Goblin's interpretation

[Oleg Kireev]

GOBLIN'S INTERPRETATION
How Russian cyberfolklore beats Hollywood crap



When talking about the partisan guerilla against Frenchmen in "War and Peace" Leo 
Tolstoy used the expression "a cudgel
of people's war". He used it within a long metaphor describing the all-European 
Napoleon's expansion: according to Tolstoy,
the European countries have been fighting Napoleon delicately and elegantly, like an 
aristocrate duellant who fights uses
a sword and when loosing confesses his failure by offering a sword to a triumphant by 
handle. On the contrary, Russian
people - as Tolstoy states - did throw the elegant sword away and started to beat 
Napoleon with a cudgel until he gave up.
That "cudgel of people's war" was partisan guerilla.

Now we have an another kind of a "cudgel of people's war" in the cyberspace.

It's well-known how J.R.R.Tolkien's virtual reality have affected behaviour and 
semiotics. From role games to artificial
languages, it gave birth to a special kind of social constructing, of a retro-oriented 
mythological utopianism. And I can
hardly believe that there was any better ground for that than in Russia. Elves and 
hobbits exist in every tiny Russian
town, their slang is being used even in newspapers, and tolkienists' sites flood 
Runet. I remember my parents reading
Tolkien's books to me in childhood from samizdat translations.

Apparently, for Russian tolkienists an appearance of Peter Jackson's "The Lord of the 
Rings" was a personal abuse. Also
for those who like Tolkien though are not involved into any hobbitism, it was a 
disgusting forgery. Comparing this
bad-taste, false, melodramatic and 3D-mastered new Hollywood "serial thriller" to an 
epic dream of our childhood is
unbearable. Can Hollywood manufactured stuff appropriate this part of our identity? 
Russian cyberfolklore says "no".

Just about a month after the first Jackson's movie release the unlisensed copies with 
an alternative translation have
appeared. The translation was authorized as "Goblin's" and became incredibly popular 
within the shortest time. With the
continuation with the second part, it's popularity grew many times bigger. Tolkien's 
plot is so familiar to everyone
here and the situations are so recognizable that the Goblin's translation had soon to 
replace the traditional Russian
anecdote in its folklore function.

Frodo has name "Fyodor Mikhailovich". Boromir and Faramir are called "Baralgin" and 
"Efferalgan" (medicine drugs).
Aragorn is called "Agronom", Gimli - "Givi" (speaks with Georgian accent). Heroes talk 
with the use of recognizable
expressions from films and books which are well-known, but sometimes "Goblin" wittily 
plays with broader references.
When elves' king talks to his daughter (casting Live Tyler) she argues him "You aren't 
my father you agent Smith. My
father's "Aerosmith". When Gorlum "divides" into the "good" and "evil" parts (one of 
the most cheap and pretentious
tricks of the movie) then the "dramatic" conversation between his divided egos is 
performed as a quarrel between the
Russian and the Ukrainian: "But our "Spartak" will beat your "Dynamo" by any means... 
- What???" With Gorlum it's one
of the most brilliant lines in the whole translation. His name is "Golyi" ("Naked"). 
He says when angry: "Do you know
whom I was before the revolution? I was an intelligentsia!!" And when he takes his 
final decision to betray Frodo he
says: "Am I a trembling creature or do I have right?" (a Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov 
decisive argument to commit a murder).

As I remember, Situationist International had once done a similar thing. "Can 
dialectics break bricks?" is a low-quality
Hong Kong action movie where original replics are replaced by the Marxist/Situationist 
discussions. That creates a comic
effect. It's also an effect of Verfremdung or Ostranenie. But in a case of a fresh, 
long-awaited and so intimately
desired pop entertainment Goblin had targeted an even more sensitive object. Really, 
this anonymous but nation-wide
scepsis, this public disrespect expressed in the common support of his interpretation 
can be treated as a "a cudgel of
people's war" against Hollywood patterns expansion taking place in the cybersphere. 
For me, this interpretation is also
a "tactical media", low-budget and parasiting on a spectacle machine.

Now Goblin's "Lord of the Rings" is being distributed on DVDs. It's jokes and 
expressions are being quoted everywhere
and told instead of the anecdotes (which are in a relative decay, after the 90s great 
rise of anecdotes about Yeltsin
and "new Russian riches"). A big goal is also that they're being distributed 
unlisensed, since true folklore cannot be
patented, copyrighted and lisensed. When xpecting the X-mas release of the third & 
final Jackson's movie, we wait even
more how Goblin will do it, with his keen and modest sense of humour.



Oleg Kireev

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Re: WSJ: Can Copyright Be Saved?

[Carl Guderian]

Wired would have loved this: Say Goodbye to Write-Once, Read Many Media

Had e-books been allowed to flower as a technology instead of being
cruelly cut down by market apathy, they might have gone this way, like
William Gibson's "Agrippa: The Book of the Dead," a limited-edition e-book
that could only be played once. It was a technology only an art dealer
could love, but my Japanese virtual popstar girlfriend and I agree Gibson
was on to something, so don't write it off yet.

But why stop with electronic media such as CDs, DVDs, and (remaining)
e-books? Vinyl junkies can benefit from the grand pay-per-view scheme too,
with new smart turntables that acoustically "fingerprint" records and
refuse to play them more than once unless paid; it's a home jukebox with a
direct line to the RIAA and marketers. You could even devote memory to
push technology and your turntable would download radio-style commercials
and run them into your stereo.

Books present more of a problem, but maybe Homeland Security, during
Bush's second term of course, can hire firemen like in Fahrenheit 451.
Books only cause trouble and take up way too much space anyway. They're
only holding us back.

Sorry about the tone, but I'm sick of businesses that invoke the free
market when someone derides a corporate strategy, then invoke the
government when the free market rejects it as well. Ramming it down our
collective throats isn't marketing, it's megalomania (see "Tails, dogs
wagging").

Sometimes people want to have stuff and other times they only want to use
it; dictating when they can do either (for free or not) is a stupid idea,
no matter how many interested people, like stockholders, believe in it.

Carl

I actually do like william Gibson's later novels

Heiko Recktenwald wrote:
> 
> Well, to correct myself, things are complicated ;-)
> As much as I hate DRM, yesterday, I saw something in the german "Bild
> Zeitung", well, thats what many people read, an interesting piece of shit
> or literature, something to read, food for the eyes, not really a
> newspaper, something else, and they announced a pay per view solution of
> cinema, developped by german telecom. "Why not?" I asked myself. There is
> no privat copying possible, but if you go into a cinema, you would not copy
> the movie too. You have no right to do so too.

<...>


-- 
Games are very educational. Scrabble teaches us vocabulary, Monopoly 
teaches us cash-flow management, and D&D teaches us to loot the bodies. 
-- Steve Jackson


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Cunningham, "Re-thinking Objectivity" (CJR)

[Soenke Zehle]

A low-brow piece on the US media, for a change. Reading a bunch of essays
on 'interventionist' media and the idea of a 'peace' journalism (not a new
idea, but part of the current trend toward something like 'best practice'
international human rights journalism - witness a tremendous proliferation
of manuals on the topic that are now filtering into Iraq, Afghanistan, and
similarly godless places, also, for kicks, dial Internews at
 for more info on who mapped post-war Iraq
media policy months before the war officially commenced), I also came
across the CRJ piece.

Not that remarkable, but I found two of C's observations interesting
(apart from his affirmation of the general sense of meekness vis-a-vis
what Jake Lynch et al call the 'Official Sources Industry' that appears to
be part of the mainstream-journalistic ethos): the insistence that there
is a US-Euro 'media ethos' divide (investigation/objectivity vs 'blind
partisanship') and the comment that "A number of people interviewed for
this story said that the lack of socioeconomic diversity in the newsroom
is one of American journalism's biggest blind spots. Most newsroom
diversity efforts, though, focus on ethnic, racial, and gender minorities,
which can often mean people with different skin color but largely the same
middle-class background and aspirations". It's 2003, and someone actually
noticed that there are very few poor people in the media. This is good,
no? Any conclusions?

sz

Cunningham, Brent. "Re-thinking Objectivity." Columbia Journalism Review
(July/Aug 2003). 

In his March 6 press conference, in which he laid out his reasons for the
coming war, President Bush mentioned al Qaeda or the attacks of September
11 fourteen times in fifty-two minutes. No one challenged him on it,
despite the fact that the CIA had questioned the Iraq-al Qaeda connection,
and that there has never been solid evidence marshaled to support the idea
that Iraq was involved in the attacks of 9/11.

When Bush proposed his $726 billion tax cut in January, his sales pitch on
the plan's centerpiece - undoing the "double-taxation" on dividend
earnings - was that "It's unfair to tax money twice." In the next two
months, the tax plan was picked over in hundreds of articles and
broadcasts, yet a Nexis database search turned up few news stories -
notably, one by Donald Barlett and James Steele in Time on January 27, and
another by Daniel Altman in the business section of The New York Times on
January 21 - that explained in detail what was misleading about the
president's pitch: that in fact there is plenty of income that is doubly,
triply, or even quadruply taxed, and that those other taxes affect many
more people than the sliver who would benefit from the dividend tax cut.

Before the fighting started in Iraq, in the dozens of articles and
broadcasts that addressed the potential aftermath of a war, much was
written and said about the maneuverings of the Iraqi exile community and
the shape of a postwar government, about cost and duration and troop
numbers. Important subjects all. But few of those stories, dating from
late last summer, delved deeply into the numerous and plausible
complications of the aftermath. That all changed on February 26, when
President Bush spoke grandly of making Iraq a model for retooling the
entire Middle East. After Bush's speech "aftermath" articles began to flow
like the waters of the Tigris - including cover stories in Time and The
New York Times Magazine - culminating in The Wall Street Journal's
page-one story on March 17, just days before the first cruise missiles
rained down on Baghdad, that revealed how the administration planned to
hand the multibillion-dollar job of rebuilding Iraq to U.S. corporations.
It was as if the subject of the war's aftermath was more or less off the
table until the president put it there himself.

There is no single explanation for these holes in the coverage, but I
would argue that our devotion to what we call "objectivity" played a role.
It's true that the Bush administration is like a clenched fist with
information, one that won't hesitate to hit back when pressed. And that
reporting on the possible aftermath of a war before the war occurs, in
particular, was a difficult and speculative story.

Yet these three examples - which happen to involve the current White
House, although every White House spins stories - provide a window into a
particular failure of the press: allowing the principle of objectivity to
make us passive recipients of news, rather than aggressive analyzers and
explainers of it. We all learned about objectivity in school or at our
first job. Along with its twin sentries "fairness" and "balance," it
defined journ alistic standards.

Or did it? Ask ten journalists what objectivity means and you'll get ten
different answers. Some, like the Washington Post's editor, Leonard
Downie, define it so strictly that they refuse to 

Heaton on The Live Coverage Revolution (Digital Journalist)

[Soenke Zehle]

I would have put (the term) postmodernism in the deader-than-dead box of
trends, hoping that it was gone for good, but here it is again. Anyway,
the end of top-down journalism Heaton announces (once again) is not that
new a topic, to say the least, and Nik Gowing has been writing better and
more comprehensive essays on the matter for almost a decade now. But what
I find curious about Heaton's tech-piece is his comment on how the grainy
images from 3G live broadcasts are supposed to re-incorporate 'youth
culture' into top-down media apparatuses - whose disappaearance 3G and
Wi-Fi are, at the same time, supposed to signal - by giving network
visuals some kind of street credibility, as well as his (largely
unexplored) invocation of OhMyNews and it's much hailed
every-citizen-a-journalist approach along with the idea that the future
role of journalists will revolve around the 'authentification' of street
media sources (what exactly are journalists doing today?). And then
there's is the strange role played by Pantic, who appears to get into the
general business of regime change wherever he ends up, so read on. sz

Heaton, Terry L. "TV News in a Postmodern World: The Live Coverage
Revolution." Digital Journalist 73 (Nov 2003).



  Of all the technologies that have changed the presentation of
television news, none have made a greater impact than those that bring a
live signal from outside a TV studio to the viewers' homes. Moreover, live
coverage has not only changed the way news is presented but also what's
covered. For example, nobody would bother with a high-speed chase, if the
helicopter couldn't beam a live picture back to the studio, and
wall-to-wall coverage of major events is made possible by live pictures.
Every day, producers build live shots into their newscasts, whether
there's anything going on at the scene or not. Live, after all, brings a
sense of urgency and drama to a newscast, which can make for compelling
TV. Granted, it's gotten out of hand, but TV news will always have live
elements, because human nature yearns to take part in history. We want to
know how it's going to come out, and we want to know at the same time
everybody else does.

  In the days before microwave trucks, if we wanted to get a live
signal from across town, we called the phone company. And back then, there
was only one phone company, so we paid a premium for those hard lines, to
say nothing of the waiting time it took to get one installed. I remember
one election night in Milwaukee during the early 70's. We had two phone
lines to cover the mayor's race, and we all thought we'd died and gone to
heaven. Imagine that - a party over two live signals! Of course, the phone
company was using microwave equipment to accomplish the task, and we
eventually figured out it would be cheaper to have our own than to keep
lining Ma Bell's pockets. But even when we got into the microwave
business, it was hard to believe you could actually transmit a video
signal "through the air."

  There are two technologies in the pipeline today that will play
significant, live-newsgathering roles for TV news in a Postmodern world.
The first is that little device nearly everybody carries these days, the
cellular phone. With a little engineering, the output of some new phones
can produce a television picture.

  The BBC is far ahead of its U.S. counterparts in applying New Media
to television news. They were the first to adopt the VJ concept of
newsgathering, whereby everybody in the newsroom is a video journalist.
Now, they're experimenting with cell phones, specifically 3G (3rd
Generation) video mobile phones as cameras. "It's almost like having a
satellite truck in your pocket," says Dave Harvey of BBC Bristol. Well,
not exactly. The phones produce a fuzzy and distorted picture when blown
up from its original size, but Harvey says this is actually an advantage.
"For younger viewers who are interested in new technologies and use them
all the time, there's something edgy in seeing this sort of image on BBC
television. It could make us seem less remote, make us more credible with
that age group."

  BBC Bristol is using the 3G phones in special reports on underage
drinking, with teenage recruits reporting on how easy it is for them to
buy liquor. The phones have generated considerable buzz among those who
see possible applications, such as reporters "going live" from breaking
news before the satellite or microwave truck gets there. There are also
predictions of these opening up entirely new avenues of coverage, because
their portability and reach allow for coverage from places where
conventional technology isn't allowed or those it can't easily access.

  These phones will have a place in the new world of television news,
although picture quality may limit their use. The U.S. is also far behind
other countries in the deployment of 3G, although Ted Friedrichs of
Qualcomm's 3G Today

"dictatorship of lab coats"?

[Ryan Griffis]

"Some experts warn that if support for science falters
and if the American public loses interest in it, such
apathy may foster an age in which scientific elites
ignore the public weal and global imperatives for
their own narrow interests, producing something like a
dictatorship of the lab coats."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/11/science/11MATT.html?pagewanted=1&th

no doubt larger numbers of the public need to be
engaged in scientific discourse beyond consumer
products, but a dictatorship of lab coats seems a
ludicrous concept. it seems, with the direction many
things are going, the scientific community is hardly
pulling the strings, outside of corporate R+D anyway.
i don't think, for example, the removal of sex ed in
public schools is a mandate from science, nor the
continuing neglect of global warming. there are
different forms of neo-luddites, no?
i think this statement says a lot:

"But major problems also arose: acid rain,
environmental toxins, the Bhopal chemical disaster,
nuclear waste, global warming, the ozone hole, fears
over genetically modified food and the fiery
destruction of two space shuttles, not to mention the
curse of junk e-mail. Such troubles have helped feed
social disenchantment with science."

what does it mean to list the Bhopal chemical disaster
and "junk e-mail" together in the same list of "major
problems?"
it's also interesting that the only "opposition" to
Darwinian evolution talked about is "intellegent
design," rather than the theories of catastrophic
markers of ecological change that have more direct
significance to the kinds of actions capital is
inacting on various ecologies.
ryan


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