Friday, January 28, 2005

Disaster porn and Pompeii

Dana Stevens, TV and pop culture blogger at Slate, shares some interesting thoughts about the Discovery Channel's special Pompeii: The Last Day:

In the recent (and excellent) documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself, the director and film scholar Thom Andersen makes the argument that disaster movies tend to appear at moments when a culture is in crisis about the legitimacy of authority (hence the burgeoning of the genre in the post-Watergate years). Representations of natural destruction on a massive scale—fires, floods, earthquakes—must be somehow paradoxically comforting, he theorizes, perhaps because they allow us to imagine the worst fate the gods can visit upon us, while still allowing us, the viewers, to survive.

I wonder what it says about the current cultural moment that this weekend there will be a golden opportunity to ponder the wrath of nature on television. The Discovery Channel special Pompeii: The Last Day, premiering Sunday night (9 p.m. ET), combines science documentary and historical fiction to create a variant on the genre the writer Paul Lukas once dubbed "weather porn." Pompeii is natural-disaster porn; it may rely on impeccable historical research and painstaking dramatic reconstruction, but its real reason for existence is the money shots, spectacular sequences of mass chaos and suffering that, as Lukas writes, "leave you staring slack-jawed at the screen, mumbling, 'Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God' and 'Holy s**t, holy ****ing s**t.'"

Read the rest of her post here.

Tuesday, January 11, 2005

Jacques Derrida, R.I.P.

The Trireme Veterans will soon celebrate our three months of survival in the Internets -- and the three months since Jacques Derrida shuffled off this mortal coil. We never paid our respects. In a small gesture to remedy this we republish below the obituary written by Fafnir of the incomparable Fafblog, whose eloquence is beyond our capacities:
flowers for derrida

Jacques Derrida died yesterday. We threw a Deathday Party to undermine the hegemonic life/death binary but for some reason everybody was still kinda sad.

"I don't get it," says me. "How could Derrida die? He was a social construct."
"True," says Giblets. "Nothin is outside the text, includin Derrida."
"Then he couldn't die," says me. "After all if he did he would be reinforcin the hegemonic Dead Derrida/Live Derrida binary."
"We must deconstruct Derrida's death!" says Giblets. "Beginning by inverting the priveleged duality! Derrida is alive!"
"He's stuffin his face with cake right now over there!" says me.
"Mmmfff," says Derrida. "Waffff uppppf fellaf."
"Derrida stop eatin all our cake!" says Giblets. "That cost good money!" Man that Derrida's always been a greedy bastard.

Saturday, January 08, 2005

Shanks to graduate students in the U.S.: You suck!

Earlier today Dr Shanks published some posts with his thoughts on the Theoretical Archaeology Group conference held last month in Glasgow. He appears to have enjoyed the proceedings but throws in this choice jab at his own American students:
But it was encouraging to see so many very well prepared and presented papers at TAG. Their average quality far surpassed that of even the better graduate students here in the US. And they were radically challenging the way we deal with the archaeological past.
I'm in Boston now for the annual APA/AIA conference and can only report that on the whole I'm rather impressed with the quality of the talks I attended today that were given by American postgraduates. And from the few conversations I've had they certainly seem to be able to negotiate the concept of humour better than I expected. They also appear to be able to hold their liquor, although on this last point I may be biased since I'm still knackered from jetlag, and what felt very late last night was probably much earlier.

I and the other Trireme Veterans can only wonder how many of 'the better graduate students' over in the States are elbowing their way to the front of Dr Shanks's entourage so they can jot down his every pearl of postprocessual wisdom.