting bad for your health?
A study says that Hongkong residents are more likely to catch the flu because they talk too much, loudly. They talk while they walk down the streets, while eating, and they have the highest concentration of mobile phone activities as well. But it's also possible that the high risk of getting the flu has to do with population density and the brisk movement of people around the island.
It's also weird because I thought the article had something to do with chatting the mIRC or the IM/icq way. But no, it's just talk.
A study says that Hongkong residents are more likely to catch the flu because they talk too much, loudly. They talk while they walk down the streets, while eating, and they have the highest concentration of mobile phone activities as well. But it's also possible that the high risk of getting the flu has to do with population density and the brisk movement of people around the island.
It's also weird because I thought the article had something to do with chatting the mIRC or the IM/icq way. But no, it's just talk.
Watched The Others this afternoon. It nearly gave me a heart attack, and there was a collective scream inside the theater when things got really really mind boggling. It's not something to watch alone in the dark, when there are rows and rows of empty seats around you. The Exorcist is child's play compared to this. And scarier than reading the script to Se7en in the dead of the night.
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