Archive for March, 2005

reading list

Tuesday, March 29th, 2005

for those of you wondering why i am rarely on IM networks these days here’s the explanation: i spend my days now mostly reading the books and articles that are on the reading list for the final oral exam at the end of april. most of the stuff is actually well known and also quite entertaining, but some articles are real suckers. even though they are written in german i have a hard time understanding what the author actually wants to say… thanks to a very confusing or call it “elitist” style, refering to loads of other authors and theories and stuff… so, here’s my current reading list:

Fiske, John (1999): Elvis: Body of Knowledge. Offizielle und populäre Formen des Wissens um Elvis Presley. In: Hoerning, Karl H./Rainer Winter (Hrsg.): Widerspenstige Kulturen. Cultural Studies als Herausforderung. Frankfurt a. M.: Surkamp.

Fiske, John (2001): Für eine kulturelle Interpretation. Eine Untersuchung zur Kultur der Obdachlosigkeit. In: Winter, Rainer/Lothar Mikos (Hrsg.): Die Fabrikation des Populären. Der John Fiske Reader. Bielefeld: Transcript.

Gillespie, Marie (1999): Fernsehen im multiethnischen Kontext. In: Hoerning, Karl H./Rainer Winter (Hrsg.): Widerspenstige Kulturen. Cultural Studies als Herausforderung. Frankfurt a. M.: Surkamp.

Giroux, Henry A. (2002): Brutalized Bodies and Emasculated Politics: Fight Club, Consumerism and Masculine Violence. In: Giroux, Henry A.: Breaking in to the Movies. Oxford: Blackwell.

Grossberg, Lawrence (1999): Was sind Cultural Studies? In: Hoerning, Karl H./Rainer Winter (Hrsg.): Widerspenstige Kulturen. Cultural Studies als Herausforderung. Frankfurt a. M.: Surkamp.

Kellner, Douglas (1995): Media Culture. London/New York: Routledge.

Kellner, Douglas (2003): Media Spectacle. London/New York: Routledge.

Virilio, Paul (1986): Aesthetik des Verschwinden. Berlin: Merve.

Winter, Rainer (1995): Der produktive Zuschauer. Medienaneignung als kultureller und ästhetischer Prozess. Köln: Herbert von Halem.

Winter, Rainer (2001): Die Kunst des Eigensinns. Cultural Studies als Kritik der Macht. Weilerswist: Velbrueck Wissenschaft.

it’s been awhile…

Sunday, March 20th, 2005

…since i blogged. and there is no excuse for that. life is quite busy right now, i got the “book list” for the final exam on april 28th and that list is quite extensive. well, i have to talk for half an hour about cultural studies and stuff. so i ordered the books i do not already own and dig into reading… yeah, is there any better way to spend spring when my allergies are in full swing and i can’t take the bike out for a ride anyway? (it is spring after all, we had like +28 degrees C this week! that’s insane!) so bear with me, the whole PhD thesis story will come to an end soon. very soon. and after that i am going to take a time out for a few months before i head into the job hunt…

fuck them all

Saturday, March 12th, 2005

mylene farmer is finally back and the first single of the new album is called “fuck them all”. i was sceptical at first because the title of the song does not sound like mylene. maybe she has changed her style but my fears were unjustified: mylene is still mylene and the musicvideo is downright awesome. actually, it blew my mental socks off! they play it all the time on MCM and it contains so many elements of her unique universe. the symbols and metaphers are overwhelming and you have to watch it again and again to get “it”. it’s to “early” for a complete analysis so i decided to put up some screenshots…

mylene in a cage
the black bird, a recurring symbol in mylene farmer's world
mylene destroying the scarecrows
reflection in a scattered mirror and again a black bird
closeup of mylene farmer
at the end mylene dissolves into particles

bad things happen to good people

Saturday, March 5th, 2005

when you are in contact with certain people via IM daily so that they become part of your life and suddenly one day they are not online and have not told you beforehand that… it’s strange. i have a very good friend who lives a few hundred kilometers away and we IM daily. it’s a part of my routine, getting up, getting online, saying “morgaehn” to him and starting my “workday”. he is always there for me, especially when i am writing i can ask him questions about the new german spelling and stuff. apart from that he’s a real pillar of support. it happened in the past that he was offline for a week (vacation) or for a few days (hardware failure) but either he told me beforehand or phoned me telling his computer won’t boot up. so what i want to say: if he is offline without an explanation something bad has happened.
i knew he would be offline this friday because he had some work to do at university. no need to worry, he’ll be online in the evening. well, when i went offline yesterday (around 10 pm) he hasn’t shown up. maybe he missed a bus or the train was late. however, since he didn’t turn up by afternoon today i knew something was wrong. i was right. i gave him a call and his grandma told me that he had a seizure yesterday and is now in hospital! OMG! now that’s bad news indeed. i hope he’ll get well soon because the summer semester at university has just started…

adventures at the copyshop

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2005

i’ve been wondering: is there something wrong with my blog since i upgraded to wp 1.5? i haven’t been getting any comments lately… are you guys still reading me? or are you simply busy?

well, yesterday was the day i have been waiting for 2.5 years: i went to the copyshop and had my phd thesis printed. i need to hand in five copies and i cannot print 228 pages with my humble ink jet printer. this needs to look professional hence my trip to the copyshop. well, although i knew the shop is sort of “self-service” i didn’t expect to spend almost the entire afternoon there. why? i needed to print the 22 pages containing the screenshots of the movies with the color laser printer and leave them out when printing the text-only portions. that resulted in a huge “sorting pages” orgy. however, after 3.5 hours of happy pages sorting and checking if they are all in the right order i was finally done. and sort of proud, you know, that are fruits of my work from the past 2.5 years. it’s a good feeling for sure.