2009 PCA/ACA National Conference: My Experience

Some general thoughts on the 2009 PCA/ACA conference.

• Having gotten back from this year's PCA, I have to wonder if the people there have gotten friendlier, or, much more likely, I've learned to relax a lot better. Met some seriously great folks.


• I'd never been to the South before -- Southern hospitality is exactly what it's cracked up to be.


• Of the panels that I went to, a distinct pattern emerged: the music papers mostly sucked, while the sci fi panels were excellent; to my mind, the lesser papers were overly fannish -- so-and-so is cleary a genius, omg! -- while the better, memorable ones argued a stronger, more provocative thesis. (And in my opinion, the less theory, the better -- reading Lacan is hard enough, trying to understand him during a lecture is whole different, hopeless matter.)


• Presentation on My Bloody Valentine was probably the best music paper, though another one that I missed, talking about Muzak(!), seemed very promising.


• Best panel from first to last presenter was for me the one on sci fi and dance(!) -- the ballerina as a cyborg(!) (apparently, pointe work came about when ballet developed technology to suspend dancers from wires to enhance the illusion of their lightness by dancing "on" their toes, after which point (pun) prostheses (pointe shoes) were developed to let the dancers do same on their own) with regards to Glaubot on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, physical hyper-virtuosity in Matrix and The Transformers and various aesthetics of authenticity in the former (the actors doing their own stunts) contrasted against the seamless (and if you ask me, excessively detailed) CGI in the latter, and the waltz as a mode of cinematic seduction in fantasy films.


• The panel on The Wire was less critical and more of a particular exercise in fandom and its attendant compulsion to catalog moments from the show we love, which actually turned out to be for the best (since another isolated paper on The Wire centered on Foucault and surveillance was one I couldn't follow). Following the more fannish approach to The Wire, I actually got into a vigorous internet-style argument about the nature of Omar Little.


• One bad thing about the panel on The Wire was that I missed a paper on SYTYCD scheduled at the same time.


• I have a LONG list of people whom I need to email so I can get their papers, both those which I missed or those which were awesome.


• One person showed a clip of the final scene from Wall-E in the 10am session, and I cried -- that's how amazing the film is, that it can make a groggy, cranky person in the morning cry without any of the emotional setup supplied by the rest of the film.


• I attended four separate Wall-E presentations.


• If you don't follow my Twitter, then this is news to you: my paper was heard by all of seven people, four presenters (me included) plus three audience members. Everyone else had more mature papers than me -- one of them actually conducted field studies (i.e. interviewed Nigel Lythgoe(!)) and conducted focus studies(!) (/me shakes fist at ethnographic research) -- and the one other English major paper mentioned Zizek = I lose. I didn't even get any questions in the subsequent Q&A, it was split mostly between the paper on American Idol and Kid Nation (!?) -- is ANTM so played out already? (Yes, though you wouldn't ever find me admitting that.)


• There was a fascinating paper on Bjork and Alexander McQueen that I only caught a part of -- in fact, judging by its Q&A, that panel (which was titled "Film, Fetishism, Bjork and Performativity") seemed like a great forum in which to develop, explore, and work through applied theory. I probably could've made it to a PhD program if my master's work had been on fashion! I was also the worst-dressed, worst-groomed person at that panel (I hadn't showered at that point in the day.)


• I am positively thrilled that I am not getting a PhD, and probably never will. Doing the PCA itself was fun, but everything leading up to it was a grind that I don't miss.

Indie rating: Heidi Berry - "Little Fox"

10 Hours: 6. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, "Self Made Man"

"Self Made Man" (2x11; FOX, 12/1/08)



Read more after the jump.

By tv algebra, I should've stopped watching The Sarah Connor Chronicles year. Its acting is perfectly mediocre (with the sad exception of Shirley Manson -- it pains me to say that she ought to concentrate on music). It's supposed to bring a battle-hardened post-apocalyptic mindset but usually engages in the moral danger of a shrinking violet. And its entire premise is based around Skynet -- fighting Skynet, stopping Skynet, finding out what Skynet is after, etc. -- so even if the humans score a victory, another Skynet plot will pop up, undercutting any real sense of plot progression and leaving us with an interminably drawn out serial. Yet I haven't missed an episode, the reason for which has to be more than the attractive leads (since in Tvland, they're a dime a dozen).

The second season opened with a respectably improved premiere, though it featured one unforgettable moment in which Summer Glaubot -- always lissome and pouty, usually John Connor's protectrix but now malfunctioning and trying to terminate him -- is caught in a trap set by him and his human allies. In a desperate gambit (as far as cyborgs are capable of desperation), she screams out, "I love you, John, and you love me!" The heretofore unspoken tension of a young man being guarded by a lithe protectrix is finally exploded into a last-ditch ploy to exploit this exact adolescent fantasy, and TSCC finally challenges its target audience to beyond the complacency that previously characterized this series.

While this scene remains the single most indelible image on TSCC, the rest of the second season hasn't always lived up to it (Sarah Connor's three dots storyline has been a non-starter). But from beginning to end, "Self Made Man" exemplified this image of TSCC at its most uncompromisingly robotic -- Glaubot has a secret project in which she's befriended a paraplegic cancer survivor/library assistant. Over the course of one night, they slowly unravel the mystery of a man who came from nowhere to build a real estate empire in the 1920s, a man who crushed his rivals ruthlessly, a man who happened to be a Terminator. (The episode had a bit of fun with how the '20s admirably interpreted the Terminator AI's literalism as hard-working stoicism.) As the two amateur historians find out more about this Terminator, it becomes more and more obvious to everyone (except the attention-starved library assistant) that Glaubot is blatantly exploiting him for his access to historical records, summoning girlish charm only when he becomes suspicious of her cold and demanding behavior until eventually she drives him to suicide, which she finds out only when she meets his replacement, and at which point she starts her project over again. All the while, the hard-nosed exploration of cyborg ethics in "Self Made Man" is underpinned by some mind-tickling time-travel scenarios, and the underachieving series that can't seem to be killed, not even by low ratings, has unexpectedly come up with the most intriguing American sci-fi narrative this year.


Indie rating: The Raveonettes - "Blush"