Disturbia

Last night, after we saw “Disturbia,” we found a freakishly large, freakishly lime green grasshopper katydid on the roof of our car. Here’s a close-up of the little, er, big guy. I didn’t realize that they came in that size. He was a cool critter, but I was a little, uh, disturbed.

Anyway, the movie was fun. Most of the remakes-for-teen-agers that have been released in the last few years have been really, really bad. You have to go back to “Cruel Intentions” for one that worked. And that one may have worked because it was so, so wrong and so, so campy. But “Disturbia” worked, more or less. And “Rear Window” is one of my favorite movies. Despite the utter sacrilege, I liked the update/rip-off/twist of

  1. setting it in suburbia, high school, and 2007 (instead of New York, early middle-age, and the mid-1950s)
  2. putting the protagonist under house arrest (instead of a cast and a wheelchair)
  3. having a wacky Asian friend (instead a sarcastic, sexless female friend)
  4. using all the modern, though still very limited, technologies for surveillance (instead of one telephoto lens)
  5. having the very cute, very charismatic Shia LaBeouf carry the movies (instead of, ya know, the great Jimmy Stewart)

Neverthess, there were some problems. Obviously. You don’t redo one of the greatest films ever made and get off scott free! (Unless, of course, you’re Tim Burton, and it’s “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” and your version is so, so, so much better, and anyone who thinks the creepy Gene Wilder version is “great” had too much sugar before they saw it. So there.) Yeah, so there were some problems, like

  1. the replacement of Grace Kelly with Sarah Roemer wasn’t quite so great (probably because Roemer only has a career because she looks like a teen-aged Gwyneth)
  2. the replacement of the very creepy Raymond Burr with the pretty creepy David Morse didn’t quite work (possibly because Morse’s hair was so bad)
  3. turning the wife killer into a serial killer made the situation less believable and therefore less scary (and it had “make the movie bloodier!” notes-from-a-studio-exec written all over it)
  4. allowing LaBeouf to be able to fight back instead of being truly trapped made the situation less tense and therefore less scary (and it had “give the thing more action!” notes-from-a-studio-exec written all over it)

Eh. Still, it was fun. And the several dozen teen-aged girls just loved it.

Oh, the previews were pretty good. In fact, one was just plain awesome. I can’t believe I’m saying this about a Michael Bay movie, but I cannot wait to see “Transformers” (which is another Shia LeBeouf film, and he’s been cast in the next Indian Jones film, so I guess he’s having a good year.) I also love the hilarious fanboy discourse about the movie. I love that some of them are refusing to see the movie because the Transformers aren’t going to transform the way the toys did in 1985. Well, if you’re going to go that route, why not demand that the Transformer not be able to transform unless an 8-year-old boy fumbles with its plastic parts for ten minutes. Fanboys can so, so strident.

Clearly, I’ve gone soft. It’s the suburbia. Disturbing, hunh?

(Even my prose has become cliched. Shit.)

Don Tuzin

I don’t know how many anthropologists or UCSD students read this blog, so the name Don Tuzin may not mean much to this blog’s readers. He was the senior member of the Department of Anthropology at UCSD, and he died on Sunday after what sounds like a short and inexplicable illness. I never had the chance to take a class with him, but I had the pleasure of having several long conversations with Don at a few department receptions. He was gregarious and fascinating and kind in those conversations, and he also had the most amazing stories–about drinking Scotch with Margaret Mead in his hut in Papua New Guinea during his field work, about annoying Mary Douglas by choosing to go grad school somewhere besides where she was, about penile bloodletting, which he wrote and lectured a good deal about. (In fact, the whole penile bloodletting thing is so famous around the department that for the grad student picnic last fall, a penile bloodletting cake was made–with a twig stuck in the urethra, as they do in PNG, and strawberry filling doubling as blood.) He was also interested in the whole intersexual issue, which I’m fascinated by, too, and we talked for a while about John/Joan and my experience reporting on ISNA. Anyway, Don was a great guy and a major figure on campus and in Melanesian anthropology, and he’ll be missed. After the jump I’ve posted the press release from UCSD.
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In other news, I’m still working on my thesis

Yes, Glenn was right. I was stuck. Or maybe I am stuck.

As you may recall, I turned in my thesis on January 8. In fact, I may have said that “Our long national nightmare is over” or somesuch. As it turned out, it had only begun. While the hard part was figuring out what the hell I was going to write about and then somehow writing 45 pages about what the hell I was planning to write about, the excruciating part was what followed: revisions. What’s the difference between hard and excruciating? Making a chocolate soufflé is hard, while pouring molten, bubbling chocolate all over your hand is excruciating.

Granted, what I turned in on January 8 sucked. It sucked in a few ways: my argument was implicit, not explicit, and this stuff is supposed to be as obvious as skywriting; the third chapter was so rushed and underwritten that its relevance to the rest of the thesis was not apparent; the introduction and conclusion, which I wrote last and thus were even more rushed and even more underwritten, were both God-awful. (By the way, what does God-awful actually mean? As awful as God? That’s just weird. It should be Devil-awful. Hmm.) But I didn’t really know this until my advisers gave me their comments. I won’t go into my initial feelings about the comments, because when I expressed them to my mother on the phone, she asked, “Can anyone hear you?” I’ll just repeat what someone told me my adviser situation was akin to: “Nancy’s the carrot, and Keith’s the stick.” That pretty much sums it up.

So, after decompressing, thinking, and procrastinating, I went back to the thesis for round two. I made my argument explicit–my argument being that some people use their hybridity agentively–and I made a lot of clarifications and corrections and I expanded that rushed chapter. And I rewrote the introduction so that it seemed a little more like skywriting. And I did some actual fieldwork, interviewing an agentive hybrid, and using that interview to conclude the thesis. Also, the interview proved my thesis. At least, I thought so.

I turned it. And ten days later I got an email that read, “i read your thesis over the weekend and think you made major improvements. congratulations. keith and i still have some concerns, though.” Emphasis mine, as they say. The concerns, as it so happened, was that they didn’t like “agentive hybridity.” At all. Not that it was the title of thesis. Not that it was the point of the thesis. Not that it was… ARGH. They thought that the way I was using agentive hybridity made it sound as if not all hybrids were agentive, when everyone, even the most oppressed, have agency. Of course, I thought it was obvious that 1) I believe that everyone has agency, and 2) I believe some people have more agency than others, and 3) my thesis was explaining how all of this works. But as my Geometry teach Mr. Roll always said, “Don’t assume anything!” To be fair, when Nancy told me this, it didn’t seem to be such a big deal. She’s the carrot, remember? All I needed to do was reframe “agentive hybridity” as “cultural capital.” This means that every hybrid is agentive, but not every hybrid has the knowledge and skills to be socioeconomically successful. The knowledge and skills are “cultural capital.” Some have actual capital, too, but that’s not my point.

So, back to the revisions. Technically, the thesis has been “approved,” meaning the school has a form saying so. But I have to fix it, meaning that I have to go through the thing and remove almost every reference to agency and so on. And do some other stuff, such as put blunt conclusions in the second and third chapters and rejigger the conclusion. All of which, of course, I’d rather pour molten chocolate all over my hand than do. Why? Because I’m sick and tired of my thesis and because I thought I had a neat little idea in agentive hybridity and I wanted to write a thesis that had an original idea. Cultural capital is not new. Pierre Bourdieu came up with it in the 1970s and Philippe Bourgois perfected its application in In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio in 1996. So, instead of doing something new, I just synthesized some old stuff. Yay: This is my job. I’m an academic. This is my life.

I spent five hours at Urban Grind yesterday doing the revisions. I had thought they’d be much easier, and I’d told Nancy that I would have the final revision in her mailbox this morning. Nope. At 7:30 last night, I packed it in without writing a conclusion to the third chapter or fixing the actual conclusion. I just couldn’t do anymore. I wanted a drink, some dinner, and some “30 Rock.” (In fact, 30 Rock and the drink went well together, or at least they did until I laughed so hard while trying to swallow that I spit wine all over myself and the couch. Good thing the couch is red.) This afternoon, I hope I can finish up. I better, because if I don’t bring it to Nancy’s party tonight, I’m going to feel like a bigger loser than I already am.

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