The Cowl - Feb 13, 2003 - Valentine\u27s Day Special Issue

The Cowl - student newspaper of Providence College. February 13, 2003 - Valentine\u27s Day Special Issue. 8 pages

Eileen Chang and cinema

The death of Eileen Chang on September 8, 1995 in Los Angeles made headlines in all the Chinese newspapers. In the Chinese-speaking areas of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mainland China, a veritable cult of mystique has been built around her by both public media and the large number of her fans (who called themselves Chang-mi or Chang-fans”). However, in the last twenty-three years of her life Chang lived quietly and incognito in Los Angeles, shunning all social contact and escaping publicity by constantly changing her residences in numerous hotels, motels, and small apartment houses until her death in an obscure apartment building in the Westwood section of Los Angeles. This “mystery” of her last years adds only more glamour to her legend: she was like a retired movie star past her prime, like Greta Garbo

"Theories are made only to die in the war of time": Guy Debord & the Situationist International as Strategic Thinkers

The Situationist International has been one of the main reference points during the past forty more years within social movement organizing, cultural studies, social theory, and philosophy concerned with the development of the city. While the SI have been understood in many ways, as inheritors as elaborators of a unorthodox Marxist politics drawing heavily from the history of the avant-garde, relatively little attention has been paid to the specifically strategic dimension of their thought and practice. This is surprising, particular in Debord?s case, given how much his work also draws from the history of military strategy. This paper particular will examine the strategic aspects of Debord and the SI?s thought and politics and how they rethinking the nature of strategy through collective forms of aesthetic-political practice

Surely fades away: Polaroid photography and the contradictions of cultural value

Photography has always had a precarious relation to cultural value: as Walter Benjamin put it, those who argued for photography as an art were bringing it to a tribunal it was in the process of overthrowing. This article examines the case of Polaroid, a company and technology that, after Kodak and prior to digital, contributed most to the mass- amateurization of photography, and therefore, one might expect, to its cultural devaluation. It considers the specific properties of the technology, the often skeptical reception Polaroid cameras and film received from the professional photographic press, and Polaroid’s own strategies of self-presentation, and finds that in each case a contradictory picture emerges. Like fast food, the Polaroid image is defined by its speed of appearance – the proximity of its production and consumption – and is accordingly devalued; and yet at the same time it produces a single, unique print. The professional photographic press, self- appointed arbiters of photographic value, were often rapturous about the technical breakthroughs achieved by Polaroid, but dismissive of the potential non-amateur applications and anxious about the implications for the ‘expert’ photographer of a camera that replaced the expert’s functions. For obvious marketing reasons, Polaroid itself was always keen to emphasize what the experts scorned in its products (simplicity of operation), and yet, equally, consistently positioned itself at the ‘‘luxury’’ end of the camera market and carried out an ambitious cultural program that emphasized the ‘‘aesthetic’’ potential of Polaroid photography. The article concludes that this highly ambivalent status of Polaroid technology in relation to cultural value means that it shares basic features with kitsch, a fact that has been exploited by, among others, William Wegman, and has been amplified by the current decline and imminent disappearance of Polaroid photograph

Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books 56 (09) 2003

published or submitted for publicatio

The Cowl - v. 70 - n. 4 - Sept 22, 2005

The Cowl - student newspaper of Providence College. Volume 70 - Number 4 - September 22, 2005. 24 pages