Yes, that's what Viv reckoned! I was trying to give them the benefit of the doubt... surely in a show so polysemous and layered there would be a reason for *everything*. But I guess HBO just like tits. A bit sad, really...
Yes, that's what Viv reckoned! I was trying to give them the benefit of the doubt... surely in a show so polysemous and layered there would be a reason for *everything*. But I guess HBO just like tits. A bit sad, really...
4 min read
So I'm probably the last person on Earth to watch "The Wire", and I'm starting from the beginning at the urging of Jim Groom and #wire106 . I'm coming to it pretty cold, from an understanding of police/crime drama that extends largely to "The Sweeney" (I usually do this kind of critical review in literature and/or music)
Jim had primed me to see a cop show being subverted, and indeed that is largely what happened. Really it seemed to be more about bureaucracy, and the need for the individual to avoid expressing emotions or instability in order to better play a part in a corporate body. With D'Angelo chastised for losing his cool when attacked in high-rise lobby, and McNulty seeing the piss flow downhill after he subverted reporting lines to press his pet case onto a judge, it was about a man against a machine, and the logic of the machine winning over.
The sense of place and division was heightened by frequent reference to a sub-section of each organisation: Narcotics and Homicide were two almost rival factions within the Baltimore Police Department, both answerable to the whims of the Deputy (who liked dots) and could banish anyone to Marine if he so chose (I liked the use of door signs and office decor in conveying the status of each part of the force). And D'Angelo was demoted from having a tower block as his patch to "the pit", which was clearly of lower status and a "lesser" role after his mistake
And yes, it was, always a man. We counted two fully-drawn female characters - Kima Greggs (a senior detective in narcotics who seemed like she actually knew and cared about what she was doing), and Rhonda Pearlman (an assistant state's attorney who near enough walked out of a fractious meeting/confrontation between Narcotics and Homicide).
Nearly all of the rest of the women we saw worked at "Orlando's" - a strip club "front" for the Barksdale organisation. Yes, a strip club. I'm not sure what we were seeing subverted there, but The Sweeney did a strip club as a criminal signifier in 1974. (in Supersnout, and she was called Brandy DeFrank - two more names than any of the women in Orlando's got).
Now, let's be frank about this: Women have bodies. But unless I am misunderstanding the HBO audience for complex cop show noir drama, people don't need to look at them all the time to remain interested. And maybe drug-dealers do have meetings in strip clubs, I'm not sure. But - as lovely as it always is to hear Bill Withers' "Use Me" - the lengthy establishing shots simply established Women! Getting undressed! To Soul Music! and did nothing to add to the nicely nuanced rebuke that "Stringer Bell" was offering D'Angelo.
So - why? Laura Mulvey's theory of the "male gaze" would be one answer: television and film is often made from the perspective of a heterosexual male viewer and tends to linger on the curves and contours of the female body in the way a heterosexual male would. A friend of mine who lectures in such matters has primed me to always notice that a male character is usually introduced with a straight, still, facial shot (or maybe some purposeful walking), where as the camera will generally move across the body of a female character - especially one presented as "desirable".
A conversation between Kima and her partner nudges episode one past the bechdel test, but it was looking like a close run thing for a long while. So, despite there being a lot to enjoy in The Wire so far, I'll be keeping my eye on the way it portrays women.
Image Lee Nathan at the Noun Project. CC-BY-3.0
This is a guinea pig with my eyes and mouth. No reason.
#dailycreate
#ds106
Alleged new Aphex Twin album ("Syro") - not sure myself yet but some fun noise.
Bill Withers - use me - YouTube https:/
2 min read
Someone has written the MOOC article again - this time Peter Wilby in the Guardian presents a gee-whizz gift of an interview to Simon Nelson of FutureLearn.
MOOC "scepticism" (an odd term for "the findings of actual research", but there you are...) merits an entire paragraph. All of which is brushed away, via a series of unchallenged counter-positions from Nelson.
I just want to dwell on "There are huge differences between the providers. Learning is not something you can commodify." for a moment. In my admittedly limited understanding the whole point of online massification is to "commodify" education - the unit cost drops, after all, to the point where you can offer it for free without losing "too much" money, and you do this by substituting an allegedly personalised (algorithmic) student experience for a truly personal (human) one.
All of the major providers (without exception) have done this in the same way, videos, readings, multiple choice quizzes and a few places for students to chat about it. Nelson (who is a nice chap, having met him at a conference in Stockholm) for me overplays the effect of offering a place to comment after the video (youtube style) rather than in a dedicated forum (BlackBoard style). Coursera forums tend to be full of students asking each other for advice, F/L comment streams tend to be "gosh, wow I never knew that" type things.
But the big warning klaxon sounds with the passage on F/L drop out rates. It's the classic pop-sci journalism trope of not properly describing data-sets, and comparing like with like. You can't just "[discount] those who sign up but never start", if you are citing data from other providers which includes all students who sign up. And Simon Nelson definitely cannot go on to say that participation rates are "two to three times better than other providers".
Katy Jordan's canonical dataset puts F/L MOOC completion almost exactly were you would expect it to be given the (smallish) size of the cohort, neatly on the Pareto distribution that appears to be developing when you plot % completion rate against enrolment numbers.
Oh, and Kyloe is not Scottish Gaelic for cow. You are thinking of Bò Ghà idhealach.
source: http:/
source: http:/
source: http:/
#wire106 S1E1 down and spooling in my brain to write about later...
Wondering if #wire106 could also be #sweeney106 ? #shutit #youslaaag
#wire106 - it's a thing, I'm gonna give it a go, and do so on my new kick-ass #known instance #likeaboss
2 min read
Because it is what all of the cool kids are up to, and because I think it is the beginnings of a trend in post-SocialMedia I've been spending my lunch hour having a little play with an application called "Known".
Thanks to the fine work of the folks at @ReclaimHosting #giveTimmmmyboyARaise it was ready and waiting on my cPanel, and the magic of installatron meant that it took the barest minimum of clicks.
I then proceeded to the front end to make myself a profile and to add some plug-ins. Of primary interest to myself were stuff like the Twitter and Facebook plugins, which allow me both to post onto said networks and collate replies back onto the "master" copy of my post here at http:/
Also of interest are the differing means of posting natively (a long-form post like this one, an image, a link, a check-in, whatever...) which are then shared via my instance of known and any social media platform I happen to select.
This is interesting and important for a number of reasons, but I'll give you one example.
Like many people I am keen to move away from Facebook and lessen my reliance on twitter, and to keep my own copies of conversations that happen on there. Known, as a tool, allows me to keep sharing and discussing things across various platforms, but to retain (reclaim!) my ownership of what I share and what happens afterwards. So all those conversations I start on twitter, or that range between twitter and facebook, can be preserved.
It's still in a very early stage so there are things "missing", most fundamentally a wordpress integration (so I can save tweet conversations around my blog posts, for example) and some kind of link to a video hosting site (vimeo, youtube etc). I'd love a lightweight smartphone integration too, so "share with Known" becomes an Android option.
But it is interesting, and I intend to keep experimenting with it to see how it grows and develops.
More about Known: http:/
My Known instance: http:/