Life is good and I’m enjoying myself. What can I say? I’m completely spellbound by the new wall shelves that my friend Christopher Pole is going to build for me and I’m also salivating at the thought of getting out of MPLS for a while.
On a recent trip to Barnes & Noble, Curtis and I came across the Mystery Science Theater 3000 box sets. Wow. Talk about taking me back to my youth. For a second, I had bad acne and felt like I was back in my family’s basement watching the Sci-Fi Channel. Anyway. As we were watching The Touch of Satan, it occurred to me that there has to be greater critical depth to this program.
In a past post, I remarked that I thought the FOX animated television show Family Guy might be an apex of late Postmodernism. After watching MST3K again, I believe that it represents yet another facet of Postmodernism coming to fruition. Where Family Guy represents the splintering, mish-mashing, and appropriation of aspects of contemporary culture to create a new whole, one could argue that MST3K indicates another core part of postmodernism in visual culture: questions of authorship.
I couldn’t help but notice that the commentary introduced by Mike, Tom Servo, and Crow acts both as a humorous (exceptionally, even) device, and also, as a means of redrawing the narrative of the film as it unfolds. It is fascinating to watch the linear format of a bad film be verbally cut up, digested, and wittily put back together into something better.
I decided to spend this Easter Sunday hunting around and photographing the abandoned structures that make up Ft. Snelling Park. Located 15 minutes south of MPLS, along the stretch of highways 55 and 62 that lead to the airport, I’ve always been curious about this place. As luck would have it, today Curtis, Lindsay, Amber and I finally had a chance to troll around.
I was a little worried as we wandered about. The area is a mish-mash of public parkland space, and its inverse square: highly restricted airport and military base. In the back of my mind I kept remembering the story of my friend David, who was approached by heavily armed military security for setting up a 4X5 camera and photographing the undersides of over-flying planes here.
razorwire and boulder
As I walked to the end of the park and approached the ominous looking airport fence, I was preparing myself for someone to point a gun at me and ask for my CF card. Such seems to be the attitude toward anyone who takes photographs in the public/private hinterlands of post-W America. I keep spinning around one question: What if the powers that be are actually able to stop everyone from photographing things which are not their friends and family?
I have a hard time imagining a world where everyone has been stripped of the (psychologically) externalizing practice of documenting something, someplace. What would the world be like if we were never able to expect a type of documentary truth in our lives that has to come from something like photography? I’m left thinking of Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451… a world where the physical record of an idea in book form is illegal… everyone is caught up in their own perceptions as truth.
Here is a rant for a fine Thursday morning. I hopped on the bus this morning, just like every morning, and plopped down next to someone. They almost immediately drew out their cell phone and started describing, in detail their intense love of Kurt Russel. Not just along the lines of Kurt Russel is a great actor in that one movie… but… to the degree of describing her dripping wet parts as she watched “Big Trouble in Little China”.
I don’t think I needed that.
This is yet another reason that cities with metro systems are infinitely better than those that with crappy buses. I would give anything to not have to put up with Chatty Cathy Cellphone Time every morning.
This was posted on Thursday, April9th, 2009 in Culture, Life
I’ve been reading through Alain de Botton’s Status Anxiety. It is truly a great book that accurately describes the pressures of being an individual alive in our current historical period. It’s true: we are infinitely wealthier than those who lived before us… but the accumulation of wealth and comfort in no way has translated into greater happiness.
Check out this video segment from Botton’s broadcast on his book.
