VLVL TV Parody or a Satire

[jbor]

on 8/1/04 3:32 AM, Terrance wrote:

> My title was inspired b y that of Richard Shusterman's essay, "The Fine
> Art of Rap" (Shusterman 1991). There is much that could be said about
> the relations between the practice of channel-switching ("zapping) and
> "sampling" in rap music; unfortunately, it will have to be said
> elsewhere. 

I also think there is an affinity between literary intertextualism
(allusions, references, parodies and the like which are *intentional* on the
author's part) and "sampling" in rap music. Channel-surfing (without a tv
guide) brings a certain randomness to the equation, though deliberate
channel-switching from one program to another might fall into the same
category. I think the issue of intentionality is the key here.

> 
> Dancing About Architecture : Postmodernism  and Irish Popular Music  by
> Stephen Ryan
> http://www.icr.dit.ie/volume7/articles/article02.html
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> 
>> I also had the impression that Vato & Blood were somehow implicated in Ortho
>> Bob being "damaged in Vietnam" (174.20, 179.5-6).
> 
> In the paragraphs toward the end of his essay, titled Death and
> television, McHale talks about Ortho Bob.
> 
> First McHale  discusses Prairie's quest via other media ...  The
> computer monitor at the Sister's Retreat, film at Ditzah's house,
> noting that Prairie's viewing are "mediumistic" ones, that is, it's  as
> if Prairie is attempting to contact her mother's spirit or ghost through
> the apparatus of the computer screen and film projector. Prairie thinks
> about all this in gothic term, exploring the gothic house where her
> Mother's ghost leads her into rooms. Her mother, in these imaginings, is
> dead only different. Kinda like a Thanatoid.
> 
> At some point Prairie understood that the person behind the camera most
> of the time was her Mother, and that if she kept her mind empty she
> could absorb, conditionally become,
> Frenesi, share her eyes, feel, when the frame shook with fatigue or fear
> or nausea, Frenesi's whole body there, as much as her mind choosing the
> frame, her will to go out there, load the role, get the shot. Prairie
> floated, ghostly light of head, as if Frenesi were dead but in a special
> way, a minimum security arrangement, where limited visits, mediated by
> projector and screen, were possible. As if somehow, next reel or the one
> after, the girl would find a way, some way, to speak to her....  VL199
> 
> Dead but in a special way: mediated death.
> 
> The Thanatoids of VL, McHale explains, occupy the excluded middle ground
> between the one and the zero of life and death.
> 
> There seems to be little interest in why and how  VL is as saturated
> with Work as it is with TV, and this exaplins why, for example, critical
> comments on the  passage above ignore the prison meatphor.

I've been one of the harshest critics of your "VL is about work" thesis,
mainly because you never quite seem to communicate what you mean by it, or
how or why this actually "works" in, or as a way of responding to, the text.
The above is an example: I'm not sure how the prison imagery, which is
definitely there, and which seems to me to relate to the degree of access
Prairie feels she has to her mother at this point, has to do with "work".

best