The Memes of Production: A cultural studies weblog

100 Best Blogs?

2009-11-10T23:24:25Z

Thanks for the nod, OnlineCourses, I hope we can live up to the endorsement.

If you feel that you’re destined to be an intellectual long after you graduate from college, you’re going to have to work a little harder to keep up with high brow culture and scholarly debates on your own. These 100 blogs will help you jump in on the discussions influencing the art, literature, political and culture worlds, even without the support of your professors and fellow classmates.

“High brow culture”? That reminds me: I better get to work on the next Eurovision post…

Vale Claude Lévi-Strauss

2009-11-03T23:15:36Z

A short snippet from my thesis:

What I have been talking about here is the opposition of nature and culture, and while a little culture is a good thing—very few of the champions of natural food actually want to eat everything raw, and even the most dedicated blues guitarist will play the most carefully crafted instrument that they can afford—the over-produced or the processed product is to be avoided. As Frith puts it, “the continuing core of rock ideology is that raw sounds are more authentic than cooked sounds” (“Art Versus Technology” 266).

The raw and the cooked: one of the defining dichotomies of popular culture, and a central metaphor in many areas of value creation.

Vale, Claude.

Labour Photo of the Year

2009-11-03T03:50:47Z

The winner of the annual “Labour Photo of the Year,” organised by the LabourStart organisation, has been announced. K M Asad, an Indian photojournalist, won with a striking image of a Bangladeshi boy resting after working, probably unpaid, in a filthy shipyard. The photo is a stark reminder that child labour is an ongoing issue in some parts of the world.

Asad’s caption reads:

A Bangladeshi boy works in a shipbuilding factory in down town. These factories employ young boys as apprentices without pay for the first few years. They work in extreme conditions without safety tools like gloves, goggles, and other protective gears. In exchange, they learn the skills of the trade. But this costs them loss of health and education. In Bangladeshi child work lad is under 18th years child don’t work in any work site. But no body eels to see them and no security in their life.

See Asad’s Flickr photostream here.

The State of the Industry

2009-10-20T23:02:23Z

The State of the Industry: the future for cultural research in the university

Thursday-Friday, 26th and 27th November 2009
The University of New South Wales, Kensington

The State of the Industry is a two day conference that will discuss the future for cultural research in the university, while marking the conclusion of a highly successful period of Australian Research Council funding for the Cultural Research Network.

The event will showcase a range of innovative research collaborations and projects that the Cultural Research Network has generated, linking different disciplines, institutions and community groups working in the area of culture over the past 5 years. It will also discuss a number of issues fundamental to the practice of research.

The conference will have free registration and is open to all members of the public and the university community.

Details here.

Andrew Bolt and Indifferentiation

2009-10-15T03:34:36Z

Poor old Andrew Bolt. Those meanies on Hungry Beast were mean to him last night:

Hungry Beast item on the ABC does underline my point, however, and increase my concern that critics are now deceitfully using the stranger comments of some reader to define my own views and to delegitimise the ones I in fact hold and express. How dishonest this is may be judged by the fact that Hungry Beast item relied on about three or four comments plucked out from a thread of more than 300, written by Muslims, atheists, Christians and Jews, expressing all shades of opinion except my specific own.

Posting here

Bolt has a point, but (to use his term) one that is rather delegitimised by his one-time annual sport of ridiculing the titles of successful ARC grants—always ones approved by the Humanities and Creative Arts panel.

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