Blog Archives

playing the dream job \/\/ the magical economy of the sims

October 20, 2010
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playing the dream job \/\/ the magical economy of the sims

Creative jobs can be dreamy.  They may offer or seem to offer dreamy things; things that can surface only as dreams in other jobs: engaging your curiosity and knowledge, materializing contents of your imagination, making something to love with love.  We have entire television shows that let us watch others pursue their creative dreams. In the United States, we’ve got American Idol, for example.  Or Project Runway, or America’s Next Top Model.  HGTV’s nearly erstwhile Design Star.  Participants on such reality shows tend to arrive with experience under their belt, the pursuit already began, but the dominant narrative theme of such shows, predictably enough, places the crux of the pursuit within the domain of the show.  The show is your ticket to Making It (if you Make It Work). Reality television participation becomes your job, and by law, only one person really survives, and even them, maybe only ephemerally. Despite the precariousness of success for entrepreneurs, artists and artisans, the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity reported a burst in business start-ups in 2009, and Etsy stores just keep opening, as the un- and under-employed do what they can to try to make ends meet. But dreams are easier to live [...]

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dressing up at dragon*con

September 13, 2010
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dressing up at dragon*con

It’s Fashion Week in New York!  But the fashion event closest to my heart took place a little over a week ago in Atlanta. Once a year, over Labor Day weekend, thousands of geeks and nerds of all ages and fiction preferences gather downtown for a celebration of fantastic fandom called Dragon*Con. Dragon*con days are made up of attending panels, checking out the art show & dealer room, gaming, screening independent media productions, meeting your favorite sci-fi figures and recovering from the previous night’s festivities. And you can do some top-notch people- and fashion-watching during the days, but it’s Dragon*con nights that the fashion-show is out in full force. Droves of DIY-costume clad con-goes fill the convention hotels’ lobbies, hallways and elevators — many fueled on assorted combinations of caffeine, food court fares and adult substances — to mingle, party and take a ton of pictures. Yours truly has attended the festivities as, variously, the Dread Pirate Roberts from The Princess Bride, Romana from Doctor Who (1978 to 1979) and the Flash – among others. Dragon*con might not be the most overtly political space you can find, nor the most critical & inclusive one (ironic enough for a celebration that’s in many ways about embracing your [...]

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the future is full of spiders & surprises

September 7, 2010
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the future is full of spiders & surprises

New beginnings can hit us any time, of course, not just on regularly schedule calendar dates and socially recognized life-markers.  It’s obvious, but sometimes I forget, caught up in cycles of birthdays, new years, new semesters, commencements, break-ups, weddings, new jobs and cross-state moves; the next thing, then the next thing, then the next thing.  By now I have just enough new beginnings under my belt that I can’t help but notice a lot of the big, official ones seem to fall in the first two or three decades of one’s life.  Or they’re supposed to, anyway.  Maybe there’s no official document dictating the schedule of our allotted new beginnings, but we do seem to share a general idea of what this timeline would be: kindergarten then grade school the high school, dating then marriage then kids, education then training then career.  Rebellion, experimentation, stabilization.  Isn’t the renown condition of middle-aged malaise supposed to be about grappling with the notion that you’ve already done all the big things you’re going to do, that you’ve already gone through your supply of fresh starts? Maybe that’s why I find it easy to like stories about unexpected, unpredictable new beginnings.  Unforeseeable new beginnings [...]

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forgetting & remembering\/\/music is my time machine

August 31, 2010
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forgetting & remembering\/\/music is my time machine

A year ago my hard drive crashed and I lost the music collection I’d been building since college. Much of the music I listened to regularly I had in albums on CD, but a good portion of the songs I lost were from various bits and pieces of soundtracks and compilations, mixes gifted from friends, albums I no longer liked and CDs acquired as a joke and then neglected. The kind of songs I’d forget I had until they came up in the playlist. At one point I’d backed up all of these stray songs on a variety of miscellaneous mixes I made for things like road trips or mowing the grass; I liked to throw in surprises to shake things up.  But when my hard drive crashed, not long after a +1000 mile move, and I couldn’t remember the fate of these made-for-discman CDs. Music is said to help aid memory retention. So is repetition.  This means its easier to learn state capitals or the letters of the alphabet when they’re set to a tune, but it also explains some of the contents of my music collection. I have songs, decades old, that I hated when they first came out. [...]

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this week on the avant guardian\/\/forgetting

August 30, 2010
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this week on the avant guardian\/\/forgetting

Things fall out of my head all of the time.  Where I put the keys.  Where I put my wallet.  A phone number.  The name of a film.  I try to look out for a future version of myself who will eventually forget something, and I make lots of lists.  This is the list about the forgetting. Short term memory loss. Long term memory loss.  Selective memory.  Inattention.  Amnesia.  Collective forgetting.  Never forgetting.  Elephants never forgetting.  Trying to forget.  Forgetting fears.  Forgetting things.  Forgetting someone.  Forgetting Sarah Marshall.  Forgetting about Dre.  Forgetful Jones.  Forget Paris.  Forget-me-nots.  Fear of forgetting.  Fear of forgetting anniversaries and birthdays. Forgiving & forgetting.  Forgetting and aging.  Forgetfulness.  Being forgotten.  Being The Forgotten.  The end of forgetting.  The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. So, what else am I forgetting? Image credits:  alexis mire

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consume for the job you want\/\/a movie about work

July 6, 2010
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screen

Hey ya’ll, I just finished writing exams last week, which means my summer has finally, really arrived, but it’s also left me a little brain dead (the exams, not the arrival of summer. I think). I’ve been coping with long bike rides and movies from the 1990s. One of these movies was the 1997 romantic comedy/drama  Picture Perfect starring Jennifer Aniston. You will love this movie if you like semi-dated romantic comedies that don’t go overboard on coherency and explore both the encroachment of work obligations and duties into the worker’s off-work time and the correspondent, compulsory blurring of work/life  boundaries for privileged contemporary American workers. I know I fall into that category! The premise goes like this. Jennifer Aniston plays 28 year-old Kate, who makes up advertising campaigns for clients at an advertising organization (like this guy, but different), and who is bit of a free spirit (no Polly exactly but certainly no quietly unhappy good girl either). Maybe a bit too much of a free spirit, according to her job! They pass her up for promotion because, as her boss tells her, they have no reason to believe she will remain loyal to the company and not suddenly one day take [...]

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the problem of creativity\/\/making it work in the post-fordist turn

June 16, 2010
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the problem of creativity\/\/making it work in the post-fordist turn

It used to be that creativity was a big problem. Probably it’s been a problem ever since the notion of creativity was invented, in different ways for different reasons. It’s a problem now, too, but it’s a different problem than it was before. Put on your time travelin’ pants, we’re going to the past. Creativity in a time of Ford (and I don’t mean Ford Prefect) Before, back in the twentieth century & up until its last several decades the industrialized Western world had this thing called Fordism and mass production. Mass production promised things like standardization, efficiency and the democratization of consumption. The price of this promise was creativity in the workplace, and the cost was paid by workers. This is because mass production entailed de-skilling. Workers, once artisans laboring with their colleagues to craft marvelous modern contraptions such as automobiles, were stuffed into tiny boxes of standardized labor power and made to perform tiny movements in isolation from each other, over and over again, on the assembly line. Think about what kind an angry dance such a change would do to your spirit, if you were one of those workers: once a skilled craftsperson, with a skilled craftsperson [...]

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flighty, flakey, crumbling away

June 8, 2010
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flighty, flakey, crumbling away

This isn’t my idea. Best I know it’s John Hodgman‘s, with a little help from several decades and several multi-verses of superhero comics. John Hodgman went around asking people to choose between two superpowers and explain their choice for a segment on This American Life back in 2001. And the choice (you might remember?) goes like this. You only get to pick one, and you are the only one in the world with this power: Flight, or invisibility. You could choose flight. If you choose flight, all you need is your body and you can soar, soar soar. Or you could choose invisibility, stay more grounded, scurrying and scampering unsurveilled as you carry out your pet projects, tiny revolutions and grand plans for domination. Which would you choose? Of course there are administrative details. The superpower you get is a stand-alone, not simply one aspect of a superpower variety pack. So super-strength doesn’t accompany flight and invulnerability doesn’t accompany invisibility. You’ve got to take the one you’ve got and make it work. On the bright side, you don’t have to strip down to your skivvies to get imperceptible, and you won’t catch a chill no matter how high you fly [...]

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