Thomas Conner
  • thomasconner
    • Bio
    • Professional: Resumé
    • Academic: CV
    • Teaching
    • Blog

Phenomonoscopy

Jimmy LaFave: An Okie in a whole other country

5/26/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
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.


Read More
0 Comments

America and her kind: Isherwood and fascism

1/29/2017

1 Comment

 
Picture

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.

Read More
1 Comment

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

12/22/2016

0 Comments

 
Picture
Picture
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.)

Read More
0 Comments

Leon Russell: How many days...?

11/13/2016

1 Comment

 
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.

Read More
1 Comment

Things have changed: Bob Dylan, Nobel savage

10/22/2016

0 Comments

 

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

Picture
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.

Read More
0 Comments

Trump is Bob Roberts. Is Hillary Brickley Paiste?

7/27/2016

1 Comment

 
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.

Read More
1 Comment

Clarifying questions: RIP Kevin Barnhurst

7/7/2016

0 Comments

 
Picture
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.


Read More
0 Comments

The light and dark of 'Noon at Dusk'

5/23/2016

0 Comments

 
Picture
The Shadow, a vigilante crime fighter in an eponymous early 20th-century radio drama, foiled evildoers by using his supernatural power to cloud others’ minds to mask his own physical and psychological presence. Each program began with the narrator’s tagline: “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!”
 
The characters in “Noon at Dusk” — a new chamber opera by composer Stephen Lewis and librettist Yi Hong Sim (a colleague of mine at UCSD), recently premiered at UC-San Diego’s Conrad Prebys Music Center Experimental Theater — possess little criminal or evil intent, yet they likewise struggle against shadows and cloudy judgment. Across an inventive narrative arc and shot through with unsettling music, two couples face shadows of themselves and must consider precisely what lurks within their own hearts.


Read More
0 Comments

Woody Guthrie: Bound for holograms?

5/3/2016

0 Comments

 
Picture
My two most productive research interests seem quite different. My current dissertation project investigates the cultural histories and spatial embodiment of holograms and hologram simulations. In my copious free time (cough, sputter), I also maintain a course of study that began well before my grad-school adventure; as a journalist, both in Tulsa, Okla., and at the Chicago Sun-Times, I wrote a great deal about folksinger Woody Guthrie and the revival of his legacy within his home state, and now as a scholar I continue examining the ol' cuss and his peculiar communication strategies. One interest is old, analog, and sepia-toned; the other is shiny, digital, and futuristic.

But — as I explained in my presentation this weekend at the Woody Guthrie Symposium, hosted jointly by The University of Tulsa and the Woody Guthrie Center — there's actually a bit of Venn-diagram shade between the two. What interests me about these emerging "hologram" technologies, especially uses of the tech in pop-music performance contexts, is how the digitally projected characters achieve some semblance of believability, how their creators manage to craft a successful performing persona, and whether these simulations can claim something like Benjamin's "aura" or even Bazin's "fingerprint." This is not far removed, I'd say, from the process human performers go through in crafting their own performing personas — which is what I claim Woody did during his two years on L.A. radio beginning in 1937, as a direct result of his encounter with the new mass medium and its delayed feedback channels. Such is the basis of my paper on the subject, and my talk this weekend.

No one, to my knowledge, yet has proposed that Woody be among the legions of dead musicians resurrected in hologram form. This sounds like both a terrific idea (he'd probably love it) and a dreadful idea. Who knows?


Read More
0 Comments

Performance chapter in 'Music & Virtuality'

2/28/2016

0 Comments

 
Picture
This month saw publication of The Oxford Handbook of Music & Virtuality, containing my chapter, "Hatsune Miku, 2.0Pac and Beyond: Rewinding and Fast-forwarding the Virtual Pop Star."

In it, I survey a history of virtuality in pop music stars, from the Chipmunks and the Archies up to Gorillaz and Dethklok — many of the non-corporeal, animated characters that presaged current virtual pop stars like Hastune Miku and the Tupac resurrection.




Read More
0 Comments
<<Previous
Forward>>
    Picture

    this blahg

    I'm THOMAS CONNER, communication researcher and culture journalist.

    I study the cultural histories and media effects of holograms, AR tech, and virtual performance, usually in their relationship to how humans negotiate mortality. 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.


    Archives

    November 2020
    July 2019
    May 2019
    January 2019
    May 2018
    February 2018
    October 2017
    September 2017
    July 2017
    May 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    July 2016
    May 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    March 2015
    January 2015
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013

    Categories

    All
    Academia
    Books
    California
    Communication
    Conferences
    Hatsune Miku
    Movies
    Music: Background
    Music: Foreground
    Obits
    Oklahoma
    Science Studies
    Technology
    Television
    Theory: Comm
    Virtual Performance
    Woody Guthrie

    RSS Feed

Home

Bio

Professional

Academic

Blog

mine, all mine © 2000-2019
  • thomasconner
    • Bio
    • Professional: Resumé
    • Academic: CV
    • Teaching
    • Blog