I've forbidden talk about work here, but I had to explain a couple of videos that are on my YouTube account, since ST subscribes to my videos and if anyone's looking they must be mighty confusing. They're temporary--I put them there for convenience sake, since colleagues scattered around the country are working on a project in which they will eventually be included.
Some of my colleagues have been collaborating in an annual parody of conference panels at the National Communication Association conference. The panel theme is repetition, and in the main that alludes to the notion that many scholars, whether pressured to produce or incapable of anything new, tend to repeat the same ideas over and over ("same s&*t, different conference"). But more than that it's a satire of manners of panels: invariably 3-4 people sit at a long table in a room and read papers to the audience, often with little effort or imagination invested in how they are presented or for that matter received. This can be deathly. There is always a pitcher of water, and lately everyone has a dang laptop which further cuts them off from the audience. Part of each of the papers includes a section of "The Emperor's New Clothes," which points to, of course, how we all just tend to accept the appearance that this is all scholarly and productive. The response, given by one of my LSU colleagues, is one of the funniest parodies I've ever witnessed, in a reflexive "this is the part of the panel where I say this" kind of way. His main criticism is that the papers have "too many words" so he makes haiku out of them, stuff like that. It's totally irresponsive to the papers--and alas, too many so-called responses are just like that. Not to put the whole conference panel enterprise down--certainly we aim to do better--but then, like all comedy, this panel's rhetoric is essentially negational in service of correcting a problem. So ultimately, it may be generative. One hopes. (Sometimes I feel like we've gone too far...but then, I'm a nice kid from Chicago.)
Essential to the parody is that the panel be repeated. This year will be its fifth iteration. In 2004 I videoed the panel, which led to creating strange little "remix" videos each year. My own brand of repetition plays out there, obviously, by making the panelists jerk back and forth and "scratch" movements. The Red Hot Chili Peppers song comes directly from one of the papers, which talks (in scatological terms) about how some scholars horde all their best stuff, but encourages them to "give it away, give it away, give it away now"--and of course the song is repletely repetitious. Most interesting to me is the "butter box effect" (my tongue is firmly in my cheek here) where we have video from one year playing on a screen within the next year's video, and inside the first video there's video from the prior year, and so on.
It makes sense when we do it at the conference. Honest. Heres the commentary version. It's supposed to be a parody of horrid pretentious DVD commentary.
This year is the fifth anniversary so we decided to do a retrospective....
Yeah, I know.
Oh, what the heck, one more.
That's the voice of my favorite podcaster, from Catalogue of Ships, by the by.
