Tama Leaver dot Net

I’m on leave, and Emily and I are away, until August 24th. More to the point, we’re going to be completely without internet connectivity (partially by choice, more by circumstance), so I’m going to be completely off the grid until we get back to Perth. So, please don’t take offence if emails go unanswered or moderated comments don’t appear in the meantime … I’ll get to most stuff within a couple of days after August 24th. Until then, enjoy this little picture I took of a little memento from our honeymoon …

The image shows a few rocks and pebbles that made their way from a park in Venice to our bedroom in Perth!

Yesterday I was interviewed by Laura Miller on RTR FM’s radio programme ‘Morning Magazine’. Laura and I spoke about about MySpace, Facebook, Australian politican’s using social software, and the recent interest in these spaces in terms of ‘class’ on the back of danah boyd’s work. For the two or three people in the world who would be interested in hearing me talk about these things, you can listed to an mp3 recording of the interview (which clocks in at just under 10 minutes) here.

Incidentally, Laura completed her Communication Studies degree at UWA last year and was part of a team who put together the wonderful comic exploration of the role of the Peacock’s at UWA and that video is viewable here (fans of Laura’s may want to focus around 2:18 in, which features a 1970s Laura cameo!).

Chuck tagged me a few days ago with the Eight Things meme; although I’m generally fairly anti-meme, I’ve been enjoying a bit of back and forth with Chuck in his blog and on del.icio.us, so figured I could add one more procrastination on a writing day.  Apparently, I have to start with rules … 

Rules:
1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged write their own blog post about their eight things and include these rules.
4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged and that they should read your blog.

Eight Facts about Me:

1. When I was in Primary School I won a Lego building competition; this is, without a doubt, my fondest memory of the first 7 years of education.

2. Apart from The Goonies, the film that rattled around my brain the most when I was a kid was called Explorers.  I was fascinated how three boys could essentially make a spacecraft out of everyday junk (and a little piece of alien technology).  In retrospect, this example of making something amazing from the bits and pieces others leave lying around resonates with some of the way I view the internet and participatory culture (and until I looked it up on IMDb to link to for this post, I hadn’t realised River Phoenix was one of the kids).

3. When I was twelve years old I joined Perth’s Doctor Who fan club, The West Lodge, which was my first proper immersion into fandom; I attend the local science-fiction convention in the following year (Swancon 14) but found the whole thing rather intimidating and didn’t get back to Swancon until  seven years later when Neil Gaiman visited Perth as GoH in 1996.

4. I have re-read all six of Frank Herbert’s Dune books as a series at least twenty times since I was 14; I’ve been relatively unimpressed by the prequel novels in the past few years.

5. My sister and I both have PhDs and are the first members of our family to ever attend university at all.  My sister is eighteen months younger, started her thesis a year after I did, but we both were officially given our PhDs at the same graduation ceremony.

6. Emily and I currently live less than 14 metres from Subiaco Oval, which is where Australian Rules Football attracts 40-45,000 people most weekends.  Despite AFL being Australia’s national winter sport, I’ve never been to a Football game.

7. Until last Saturday I had never test-driven a car, having bought my only owned vehicle to date from my parents.  On Saturday I test-drove a Prius which Emily and I are seriously considering buying despite the fact it will take us several years to pay it off.

8. In the proposal for my PhD thesis in 2000, the final chapter was supposed to look at the use of computer-generated imagery and special effects in nature documentaries as a case study of artificial culture where natural and technological meaning merged together.  (It never got written because after that proposal both September 11 2001 and the Spider-Man films happened, and I used the latter to interrogate the cultural impact of the former.)

You’re It! I now tag the following people (hoping at least a few will play along): Jill Walker Rettberg (just getting used to writing that double barrel surname!), Christy Dena, David Silver, Nancy Baym (because fandom has a meme for a heart!), Mia Consalvo (who can sadly not follow the meme and call it ‘cheating‘), Jean Burgess, Kate Raynes-Goldie and Kevin Lim (who lives for these sort of connections!).

On our honeymoon last month, Emily and I were lucky enough to be in Venice during the heart of the 2007 Venice Biennale, one of the world’s most exciting and long-running art festivals. We saw many amazing installations and exhibitions and had a fabulous time exploring all sorts of art, as well as taking some (I think) cool photos, but I’ve found it hard to find the time to add the titles, tags and metadata to a full Flickr set. However, I’ve finally finished labeling the photos, so I encourage you to take a wonder through our captured fragments of the 2007 Biennale.

There were a number of highlights (and I’ll write about one more in a future post), but I wanted to mention a few things that really stood out. I thought Patrick Mimran’s installations and photography were amazing. His main show was an ironic set of photographs called ‘New York Parkings’ which looks at New York Car Parks, but Mimran also had an installation in Venice where a number of the rubbish bins were covered in “No Art Inside” billboards!

Also outstanding was the Taiwanese ‘Atopia’ pavilion which combined an interesting take on manga and comic-book art with some neon installations created out of mechanical parts and ubiquitous objects to really create an interesting take on the life of everyday objects.

Wearing my academic hat, I have to say Sophie Calle’s ‘Take Care of Yourself’ exhibition in the French Pavilion was outstanding. Calle took an email she received from a lover ending the relationship and asked 107 women to interpret the email for her, with responses ranging from photographs and videos to responses from academics attacking grammar and psychoanalysts delving into the emailer’s inner psyche. I wish instead of having undergraduate lectures on multiple interpretations of a text we could just get students to immerse themselves in Calle’s work for an hour … I suspect they’d learn a lot more!

There were lots of other interesting exhibits, but one that really spoke to me (so much so I forgot to take any pictures) was the Aniwaniwa installation from New Zealand, which combined Maori dreaming with images of the 1900 hydroelectric dams to show the moment(s) when water became electricity!

Of course, there’s were one or two (!) other bits of art to be found in Florence and Italy, but for the rebellious amongst you, check out a glimpse of the healthy street-art scene from these two magnificent cities.

Tags: Art, Florence, Italy, Venice

The second half of 2007 hit with something of a bang today.  The combination of extreme winds and the proximity of our place to Subiaco Oval suddenly led to the rather loud, dramatic and quite dangerous appearance of the massive advertising signs from Subi Oval hitting out (glass) back door and coming to rest in our back yard:

While fascinating on some level, these huge signs had to travel over the top of the oval (they’re supposedly fixed to the stands) and fly probably 50 metres in the air before spinning down into our place.  It’s incredibly lucky that it was pouring with rain, too, because it anyone was outside, being hit by one of these could have caused some very serious injuries. 

When the winds settled a little, Emily headed out the front door and discovered a whole lot more of these hoardings lying on our road and in the drive-way, so now we have four massive advertising banners on centimetre-think cardboard sitting soggily in our little backyard:

We now have part of an SGIO sign, a National Australian bank advertisement and something that has NTER in its lettering.  I wonder when Subiaco Oval will be knocking on our door looking for them?  Maybe they’ll offer to replant the bits of the garden that were sheered in half when the sign flew in from the sky?!

(Given that these signs cost advertisers anywhere from $5000 to $60,000 dollars each to display, I suspect someone might want them back!)

Since I’ve just signed off on editors’ proofs for my chapter in the forthcoming Cylons in America edited collection, I thought I’d paste this little advertisement from Continuum’s 2007 Pop Culture catalogue to remind myself (and anyone else interested) that it should, in fact, be out before the end of the year …

[Click image to enlarge.]

This is my first book chapter (as opposed to a journal article, of which there are a few) and I’m quite excited to see the collection in print in the near future!

Update (15 Sept 07): The publication date for this collection has now been confirmed as January 31 2008 (for the US) and Cylons in America: Critical Studies of Battlestar Galactica is available for pre-order from Amazon.

Update 2 (26 November 07): It looks like the US version will now get a December 10th release! Check out the cover:

Update 3 (7 Dec 07): As a few people have asked about this book, I thought I’d add the Table of Contents to this post, so you can get a sense of what’s under the cover:

“I see the patterns”: Battlestar Galactica and the Things That Matter - C. W. Marshall and Tiffany Potter

I. Life in the Fleet, American Life

1. (Re)Framing Fear: Equipment for Living in a Post-9/11 World” - Brian L. Ott
2. Torture, Terrorism, and Other Aspects of Human Nature - Erika Johnson-Lewis
3. Alienation and the Limits of the Utopian Impulse - Carl Silvio and Elizabeth Johnston
4. The Cain Mutiny: Reflecting the Faces of Military Leadership in a Time of Fear - Rikk Mulligan
5. Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know? Negotiating Stereotypes of Science - Lorna Jowett
6. “Pyramid, Boxing, and Sex” - Kevin Wetmore

II. Cylon/Human Interface

7. The Cylons, the Singularity, and God - C.W. Marshall and Matthew Wheeland
8. Sharon’s Choice: The Role of Decision in the Self-Constitution of Personhood - Robert Moore
9. Uncanny Cylons: Resurrection and Bodies of Horror - Alison Peirse
10. “Humanity’s Children”: Constructing and Confronting the Cylons - Tama Leaver
11. Hybridity’s End - Matthew Gumpert
12. Erasing Difference: The Cylons as Racial Other - Christopher Deis

III. Form and Context in 21^st-Century Television

13. When Balance Goes Bad: How Battlestar Galactica Says Nothing” - Chris Dzialo
14. “This Might be Hard for You to Watch”: Salvage Humanity in “Final Cut” - Kevin McNeilly
15. “Long Live Stardoe!”: Can a Female Starbuck Survive? - Carla Kungl
16. Authorized Resistance: Is Fan Production Frakked? - Suzanne Scott
17. Of Duduks and Dylan: Negotiating the Aural Space - Eftychia Papanikolaou
18. “All this has happened before”: Repetition, Re-imagination, and Eternal Return - Jim Casey

While I was away, the health, welfare and abuse issues in some indigenous Australian communites has flared into the political spotlight.  The issues aren’t new, but several new reports and issues have focused the debate markedly.  That said, I was still quite suprised to hear Australia Prime Minister John Howard comparing these issues to the 2005 Katrina disaster in New Orleans:

“Many Australians, myself included, looked aghast at the failure of the American federal system of government to cope adequately with hurricane Katrina and the human misery and lawlessness that engulfed New Orleans in 2005,” he said in a speech to the Sydney Institute last night. We should have been more humble. We have our Katrina here and now. That it has unfolded more slowly and absent the hand of God should make us humbler still.”

The religious tones here seem particularly unhelpful, and casting this as Australia’s Katrina makes light of the fact that these issues are a systemtic issue which have been around for some time.  Sending in the troops (literally) may not be the best approach for communities which still have very real memories of children being forcibly removed from families a generation earlier.  That said, change has to happen, and I tend to agree here with Democrat Senator Andrew Bartlett:

There has been a fair degree of cynicism amongst many of the responses to the government’s plan, including from many Indigenous Australians. Given the past history of many grand government announcements which have not been followed up with adequate resourcing or implementation once the headlines have died down, there is every reason for people to be cynical. However, that should not be a reason to try to tear this plan down, it should be a reason to keep the focus on it, to do everything possible to translate all the current waves of rhetorical flourishes into real and lasting positive change.

For your own reading, please …

[X] Read The Northern Terrtitory Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse and the many, many problems it describes (or, at least, look at the Foreward);

[X] See North Queensland Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson being interviewed last week on the 7.30 report about some of the strategies being implemented (which were recommended in a report he chaired);

[X] But also keep in mind that the timing of this is political since former WA premeir Geoff Gallup called this issue a “national disaster” in 2002 and called for broad-scale national and state-level action in that year (”There needs to be a national approach to this, it’s not just a Western Australian issue”). None happened until a closely run Federal election was looming.  (That’s a reason to try and ensure that the energy galvanised here is directed in a sustained way, not a short-burst political way.  And, to be honest, even gettings things right here doesn’t make up for all the years that the Howard goverment has done nothing, despite the issues being clear as day.)

Emily and I are back from our honeymoon; Florence and Venice were brilliant, from the Uffizi to the Venice Biennale we had a fantastic time and were quite sad to have to head home (to work)! I haven’t processed them yet, but there will be a lot of pictures heading to Flickr in the near future, thanks in part to the purchase of a new Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi on the way out of Perth. I’ll post links when the photos start to emerge.

Also while I was away, my first In Media Res post went up, entitled “The Haunting of Spiders, Cities and DVDs” which looks at the (in)famous pre-September 11 (2001) trailer for Spider-Man which featured the Twin Towers and was pulled after the 911 attacks. If you’ve got a minute, please take a look (it’s only 300 words and a 2-minute trailer!) and comments are most welcome.

I’m catching up on a lot of material in Google Reader from all my blogs, so tomorrow’s del.icio.us digest should be an impressive one!

Incidentally, the line “Home again, home again, jiggity jig” is from Blade Runner, which is 25 years old this month and has a rather impressive looking 5-disc DVD version, re-cut once more, just on the horizon!

Ciao!

Visitors to this blog may have noticed many things broken or not got anything but a 404 for the last 12 hours. My apologies - most is now fixed, but let me explain. Last night, about 5 minutes before I went to bed, I got this email:

from: “support@secureserver.net” <support@secureserver.net>
subject: Update [Incident ID: 2110748] - Information Regarding Your Account for tamaleaver.net

Support Staff Response

Dear Sir/Madam,
It has come to our attention that your tamaleaver.net hosting account is running a vulnerable version of wordpress. This has caused an attacker to upload malicious content to your hosting account. We have removed the malicious content and have disabled the vulnerable script.
To prevent further attacks, we request that you update your version of wordpress as soon as possible. We appreciate your cooperation in this matter.
Please let us know if we can be of further assistance.
Regards,
Advanced Hosting Support

I was a little surprised since I was running 2.1.3 which, to the best of my knowledge, was fine (and I was not running the buggy 2.1.1). However, I figured I’d check in the morning what had been deleted - I presumed a script that wasn’t part of the standard Wordpress world, so that was fine. However, to my horror this morning when I checked, I found that “support” (and I use the term very broadly) had done at least two things: deleted my entire wp-admin directory, and deleted a number of image files (the reason for which I can’t even begin to fathom). As a result, this blog has been rather stuffed for the last 12 hours. Since it was broken anyway, I’ve now upgraded to Wordpress 2.2 and got almost everything back and running. However, a month’s worth of uploaded images were deleted, and I’ve not backed up since the end of April, so they can’t be recovered (thus, if you find a blog post with an image missing … primarily from posts in May 2007, this is why; I’ll try and replace them at a later stage.)

So, sorry for the downtime, if I had any control over it I’d promise it wouldn’t happen again! That said, the support folk at secureserver (whom GoDaddy use) will be getting a rather frank email about the over-deletion of my files, and, more to the point, a request to exactly what they think happened since I’ve seen no evidence myself of any malicious content.

In a fit of silliness, I find myself using the LOL CATS builder for terrible, terrible, theorist humour …

Henry Jenkins…

Jean Baudrillard …

Where did this insanity come from? I blame Jean (Burgess, not Baudrillard!). (More here.)

Update: Henry Jenkins linked to the LOL Theorist mashups of himself!