4n9314 “I <3 Henry Jenkins” Harrison
Christy “Groceries have no meaning for me” Gilroy
Kelly “I’m really a bad ass in Jimmy Choos” Murphy
Sam “I get my own soundtrack at conferences” Evans
Shaw “I’m covering a murder trial this week” Day
Chris “G $ Zombie Killah” English
Laura “I’m sooo much cooler & nerdier than my kids” Bucholz
Liza “Oh God, what have I done?” Potts

I want to say thanks to all of you. Every Tuesday night for the last four months, I have eagerly looked forward to our class. I knew, at some point in each class, several things would happen:

1. I would smile and/or laugh at a pop culture reference that reminded me of something awesome. Or, I would find appreciation for a whole new piece of nerdery, something I hadn’t known before. Hello, Firefly!
2. I would learn something completely new — a new angle on something I had long taken for granted.
3. One of you would blow my brain apart, challenging me to put it back together in a way I could never have thought of on my own.

Moving to Norfolk was a big transition with a lot of challenges for me. But, every Tuesday night, all of you made it a little less difficult. To see this class come to an end is fulfilling in the sense that it points to new steps and ideas to be pursued. But it’s also sad. All of you challenged me and motivated me to learn more and to do more. And I don’t want to see that end.

Have a good summer and keep in touch. And, again, thanks to all of you for the best class I’ve ever had with any group of people.

And congrats to Shawn, and good luck in whatever you decide to do.

–Dave “….” Jones

I spent more than an hour hunting for anything on Ryan Moore. I found a pro golfer, a NASCAR driver, a software developer, a motorcycle stunt rider, and some kid’s MySpace page. Unless our man is the modern day Buckaroo Banzai, I’m thinking none of these are him.

Finally, I found his page for the Department of Sociology at Florida Atlantic University, where he’s an assistant professor.

I found no picture to prove it, but apparently, his students love him and think he’s pretty hot [link].

And Sells like Teen Spirit (2009) has a Facebook page.

“Anarchy in the USA”

Pivoting on the emergence of punk and hip-hop as reactions to the collapsed attempts at social change spurred on by earlier forms of music, Moore situates the evolution of these musical scenes against a backdrop of postmodern critiques of meaning and culture, as well as a Marxist critique of their contemporary economic contexts. He states that “such changes cannot merely be described as ‘economic,’ for they have given rise to a whole way of life where time and space are compressed, social relations are more fluid and ephemeral, and the commodity form infiltrates every aspect of everyday life” (p. 7). All of three are necessarily bound to each other if he is to form a full sociological examination of music as a line of cultural force in late 20th century western capitalist societies.

The central gist of his argument is that the postmodern rupture of meaning and the economic downturn of the late 1970s combined to demolish the idealized social transformations of the 1950s and 60s counter-cultural revolution under the weight of the pressures those changes created. In effect, the sociological pressures of increasing poverty led to a cynicism that is both producer of and created by the semiological deconstruction of meaning. Punk and hip-hop stood as localized expressions of this tension while they remained largely hidden away within their respective communities. Briefly, Moore traces a quick narrative of rock music’s evolution through the 1980s and into the late 1990s, along with its simultaneous demise as a force for cultural critique and change.

Several key ideas emerge in Moore’s framework as a basis for cultural analysis, among the most interesting his distinctions between “noise” and “rhythm” as auditory semiotic structures that denote potentially different emotional resonances to given situations (p. 21). As a musician, especially one steeped in Grunge, I find this idea fascinating as an analytical tool. Where Moore admits he doesn’t have the knowledge to examine music as a structural system, I can point to some observations that empower his analysis.

Below are four videos for songs from the four commercially successful bands that emerged from the Seattle Grunge scene. All four feature the same instrument tunings (Dropped D, specifically), extremely similar main guitar riffs, but are couched in different sounds and styles that draw from different moments in rock’s past.

Nirvana — “Heart-shaped Box” (1993) — often compared to punk predecessors

Soundgarden — “Outshined” (1990) — often compared to black metal, like Black Sabbath

Pearl Jam — “Go” (1993) — sometimes compared to 1960s rock, like The Yardbirds

Alice in Chains — “Would” (1992) — started as a speed metal band

What’s interesting is that each could evoke something of a territorial pissing match about who had the most authentic “Seattle sound,” at least among those not from the Seattle area (like me). To Grunge enthusiasts like me, there are radical differences in the sound and emotional uptake from each song, despite their structural and musical similarities.

What do you think?

Barthes’ father was killed in WWI when he was only a year old. Raised by his mother, he dealt with repeated illness issues his whole life, including Tuberculosis. These problems kept him out of WWII. They also meant that he often had difficulty procurring teaching positions throughout his career.

He was also gay, and much of his work is often read in light of this fact. His resistance to bourgeois cultural values is often interpreted as a function of his sexual identity.

Barthes published extensively, solidfying his reputation as a scholar and theorist. “The Death of the Author,” his famous 1967 essay, argued that text created by the author supplanted the author’s authority within culture. Ironically, it also led to Barthes’ great critical reception by other literary theorists. Wikipedia has long bibliography of Barthes’ work.

“Mythologies” and “The Eiffel Tower”

Barthes saw myth as a set of semiotic relationships. And though, as any reader can see, he offers a meticulous and complex analysis of the semiotic operations at work, I’ve tried to keep it relatively simple for my own benefit. He calls myth an example of “speech” primarily because he sees it as a semiotic system. The easiest place to start are his assertions about myth’s function and character — that it commits “language robbery” (p. 131) by aiming for “immediate impression” rather than allowing thoughtful analysis (p. 130). Myth can do this because, through an elaborate semiological system, it “distorts” meaning by “distancing” history from the signifier. It doesn’t destroy this meaning, needing it as a vague and fuzzy base upon which to build. Instead, distance can be filled with whatever the bourgeois deem culturally or politically expedient by appropriating what they want from the meaning underneath. (Barthes sees myth as a distinctly bourgeois, right-wing phenomenon.)

His most prominent example is this, the young black boy in French soldier’s garb, seen here. The image is an amalgamation of French colonialism and patriotism, expressed through visual signifiers, that is instantly recognizable as an attempt to perpetuate the myth of French Imperialism. Barthes’ purpose is to establish a rigorous method that can uncover the mythic operation at work in the image, and hence offer resistant readings of it. In Barthes’ terms, “he is the very presence of French imperiality” (p. 128, emphasis in the original). What he means is that recovering this image from its mythical structure is an act that simultaneously exposes the myth’s operations, as well as the history that is being marginalized. Repeatedly, Barthes argues that this marginalization, or distancing at work in the semiological system, amounts to a “naturalization” of the myth.

In some sense, there is a connection to be made between Barthes and Benjamin’s concept of the aura. In effect, Benjamin is arguing this same distancing between the foundation of reality and the experience of stories about reality. The mechanically reproduced work of art is a myth that can be understood as a decontextualization of the hard reality of the artwork.

Barthes applies this method to the Eiffel Tower as a way of explicating its differing relationships to Parisians versus outsiders. The feeling imposed by an experience — that which evokes sentimental attachment to abstractions about time, place, or event — can serve as a way of distancing the observer from the history that might be found in the pre-mythic semiological system.

But Stephen Colbert can explain it better than I can:

So, how the hell did “McLuhan” come to be a more dominant word in this cloud than did, say, “experience”? And no, I don’t have any idea what the “media” is doing out there by itself. Maybe that somehow represents New Media…?

Click the image to go to Wordle.net to see a bigger version.

(BTW, don’t you like how Deep Six is hanging out watching two boys swim in a pond.  Sheesh…)