Category Archives: Postmodernism

Postmodern Learning?

One of my friends made the recent comment that with the advent of the supplementary material on DVDS, watching movies can require a huge time commitment.  I think it’s mostly a way to use b-roll stuff and justify charging all that money for 50 cent piece of plastic.

The Monterey Pop documentary DVD includes commentary by Lou Adler and director DA Pennebaker.   Adler was one of the organizers.  I did not know that the festival collected funds for a charitable foundation that is still in existence today although I couldn’t find a website.  I was fascinated by their commentary.  There were things they simply didn’t remember after 40 years.  They talked about how people who had gone to the concert still thanked them for both holding the festival and producing the movie.

Pennebaker focused on the emergent nature of the whole movie.  They didn’t do much pre-planning or storyboarding. They did decide they were only going to include one song from each group.  They stationed seven cameras different places and did at least try to record the same songs using a red light to indicate which to record.  It didn’t always work and sometimes they couldn’t see it; yet, somehow they all recorded the same songs.  Zen, according to Pennebaker. According to this review, one of the camera men was direct cinema pioneer Albert Maysles.  But some of the other camera men were musicians rather than camera men and had little or no experience.  In fact, two of them filmed the Ravi Shankar raga.

So, I ended up watching the film again and listening to their running commentary.  I think this is what I’m labeling post-modern…in the modern era, we went to see a film and perhaps knew something of its production.  Now, I can get the director’s viewpoint frame by frame.  And, this new series that came out in 2002 includes two more disks with two films of additional material along with outtakes.  One thing people complained about with the original documentary was which songs and groups Pennebaker chose to include.  For instance, he ended the movie with this incredible Ravi Shankar raga that took place Sunday afternoon even though there were more groups on Sunday night. And what a contrast that was to the sexually charged footage of Jimi Hendrix and his guitar. So, while Pennebaker may have taken a Zen-like approach to filming, he had to make choices when it came to keeping the film to a reasonable length.  In the commentary, he also discussed his decision to not use transitions; instead, he moved directly from one group to another without any fades or other breaks.

This commentary provides a way to “look at” the film itself, the techniques used to create it, the way it represents reality.   Without the commentary, I wouldn’t have thought too much about the Otis Redding section where Pennebaker gets behind the singer and shoots straight at the stage lights.  Redding’s head in encircled in light.  The singer died in a plane crash in December 1967 while Pennebaker was editing the film and that light has come to be seen as an aura rather than just a trick of the light.  It’s another example of Zen, according to Pennebaker.

Well, It Turns Out That Lonelygirl Really Wasn’t – New York Times

Well, It Turns Out That Lonelygirl Really Wasn’t – New York Times
“They were like the new Marshall McLuhan.”

I missed this one…don’t spend enough time at YouTube, I guess. Anyway, it turns out that the teen who has been videocasting from her laptop is actually a 20-something actress who is videocasting from someone else’s laptop.  The interesting piece of this from a media literacy standpoint is that the audience suspected all along that this wasn’t “real” yet were fascinated by the story as well as the mystery of who she really was.  There is a fine line between fiction and reality these days, isn’t there?

Hermeneutics – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hermeneutics – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hermeneutics may be described as the development and study of theories of the interpretation and understanding of texts, particularly Biblical texts. The concept of “text” is here also extended beyond written documents to any number of objects subject to interpretation. A hermeneutic is defined as a specific system or method for interpetation, or a specific theory of interpretation.

Definition of Hermeneutics from Wikipedia

Derrida’s “hauntology”: http://halflives.adc.rmit.edu.au/haunt/hl033.html 

Media Literacy At Its Most Basic

fremonttribune.com, Fremont, Nebraska’s Community Newspaper
Seigenthaler said it took months to get statements about him removed from a Wikipedia page.

This quote is from an article about the most recent Wikipedia flap…a Catholic high school is concerned that someone wrote something bad about them and they are suing Wikipedia.   Tim at Assorted Stuff asks the pertinent question:  “Why didn’t they correct the entry themselves?”  Just fix it, monitor the page, and move on.  Recognize that this a new media…your PR agent is no longer in control.  It’s ironic that one of Seigenthaler’s friends replaced the incorrect comments by copying and pasting a biography from another website, a copyright violation.

According to the Wikipedia article about the incident, Siegenthaler is concerned that such vandalism will lead to government regulation of the Internet.  He is arguing that we should go back to the “old” Internet: passive, a vehicle for communication by government and businesses, without all that free speech floating around.  I did a workshop at a high school and when we checked the county’s Wikipedia entry, we discovered it had been created largely by a student at the high school.  I noticed a few somewhat negative comments about the high school related to bullying.  And, when I revisited the site a week later, I noticed those comments were gone.  I hope one of the principal’s in my workshop fixed it.  That’s how Wikipedia works.  You get to offer your version of the truth until someone else decided their version is better.  You might be rich and powerful but you’re not going to be able to control everyone on the Internet so your time is better spent getting out your own message instead of trying to control the message that others are sending.

U B U W E B :: Nancy Perloff

Perloff’s description of Cage’s work helps clearly define modernism and post-modernism:

U B U W E B :: Nancy Perloff “Postmodernism and the Music of John Cage”
In the early 1970s, as we see in the comments quoted above, Cage endorsed collaborative musical performances in which the audience worked together with performers, fusing art with its environment, and in which the composer’s will did not constrain participants’ activities. This de-centered, collaborative, and heterogeneous principle for musical performance seems very postmodern. Yet the decisive presence of Cage’s ego (“I like”, “I try to bring about”), as well as the value he attached to historical musical practice, steered a modernist course. He designed and determined the performance situation, no matter how many participants were involved, and relied on his invention of chosen traditions from the past.