October 2010

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immiscible camp

21.10.2010 in &c.

Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on “Camp”‘:

Of course, the canon of Camp can change. Time has a great deal to do with it. Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don’t perceive. We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as fantasy when it is not our own.

As a sometime connoisseur of camp, the fact that the Glee treatment clearly does not work for The Rocky Horror Show — at least, in the songs released in advance — is especially intriguing. Some hypotheses:

–The generational effect. The stage version of RHS is as old as me. It evokes the early days of rock’n'roll and B-movies in the context of glam: and yet it seems barely plausible that only 15 years separates Buddy Holly from Marc Bolan, or Del Shannon from David Bowie. But perhaps that kind of distance is perfect for camp. (While Mad Men currently serves as the nostalgic anchor for 1960 and thereabouts, the standard retrofilter for a long time was that of Grease and Happy Days: one is camp, the other not so much.)

–You can’t square camp. Or, perhaps, ‘you can’t supersaturate camp.’ It’s clearly possible to give a Glee refinishing to songs that have always had a heavy varnish of camp, and the inherent stone-facedness of the power ballad makes especially potent source material. But RHS is part glam, part deviant doo-wop: there’s little in the way of high seriousness to play off, and the only route for a cover that’s not a bare homage is to strip down those layers, not add additional ones.

–Camp and kink. Regardless of amended lyrics or casting, the overtly kink-driven camp of RHS sits uneasily with Glee; perhaps ironically, I think that’s because Glee portrays camp as normalised, to the point of its being incidental.

I can easily imagine crossover fanfic in which the cast take on RHS roles, but I doubt the producers contemplated an ‘Atomic Shakespeare’-style re-enactment, and with good reason. Still, it raises the question of why they went anywhere near RHS at all.

part archive, part trowel

3.10.2010 in Worlds, real & imagined

Very quietly, Rudolf Ammann is doing meticulous and assiduously-sourced work that sets up narratives of online history that engage with their protagonists but also test accepted narratives. This post from last year is a great example, and the comments from Dave Winer, Scott Rosenberg and others set up a fascinating dance of narratives.

I’m going to take very slight issue with the analysis: while I think the spare, link-based weblog set up a contrast to the long-form personal narrative that had previously held a certain amount of sway, my own recollection is close to Rosenberg’s: the distinction between the two forms was never as contentious or as zero-sum as the exchanges at SXSW 2000 made it out to be. That’s perhaps because of underlying personal relationships and a sense of common cause that transcended formal boundaries — what Heather* and Derek or Lance and Leslie were doing didn’t feel that dissimilar from Peter or Judith were doing around the same time. You could play around with the weblog format and maintain a zine/narrative site, perhaps in a subdirectory, perhaps a separate domain, and not feel like a traitor to the cause — or you could mix it up, because that’s what Justin Hall did, and everybody knew Justin’s site.

By 2000, there was, perhaps, a certain wistful regret that the hand-coded custom layouts and experimental design of {fray} and Colors and AfterDinner and 0sil8 were giving way to lower-maintenance templated sites, reflecting an era of browser messiness and dot-com craziness and increased demands on site creators’ time. (I’ll use this post to deliver my annual nudge at Kottke’s expense.) What appears in retrospect as conflict can also be read, perhaps more accurately, as a desire to give a proper send-off to the surfeit of effort in a craft superseded by production, even if subsequent production demands a new kind of craftsmanship.

Terms like ‘spirit’ don’t really suit analytical frameworks, but that’s where you find the continuity of the weblog era, in a group of people who have been engaged at the leading edge of the web for as long as I can remember, adapting to (and adapting) the forms that emerge.

*Heather’s non-bloggy jezebel.com is no longer in archive.org, perhaps on account of its current owners. This makes me sad.

making [a] public

1.10.2010 in Worlds, real & imagined

My thinking about the online public sphere is, by necessity, shaped by many years’ work into the emergence of the public sphere in early modern Europe, which creates, in its silhouette, the idea of the private self. The CBC Ideas series on the origins of the modern public is both a testament to the Canadian broadcaster’s commitment to intellectually challenging radio — it’s Radio 3 territory, not NPR — and a trove of ideas to juxtapose with this new domain for identity and interaction.