I just love this NY Times article and keep referring back to it in my remixing thoughts. Written last May to various Hollywood CEOs and Directors, the papers’ movie critics finally air their grievances with the business. Perhaps it’s the holiday season, but upon review, I am reminded of the traditional Festivus airing of the grievances of which I am accustom. I don’t agree with all their memos but, overall, the critics’ attempt is heartwarming and long anticipated.
I got a lot of problems with you people! And now, you’re gonna hear about it. Frank Costanza
To: Straight filmmakers
From: M.D.
Enough with the gay slurs, the gay baiting, imitating, limp-wristing, so-not-funny lisping — in other words, enough with the hating. Yeah, some gay men are hilarious (Oscar Wilde). But people are funny, their identities are not. Try this simple test: Every time you feel the need to mock or denigrate gay men or lesbians, replace that joke with an equally vicious dig about African-Americans or Jews. Doesn’t sound so funny anymore, does it?
To: Heads of production, Sony, Universal, Paramount, Fox, Disney
You all keep trying to make Rock Hudson-Doris Day-style romantic comedies with the golden guys and gals of the moment, and the results are sexless, subtextless, bland career-girl-in-search-of-Mr.-Right retreads. Meanwhile, a bunch of hungry directors with digital cameras, time on their hands and not much money are making free-form studies about tentative hookups and long conversations among actual, overeducated, undermotivated young folks.
I finished up teaching a Fair Use and Copyrights class at Cambridge Community Television and wanted to passing along my resource list. It’s important for online video producers to understand Fair Use because it protects free speech and allows them to legally use copyrighted culture for comment, illustration, critique among other things. In Cambridge we are lucky enough to have an extremely lively and active community television station that promotes locally grown video and offers trainings to help community members navigate the often sticky waters of media production and distrobution. But regardless of location, producers need to be aware that Fair Use is a case by case judgment call, which you can help make yourself based on the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video.
Because most of the members at CCTV are documentary focused, I featured this video from the Documentary Filmmaker’s Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use as well from Center For Social Media.
I must admit that when I first heard the term transmedia, I got real excited because I thought it was related to media made by trans people, ie transgendered or “transexuals”. Trans people continue to queer the gender paradigm, illustrating that gender and sexuality aren’t inherent but performative. For example, a trans man (F-M) attracted to women isn’t what we would classify as ’straight’, or ‘gay’, for that matter. But that mind-fuck of messing with and subverting what we all thought was so fixed and predetermined is queering. So, I was real excited to see some queer’d media made by trans people, called, transmedia.
Well, that’s not what transmedia is.
Transmedia (as defined by Henry Jenkins in his 2006 book Convergence Culture ) is storytelling across multiple forms of media with each element making distinctive contributions to an understanding of the story world. By using different media formats, it attempts to create “entry points” through which consumers can become immersed in a story world. The aim of this immersion is decentralized authorship. (wikipedia)
I’m working on Sex and the Remix Season 2 now. While Sex and the City had a huge following and tapped a virgin market (pun intended), it didn’t attract a participatory fan following that created vids and remixes, comic books and alternate reality games that contributed to a distinct understanding of the story. However, the story did expand through different types of formats. The first narrative incarnation of Sex and the City was a column in the NY Observer. Then the story was expanded into a book, then into six seasons of an HBO series, which had enough “entry points” for consumers (ie, markets) to be made into a movie. Just as previous incarnations of the characters took place, I too have expanded the story in the remix.
Day dreaming, the Sex and the Remix Series would spawn into a legit TV series, Queer in the City, that encourages audiences decentralized participation through remix, vids, etc. The premise is the 4 women come out later in life, kinda like that lady who came out this week.
…just an idea of where transmedia + remix concepts can go in terms of storytelling and a hope for it’s more subversive, queer future.
I’m proceeding with Season 2 of Sex + the Remix series but not without looking back on Season 1.
Below are questions I received from a student in Erin Reilly’s women’s studies class at MIT. They are working on a wiki that compares the women’s movements to the media lit movements, a fabulous idea that, once public, I’ll post here.
Why pick Sex and the City which has a few gay story lines compare to many sitcoms that are clearly only in a hetro world?
First off, having 3 gay storylines does not mean the show is queer positive. I would would even go as far to say that SATC is queer-negative – Samantha is considered not normal once she begins to date a woman. Here, the viewer is encouraged to cringe at her description of gay sex. (fast fwd. to 1:45 for the best illustration)
When a show is queer positive, queer or gay characters are complex. They have conflicts, thoughts and feelings. We see things from their perspective and are encouraged to identify with them. In queer negative texts, gay or queer characters are cast as a girl’s best friend (ie, all the joys of a male companion without the sex). These characters are not complex. Stanford is the oddball, weird or quirky stereotypical effeminate male side-kick character.
Charlotte’s fascination with lesbians furthers the concept of queer as ‘other’, a new trend, something different, exciting, and non-normative. I would even say this episode illustrates the exoticfication of queerness: the objectification and displaying of certain characteristics and lifestyle choices:
Samantha: Nobody told me it was B.Y.O. Man.
Carrie: What did you expect? It’s a lesbian art show.
Samantha: I know. But don’t straight guys follow them around to see what they’re going to do?
“By midnight, Charlotte discovered Manhattan’s latest group…
…to flaunt their disposable income:
The power lesbian. They seem to have everything.
Great shoes, killer eyewear and the secrets to invisible makeup.”
“One drink at G-Spot, the hottest new girl bar in town…
…followed by dinner and scintillating conversation at Luke’s…
…a hot new French-fusion restaurant with an even hotter chef…
…followed by late-night dancing at Love Tunnel…
…left Charlotte exhilarated and happy as she’d been in ages.
There was something relaxing and liberating…
…in traveling in an alternate universe that contained no thought of men.”
I choice SATC for a number of reasons:
1. It’s a highly gendered text: the show illustrated womens’ sexual candor and was a positive shift in cable television where women publicly staked claim to previously male territory of sexual frank-ness and sexual language. This meant I could have a lot of dialogue and images to work with and around to re-edit out of context.
For more on this concept of sexuality and confession see Confession is the basis of sexuality in Foucault’s History of Sexuality.
2. The show’s narration appropriates the language of radical feminist politics only to retell old patriarchal fairy tales of women longing to be loved by men. This popular feminine text provided an outlet for women’s dissatisfaction with male-female relationships in which they never questioned the primacy of these relationships. I hoped that they would question it after 6 seasons of dissecting their failed interactions with men. Furthermore, the voice-over provided the narrative thread to hold the story together. The use of radical feminist language only helped my new storyline.
There were a few interactions that seemed very unnatural, like the sexual encounter over a tampon. It creeped me out.
There can be 2 readings of that scene:
Essentialist/2nd wave – Carrie feels the essential female-ness and connection to the female spirit that represents menstruation.
Radical/3rd wave – Refers back to Andrea Dworkin’s Occupation/Collaboration. Women don’t reach orgasm through penetration but still “collaborate” in their own oppression by being ‘occupied’ through penetration. The tampon scene came after the heavily male beef cake scene. “My desire over came my fear” = She realizes the only penetration she’ll be participating in is through tampons.
What do you think worked or didn’t with this remix?
Where would you like to see Queer Carrie’s character go?
I’ve been thinking alot about telling stories using existing narratives in the context of remixing. How can remixers tell a new, well developed story by re-purposing the originals?
This overlaps somewhat with the ever-trendy transmedia storytelling topic that’s been heavily talked, tweeted and tracked. I found this video from DIY Days LA interesting because Elan Lee (Co-Founder and Chief Designer at Fourth Wall Studios) bluntly admits that the first steps in transmedia storytelling haven’t been good.
Successfully developing a new method of storytelling means time is needed to work out the kinks…but in the mean time, what lessons can be learned from past failures in tranmedia storytelling and can any by applied to remix?
Will the new model of transmedia storytelling make remixing much easier as there will be more readily available content for complex story lines and characters?
I have some issues with transmedia, mostly that it creates media franchises to engage target audiences in new and “interesting” ways to sell products. I wonder if it’s the spawn of product placement.
BravoFan is a space dedicated to the content of Bravo, a TV network owned by NBC Universal. For those of us looking for more concrete examples that misogyny still exists, BravoFan makes it easier to find posts about shows like “Date my Ex” and “Millionaire Matchmaker”. “Inside the Actor’s Studio” maybe the only legit show the network airs…and by legit I mean not targeted to just women and gay men, of course.
Are they completely independent of the Bravo franchise or is their relationship symbiotic? A channel known for hideous product placement and shameless ‘integrated’ marketing, Bravo’s commercials not only push products but it’s content does too! There’s no distinction on their site but I wouldn’t be surprised if BravoFan and the network have established a mutually beneficial agreement.
What I enjoy about BravoFan is that it encourages a lively comment culture on it’s posts and creates a space for fans to critically dissect and examine Bravo’s content, which often promotes misogynistic forms of beauty and endorses, supports and glorifies societal expectations for both men and women. The site appreciates it’s participants by profiling those most active in the discussion. My all time favorite profiles are from the unexpected young-male Bravo fans like Danny.
Most of the content is written by Maria Diaz of b5 media, a “global new media network featuring a wide variety of topics…one of the largest blog networks in the world.”
Maria is lovely. The description of her company…a little scary.
At its narrative core, Sex and the City is about women searching for love and acceptance, a premise neither gay or straight but merely human.
Sex and the City illustrates an authentic version female friendship, paying particular attention to dissecting social and sexual expectations. But the show also relies on the language of feminist politics to reiterated old patriarchal fairy tales of women longing to be swept away. Why is it so hard to give up these fantasies? Remixed and re-imagined, Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda’s dissatisfaction with the opposite sex is no longer an unquestioned desire to follow the expectations of conventional heterosexuality.
This is the first of six videos in the Sex and the Remix series. Each season will be remixed into an episode, building upon the story line established in the previous work. The queering of on-screen relationships are especially important for LGBTQ fans and allies who have so few options of characters to identify with in popular culture.
This remix is classified as fair use in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107.
The series is intended to provide an informal exchange between CMS faculty, students and figures from academia, industry, and the art world. The sessions is free and open to the public!
CMS program has an amazing database of past speakers including my personal favorite, Junot Diaz. He and I met briefly after his wonderful, inspiring, unscripted talk last year. He’s my public speaking idol. Smart, sarcastic, witty and throws in the occasional curse word.
The talks are recorded and broadcast via Podcast and they’ve got 24-hour turn around time, so if you can’t make it, you’ll find it Friday on podcast.
Political Remix Video: A Participatory Post-Modern Critique of Popular Culture
Elisa Kreisinger
Remixers are on the front lines of the battle between new media technologies and impeding copyright laws that threaten to obstruct the public discursive space for critiquing popular culture. These spaces are abundant with meticulously crafted and articulate video remixes that deconstruct social myths, challenge dominant media messages and form powerful arguments reflecting the participatory nature of both pop and remix cultures. We’ll deconstruct these videos, honor the history of female fan vidders and the influences of African-American hip-hop cultures and debate the remix’s ability to effect actual change.
After my post about Carrie Bradshaw syndrome and the unconscious effects of watching too much hetero-haute, I received this response via email from a blog reader. I think her response is witty and revealing of the psycho-social effects of being a fan.
I can’t decide if I’m disappointed or relieved by the lack of lesbian visibility on television. Don’t misunderstand me, I am completely sick and tired of the heterosexually-structured norms that have been fueling television romances and story lines for the last half-century. I think it’s sad that our media is so obviously LGBT-deficient. But, at the same time, if I hear another fucking girl compare me to a character on The L Word, I am going to kidnap Ilene Chaiken and expose her to rabies.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved The L Word. It was groundbreaking and provocative. For six years, I fell in and out of love with those women. But, all the while, I understood that The L Word was a fabrication, a glossed-over crock of shit. It was beautiful, but it wasn’t real. Sadly, due largely to the fact that most people can’t help but become entirely brainwashed by pretty things in the media, I feel like I have dated far too many women who have not yet gotten passed the illusion of The L Word. And since it is one of the lesbian community’s few options on television, they tend to really live by happenings of these fictional characters.
I am opinionated, aggressive, and have a degree in Art History. I direct a gallery, collect art, and like fashion. Those things combined do not make me Bette Porter. Yet still, too many women treat me like I’m her. Some of my flings were always waiting to catch me cheating on them, surely due to Bette’s infidelity. One girl went as far as to assume that I was half black. And, by god, if I grab dinner with another “Tina,” I am going to scream.
Once, after successfully convincing one girl that I was not at all like Bette, I mentioned that I wasn’t really looking to be part of a monogamous relationship and her exact reply was, “So, you’re more like Shane.” Are you fucking kidding me?
Trust me, being around people who insist on diagnosing you with Bette Porter Syndrome is far worse than actually having Carrie Bradshaw Syndrome. I’ve heard that Showtime will soon be releasing a reality-version of The L Word, again, I’m not sure if I’m excited or scared.
