it’s only a nightmare. Sold, to a nice lady whose daughter’s favorite book is The Paper Bag Princess. I took Peter out to a Thai restaurant named after a pun with the commission, and now it’s all gone again.
But it was delicious, and now I want to make pumpkin curry. I walk past the church with their yard full of pumpkins for sale and think about potential yum.
My newly acquired experiences include:
-Getting boxed into a side street with an LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device also known as a “sonic cannon”). According to several reports this was the first use of the device against civilians. Should I feel special?
The sonic cannon emits a high pitched, high decibel focus wave of sound. Turned up to full strength it can cause nausea, problems with hearing and visions and migraine-like headaches. At less than full strength, which is what I experienced, it makes you want to get away from it as quickly as possible.
This lead to…
-Running through someone’s yard and private ally to escape the LRAD and accompanying riot cops. At this point I became separated from my professor (we were observing the march through Lawrenceville) and started tagging along with some legal observers from the ACLU and Lawyers Guild. We hung back near the police line with some press as the march moved up Liberty.
-Standing behind the police line, a rock the size of a double fist flew past me, about a foot from my head.
-Following the protest as it wound through Lawrenceville and eventually back to Shadyside and Oakland, I saw tear gas and OC gas (a derivative of pepper spray) deployed several time, the closest being about half a block from me.
-Friday night, I attended a gathering in Schenley Plaza. There were 300-500 people, mostly student onlookers. Some anarchists were playing duck, duck, goose on the grass, and there were two or three people with megaphones making ill-attended speeches. Around 10:45PM I noticed media camera crews being directed to exit the area by riot-cops. There were many more cops than civilians. Several reports have put the ratio of cops to civilians at 2:1.
An announcement was made around 11PM that this was an unlawful gathering and we were told to disperse. At this point riot cops had surrounded the grassy area of the Plaza in a tight perimeter. A few short blasts were let off from the LRAD. There was an orderly exodus of people up Forbes, turning up Bellefield parallel with the Cathedral lawn…until the riot cops moved down Bellefield toward us and pushed us through a 4′ tall hedge, onto a across the Cathedral lawn towards 5th. My friend was shoved by a riot cop when he pointed out the hedge and asked where the police wanted us to go. At this point I saw OC gas being deployed at our backs and head the distinct pops of rubber bullets being fired.
My friends and I were some of the first to arrive at 5th. I could see riot cops forming another perimeter around the Cathedral lawn and wanted to get out before they closed it. We headed up Tennyson, but were quickly cut off by more riot cops firing rubber bullets and pushing civilians back towards the lawn. We cut through the parking lot of the Holiday Inn at UPMC University Center and were ushered into the lobby by another student. There, the security personnel told us we couldn’t stay, and one guard attempted to walk a group of frightened girls (who had been caught up when the perimeter reached 5th) back to Tennyson, but was turned back by riot cops. We waited in the parking lot for things to quiet down, and when they didn’t we crossed Bigelow and headed up Lytton until we were again cut off by riot cops running perpendicular to us on Parkman (I think). After asking an older gentleman out for a smoke if we could shelter on his porch and being rebuffed with a civics lecture, we headed back towards Bigelow, walking southwest. At this point we were just trying to stay ahead of the police perimeter, which seemed to keep pace with us, cordoning off blocks as we passed them. We were able to keep track of police activity on 5th as we passed intersections, and the police presence seemed to be amping up rather than declining.
We eventually made it up the hill to the Peterson Events Center, where someone was able to pick us up. Aside from some bruises and scrapes from the hedge and some wicked blisters from running in my Docs, no one in my immediate group was injured. I have since heard that some friends of mine were arrested, but most of them have been released by now.
Here is the lecture (slightly edited) I gave earlier in the summer about intellectual property law and participatory culture. I’ve removed most of my media exhibits from this recording, though all can be found online easily and for free.
At break between Part 1 and Part 2 I originally screened a Red vs Blue episode. So it’s not a strictly organic break, but it’s as close to the middle as I could get.
Altogether (with questions) this lecture runs for nearly an hour and a half. Listen while you fold you laundry.
I’ve also included my slide deck, though it is not strictly necessary to follow the lecture. It is pretty, though.
fact checker’s note: Queen Anne was born in 1665, but ruled from 1702 to 1707.
The thing that fascinates me about AGT is how it represents (or seems to represent) a throwback to the old studio system of Hollywood (I realize that this has been building for some time in these types of shows, but it seem particularly apparent in AGT. The acts are straight out of Vaudeville, and I’m not just looking at the auditions. In the Top Forty this season there were/are a magician, an impersonator, prodigies and virtuosos of several stripes, freaks & (old school) geeks, comedians, weirdos, children and dogs along with the more popularly expected singers and dancers.
Along with the throwback nature of the acts, the networks have *finally* figured out how to make appointment TV work, and it’s not with the voting (though that’s certainly very important). The nature of the acts themselves emphasis the artifact of the singular performance. American Idol has nothing but the voting dynamic to create the need for immediacy, because the individual performance of the song is fairly indistinguishable, in terms of dramatic value, from original broadcast to rerun to Youtube clip to cd release. But magic acts or acrobatic dance acts or virtuosic piano acts or glass chewing acts or chainsaw juggling acts or burlesque acts contain within themselves drama as *performances*. You see a magic trick once before you start to analyze it (this particularly comes out in the YouTube clips of the Drew Thomas Magic acts). With geek, chainsaw juggling or other death defying acts, you only really watch it once, and when they’re not dead by the end of it, you don’t need to watch it over and over again (unless you’re showing it to your friends). The drama of the performance is diminished once you know they don’t drop a saw on their heads or choke on a lightbulb. Virtuoso and acrobatic performances are of a similar species (will they succeed or crash figuratively or literally), ad similarly the value of the act is in the artifact of the individual performance, not in the value of the act itself.
So so far we have two major throw-back elements, both in the types of acts and the live-performance-heavy-nature of the acts themselves. The final throwback element I see is in the prizes. The million dollars is by now fairly standard, and by current economic standards pretty paltry actually. Moreover, that is not what the acts are focused on, as shown in their individual interviews. The acts focus on the prize of a show on the Vegas Strip. Vegas is a throwback city, in terms of morality, in terms of the kind of entertainment available there, in terms of the sheer scale of the place. It calls up associations of the Rat Pack, The Godfather, Prohibition, deserts and oases both, and a delicious disregard for the consequences of actions. The prize could just as easily have been a show in Carnegie Hall or in LA, but the producers specifically chose Vegas.
Unlike most reality/competition shows (and I am hesitatingly including American Idol in this category) AGT is not a 15-minutes of fame show. It is about the old studio system, where small town talents were “discovered” by studios and hand reared to fame, fortune, and life-time exclusive contracts. The dream being sold is not “You too can be on TV and get paid 100k to eat a bug.” It’s “You too can be an entertainer (NOT an artist), because we are opening up the studio system to you.”
I’m also fascinated that none of the judges are actually American. But I’ll leave that for another entry.
EDIT: David Hasselhoff is American. For some reason I thought he was German.
