Nuclear and Environment
US War Department’s Archival Footage of the Bombing of Hiroshima.
H. Bruce Franklin, “Hiroshima, Nagasaki, American Militarism,” a review of Paul Ham‘s Hiroshima Nagasaki: The Real Story of the Atomic Bombings and Their Aftermath.
Mark Strauss, “Federal Employee Gets Fired After Writing an Article Criticizing Nukes.”
Lindsay Abrams, “Researchers: Warming Responsible for Siberia’s Mysterious Hole.”
Nuclear
More adventures in nuclear incompetence: Lily Hay Newman, “Air Force Security Failed a Takeover Drill at a Nuclear Silo.”
Climate Change, Catastrophe, and the Anthropocene
We’re doomed. “A Galaxy Far, Far Away . . . Will Hit Ours.”
Lindsay Abrams, “Researchers: The Collapse of Greenland’s Ice Sheet Could Be a Bigger Disaster Than We Thought.”
Ari Phillips, “In Landmark Class Action, Farmers Insurance Sues Local Government for Ignoring Climate Change.” Is that what we need? For the insurance companies to get involved?
Yes. McKenzie Funk, “Insuring the Apocalypse.”
Paul Krugman, “Cutting Back on Carbon.”
On the flooding in the Balkans.
Everything is the worst: Ryan Koronowski, “House Votes to Deny Climate Science and Ties Pentagon’s Hands on Climate Change.”
R. recently drew my attention to the fact that the Center for PostNatural History exists, and it is just down the street from us in Pittsburgh. This is definitely on the list of places to visit in 2013. Their mission statement:
The Center for PostNatural History is dedicated to the advancement of knowledge relating to the complex interplay between culture, nature, and biotechnology. The PostNatural refers to living organisms that have been altered through processes such as selective breeding or genetic engineering. The mission of the Center for PostNatural History is to acquire, interpret, and provide access to a collection of living, preserved and documented organisms of postnatural origin.
And of course their current exhibition is “Atomic Age Rodents.”
Below is an abstract for a paper I will be presenting at the 2012 Mid-Atlantic Popular & American Culture Association Conference, taking place November 1-3, in good ole Pittsburgh, PA. Along with two of my fellow colleagues from Pitt, we will be presenting a panel titled, “Celebrity, Authenticity, and Decadence: Lady Pop in the Age of the Networked Star.”
Decadence and Sincerity in the Risk Society: Katy Perry and Britney Spears Partying at the End of the World
It is a familiar trope in the rhetoric of the American jeremiad to draw a comparison between the high decadence and subsequent fall of the Roman Empire and the similar decadence of the contemporary United States. So it is tempting to make such a comparison when considering a recent series of pop songs celebrating “partying.” The videos for Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance,” Ke$ha’s “Tik Tok,” Katy Perry’s “Friday Night,” and Britney Spears’s “Till the World Ends” portray gyrating bodies having simply way more fun than anyone could possibly have, reveling in their own meta-celebration. Such images easily invite a critique of these videos’ lack of self-awareness and apolitical celebration of decadence as a mode of being in a time of global financial crisis and austerity. Inarguably outgrowths of a specific brand of American exceptionalism and a youth culture where hedonism has become an end in-itself, what is perhaps most disturbing about this party program is its relative sincerity. By focusing specifically on Perry’s strangely sincere meta-filmic nod to the 1980s and Spears’s dance club at the end of the world, I will argue that these videos should be read not as jubilant affirmations of life and individuality, but as particularly cynical expressions of life in what Ulrich Beck calls the “risk society.” Perry and Spears signal a cultural inability to imagine a coherent future in the face of the present multiplying networks of global risk, and exemplify a need to perpetuate and maintain a decadent cultural fantasy by erasing the disasters and crises that define the present through the spectacle of nostalgically reappropriating the past or fervently anticipating the end.
The videos:
So I suppose E3 just happened, and obviously this gameplay footage from The Last of Us has me quite excited. Post-apocalyptic Pittsburgh never looked so good. (I also feel like I’ve been on this street before. . . .)
This weekend Pittsburgh Filmmakers and Pittsburgh’s local nuclear disarmament organization Remembering Hiroshima 2010, along w/ other events, are showing 3 films for an Atomic Weekend just down the street from me at the Melwood Screening Room. I’m gonna try to attend a few of the events, but def. Kurosawa’s I Live in Fear, a film I’ve been meaning to see for awhile. I had no idea this organization existed in the burgh, and I am very happy to see that it does and that it appears to be quite busy and active w/in the community. Please show your support. (And of course they’re also showing Dr. Strangelove.)
Today I experienced my first ever “snow day,” as my Reading Poetry class along w/ the rest of the University of Pittsburgh’s classes got canceled; and to commemorate it I thought I’d add a couple more “Apocalyptexts”: basically things I’ve read recently during a bout of mild yet much deserved academic irresponsibility. For someone who grew up in Tucson, Arizona, a snow day is completely novel. The closest I ever came to anything resembling a snow day was school being canceled b/c of floods, but that really isn’t the same thing at all, for the rains, when they come—even when they are torrential and flood the streets w/ feet of water—are a blessing: they slake the perpetual thirst of the desert. For this snow day, however, it isn’t even snowing (it’s actually sunny and quite nice, if cold, outside). The nearly 2 feet of snow that got dumped on the ‘burgh b/t Friday evening and Saturday morning is basically still on the ground, and doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere anytime soon (there’s another 3-6 inches expected Wed.). The storm that hit the mid-atlantic states this past weekend dumped the most snow pittsburgh has seen since 1992, and is one of the 4 worst snow storms in terms of inches since they started keeping track of this stuff. Basically, it’s kinda epic. (Though the pics below don’t quite do it justice, esp. since things have “melted” a bit in the past couple of days.) Wandering around the city has been surreal. I haven’t been driving b/c my back-wheel drive pickup truck would not get very far—esp. w/o the sandbags in the back I’ve been procrastinating putting there all winter—though I do have a large amount of respect for the many inhabitants I’ve seen valiantly digging their cars out and spinning their wheels down streets it looks like no one has even tried to plow. There has been an infectious sense of joy amidst what they are still calling a “state of emergency” (or maybe it’s just me, whose current life is such as to be minimally effected by this type of inclement weather). More people are walking around the streets than I’ve ever seen before, and people are generally smiling and cordial, esp. those brave souls who have gone to work, opened much needed services and stores, and basically kept the whole capitalist train running. My thanks. But I am sitting at home, warm and happy, pouring hot water down my pipes to unfreeze them (they weren’t that frozen thankfully) so I could do some much-needed laundry. So what better way to spend a snow day, to endure what Barack Obama called “snowmageddon” (no fooling), to do some apocalyptic blogging? My thoughts precisely. On to some Apocalyptexts.
Also, someone has recently pointed me toward this delightful apocalyptic flash video, check it out.
Some pics (though they aren’t as apocalyptic as could be, as I just stepped outside to do them, rather than, as I shoulda, taken my camera when I was wandering around the city earlier):
wait, that tree limb isn't supposed to be there. . . .
Yep, that tree limb has definitely decided to come hang out on the porch. there's also a grill, a table, and some chairs out here somewhere. . . .
I'm not going anywhere.
holy nuclear winter batman!
tree, please don't fall on our house.
I’ll try to be more prescient and try to take my camera elsewhere, but not today. cheers.
So the G20 was in Pittsburgh last weekend. I don’t really have much to say about it beyond the fact that the massive police presence (4000 police)–many hired specifically for this occasion from other departments around the country, also including national guard, etc.–appears to me like a clear case of (over-)accumulation to prevent the movement and realization of an alternate, or subaltern, history. (Archivally) over-accumulate police! Then no Seattle!–I suspect was the thinking behind this. Original estimates planned on something like 35,000 protesters. The actual amount of people at both licensed and unlicensed protests was more b/t 3,000-5,000. (By all accounts, there may have been more police than protesters. . . .) I don’t know if this says something about pittsburgh, the current state of things, or whatnot, as I cannot lie about a general kind of ambivalence toward the whole thing–i.e. if the G20 had been somewhere else, would I, in my cloudy-haze of academic self-absorption, even have noticed beyond a passive reading of the news? But all in all, it was one of the more-interesting times to be living here in my now going on 6 year tenure. Many of the shots from television and such occurred only a couple blocks from my house. The town was shut down, martial-law style. (One guy said it was like Kent State mixed w/ Mardi Gras.) And commentators couldn’t help but overly-stress how pgh has bounced back after the disaster of the late-70s and 80s. It is a lovely town to live in, yes. It is cheap, livable, and has fared better than many places during the “recession.” But come on, it’s still pittsburgh, and any perusal of much of the town will reveal a past which it is desperately trying to escape, a city defined by antagonisms: a mixture of weird post-apocalyptic ruins and Banana Republics; an infrastructure which is barely being held together mixed w/ SF-like health-care; complete geographical racial and economic segregation mixed w/ exciting sports championships; yinzers and state-o-the-art education.
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So, some media:
That said, my friends and colleagues Molly Nichols and Katherine Kidd, two quite amazing women, were more-or-less literally taken off the streets to appear on the Sean Hannity show. Watch the interview here. It is awkward, to say the least. Who knew that being a lit. PhD was a way to get on tv, and Fox News no less.
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This recent story on a judge’s ruling in favor of the city police, a lawsuit brought against the city by Seeds of Peace, literally occurred right outside my window. The day they towed the SoP bus away from its location on Melwood Ave., parked in front of no one’s property, and not hindering traffic flow in any way, I was sitting at my window working and overheard the entire discussion b/t the police and the owners of the bus. I can say w/o compunction that the police were unnecessarily harassing the owners of the bus, had no reason to be there (i.e. I guarantee none of my wonderful neighbors called them about the bus), and were quite obviously abusing their power. I can’t help but think that the police said to themselves something along the lines of: “oh, there’s a dirty anarchist bus. Let’s get rid of them. Otherwise they might disrupt the G20.” In terms of what I overheard, they towed the bus b/c either a) the owner was not present, b) the owner could not produce documentation that s/he did in fact own the bus, or c) one of the people involved provided false identification. Whether or not any of those things are true, they might as well tow every car on my block. It would be as justified to randomly come up to me and ask me to prove that I own my car when parked on the street.
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Lastly, on a slightly lighter note, please visit hotmetalbridge.org, as our new call for papers just went up.
The Hyperarchival Parallax 