Thomas Conner
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Phenomonoscopy

'Twin Peaks': Tulpas as augmented reality?

9/5/2017

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“What year is this?”
 
It was an extraordinary last line for a wide variety of reasons. Aside from those relevant to the narrative, it’s a question I hear asked often of pop cultural events. Like: “Nintendo is releasing a mini NES? What year is this?” “Billy Idol is opening for Morrissey? What year is this?” Even and maybe especially: “A new season of Twin Peaks? What year is this?”
 
Sunday night’s anticipated finale of Twin Peaks: The Return capped an extraordinary run of television. That certain chunks of this 18-hour avant-garde odyssey are out there in the stream now — for everyday channel surfers to just stumble upon — blows my happy mind.
 
This post is not a review of the show — there are plenty of good ones out there now — but just a quick knocking together of some thoughts about the series’ intriguing engagement with representational technologies and death.   (And it does contain spoilers!)

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Comic Con panel: Science w/ or vs. Hollywood?

7/24/2017

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Attending San Diego’s famous annual Comic Con is a breeze — when you’re an STS grad student, at least. The lines for the Netflix trailers and movie sneak-peeks and TV cast conversations? Long, like crazy-long. The lines for the science panels? What lines?

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Ashes to auto-icons: Devising an uncanny rally

7/15/2017

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I think I possess the very opposite of a macabre personality, but I’m thinking a lot today — in grave detail, shall we say — about my father’s corpse.

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Jimmy LaFave: An Okie in a whole other country

5/26/2017

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Jimmy LaFave left Oklahoma as a young man — just like one of his biggest heroes, Woody Guthrie — then lived an entire life continually inspired by the red dirt he left behind, haunted by his homestate histories, and consistently pressed into service as an ambassador for its culture.
 
He didn’t seem to mind. “There’s something about that part of the earth that sticks with you,” he told the Tulsa World nearly 15 years ago. “I have to go back there from time to time to soak up some energy and inspiration. I plan to end up back there myself one day.”
 
I don’t know if he’s ultimately ending up back in Oklahoma, but I’d always been convinced he never actually left.


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America and her kind: Isherwood and fascism

1/29/2017

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If I fear anything, I fear the atmosphere of the war, the power which it gives to all the things I hate — the newspapers, the politicians, the puritans, the scoutmasters, the middle-aged merciless spinsters. I fear the way I might behave, if I were exposed to this atmosphere. I shrink from the duty of opposition. I am afraid I should be reduced to a chattering enraged monkey, screaming back hate at their hate.
          — Christopher Isherwood, 1940


Throughout my life I’ve been a student of Christopher Isherwood. The avocation ranks as one of my supreme personal joys. Post-election, however — certainly post-inauguration — I find his subjective ruminations on Germany in the ’30s less abstract, starker, unsettling, more palpable. I’m beginning to recognize his texts in the world around me.

This should be a book lover’s joy. Not this time.

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Life after death: 'Rogue One' to 'Jeopardy!'

12/22/2016

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Writing about Facebook profiles as memorials to the dead, Patrick Stokes notes that “our social identities are not necessarily coextensive with the biological life of the individual human organism with which they are associated, and thus it is not the memory of the dead person that is being honored and sustained through this form of memorialization, but some dimension or extension of the dead person themselves” (367). This is part of a growing body of literature that has coalesced around the agency of the dead — an agency facilitated specifically through durable, mediated representations of formerly living bodies.

My research is rooted in a sizable patch of this, but I’m commenting on some of it here because of a couple of nifty examples encountered just this week — mediated, shared, and hyped performances by two public figures who are no longer alive. (Warning: a few minor “Rogue One” spoilers lie ahead.)

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Leon Russell: How many days...?

11/13/2016

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People think I don’t like Leon Russell, and nothing could be further from the truth.
 
It’s my own fault. On the way out the door as pop music critic for the Tulsa World newspaper back in 2002, I reviewed one of his shows and kinda let him have it.

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Things have changed: Bob Dylan, Nobel savage

10/22/2016

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Studs Terkel: Some will say: listen to Bob Dylan, he’s talking street mountain talk now, though he’s a literate man, see.
Bob Dylan: [Laughs] I don’t think I am.
Terkel: How do you answer that
when they say it?
Dylan: I got no answer. If they want to think I’m literate, it’s okay by me.
— Interview, 1963, from And They All Sang

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In a welcome break from election trauma, the usual Trump v. Clinton opining across my social-media feeds has been balanced this week by a different argument: “It’s high time Bob Dylan won the Nobel” v. “It’s a travesty Bob Dylan won the Nobel.”

Even amid my curation of friends and followers — heavily weighted as each set is with fellow folks and folkies in the orbit of the Woody Guthrie Center and that same city's new Bob Dylan Archive — the split has been nearly half and half. Like the presidential polls, such overall ambivalence is surprising, particularly because this particular box of Pandora’s has been wide open for some time. What’s been especially astonishing to me, anyway, is the vehemence with which some fans — of literature, not necessarily of Bob — cling to an outmoded compartmentalization of mediated experience.

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Trump is Bob Roberts. Is Hillary Brickley Paiste?

7/27/2016

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The movie about Trump’s rise to power — his steamrolling of typical political strategies, his wielding of entertainment and emotion over policy and fact, his irascible irresistibility in the face of plodding traditionalism — was made more than 20 years ago. It’s called “Bob Roberts.”
 
It’s a great “mockumentary,” but, like “Idiocracy,” it’s no longer very funny now that real life in America seems to be taking the gag seriously.

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Clarifying questions: RIP Kevin Barnhurst

7/7/2016

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I’ve been trying to define what kind of scholar I am for five years now. My answer remains fluid — a bit more like Silly Putty now, but not yet firm like concrete — perhaps to the dismay of my current adviser. The journey of discovery is a more finely honed process than initially expected. Arriving in grad school, I simply thought I’d be trained to become a scholar — you know, like every other scholar. Of course, I quickly learned that this involved a game of Twister, placing hands and feet on established fields, theoretical perspectives, and myriad schools of thought, as well as playing tug-of-war with my own critical insights, situated knowledges, and bees in various bonnets. Thankfully, my first cohort (at UI-Chicago) happened to be one that landed in front of Kevin Barnhurst for class one, semester one: Philosophy of Communication.


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    this blahg

    I'm THOMAS CONNER, Ph.D. in Communication (Science Studies) and culture journalist.

    I study the cultural histories and media effects of holograms, AR tech, and virtual performance. I was a pop music critic for 20 years.
    I'm a Taoist and a teaist. All of this and more is fair game here.


    &c. &c. &c.


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  • thomasconner
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    • Professional: Resumé
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